Sanders Bill Would Bar Federal Use of License-Plate Readers
Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) introduced the Ban Flock Act on October 2, 2026. The bill would bar federal agencies from operating automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), cameras that record plate numbers with time and location, and from drawing on ALPR data collected by local police and private companies. TechCrunch
The bill is co-sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Jeff Merkley. Sanders' Senate office published a press release saying the three lawmakers unveiled the bill to protect Americans' right to privacy. Senate Ocasio-Cortez's House office published a parallel release announcing the same unveiling. House The full legislative text is available as a PDF from Sanders' Senate office.
Despite the short title, the text does not name Flock. Its scope is broad. It covers all ALPR systems, not hardware or cloud service from a single vendor.
The exceptions are narrow. The bill allows ALPR use for toll collection and for any use Congress approves in future legislation. Any use approved that way would be limited to keeping data for no more than 48 hours.
Enforcement would reach beyond federal purchasing. Starting in the first fiscal year after enactment, state and local governments would lose grants from five federal departments unless they ban ALPR technology. Those departments include the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The bill would also let Americans sue the federal government over violations and let state attorneys general enforce the law.
The figures cited around the proposal describe an installed base built for large-scale search. According to Sanders, Flock is the largest ALPR vendor in the United States, with more than 120,000 cameras. Flock said in a February blog post that its network processes more than 20 billion vehicle reads each month. In August, Flock CEO Garrett Langley set a new default retention period of seven days, down from 30 days. TechCrunch
The broader context here is architectural as much as legal. Owning cameras is different from searching shared datasets. A ban on federal operation alone would leave federated queries, API access and bulk data purchases intact. Federated queries search many separate databases through one request, and API access lets one computer system pull records from another. This proposal addresses both sides. It would end direct federal deployment and indirect federal access to state, local and commercial ALPR stores.
Looking at what this means for system design, retention periods decide what remains possible. Seven days as a vendor default, 30 days as the prior default, and 48 hours as the proposed legal ceiling are not small settings. Short windows allow tolling and immediate incident response but block historical tracking, pattern-of-life queries and retroactive searches across months of reads. The grant condition extends that effect. A local agency could keep cameras and lose federal funds, or drop ALPR to keep funds, a choice that shapes procurement, storage budgets and data-sharing agreements.
In my view, worth flagging is how the bill applies familiar tools to a newer infrastructure question. Congress has long attached conditions to federal grants to set baseline practices for state and local systems. Applying that model to a privately built, nationally searchable network avoids regulating each camera directly. Whether a tolling exception can stay isolated from wider querying is an implementation question. Clear retention limits and explicit approval paths would give builders, buyers and the public a predictable basis for deciding what vehicle-location infrastructure should do.
