Your car is being tracked without a warrant. Two Republicans are ending the dragnet

Two House Republicans have decided the Fourth Amendment still applies to people who drive cars.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed HR 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, on July 21. The bill would bar federal agencies from buying, operating, or accessing automated license plate readers, explicitly naming Flock Safety cameras, along with facial recognition and biometric tools that identify people by fingerprint, iris, voice, or gait. Any data a federal agency does obtain has to be deleted within 30 days, and none of it can be used in court. State and local governments couldn't spend federal dollars on the same systems. Burchett's summary of the problem ran to seven words. "We gotta ban these dadgum things."
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced his own bill on July 25, taking the harder route. Rather than regulate the cameras, Massie would withhold federal money from any city or police department that installs them. Flock's business runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities. Cut the subsidy and the network stops growing on its own.
Every car gets photographed, logged, time-stamped, and assigned what the company calls a vehicle fingerprint.
Police can then ask where your car has been. No warrant, no suspicion, no judge.
A Milwaukee officer used Flock to locate his romantic partner 124 times and her ex 55 more. He pleaded guilty.
Mountain View, California, later discovered that federal and state agencies had been querying its cameras through a nationwide search setting Flock switched on without the police department's knowledge.
A camera at the entrance to a shooting range performs a function no legislature ever authorized.
It builds a list of people exercising an enumerated right, sortable and searchable, held by a private vendor and available to any agency with credentials.
Congress has never passed a firearms registry. This is how you get one anyway.
A warrant requirement isn't a burden on legitimate policing. It's the price of a free country, and it was cheap when James Madison wrote it down.
In Ithaca, New York, the readers went up under a state gun violence program and residents woke up unable to leave their neighborhoods without being photographed.
Collection happens first, the constitutional question gets asked years later, and by then, the infrastructure is paid for and nobody wants to unplug it.
Knox County commissioners abruptly canceled a meeting on a proposed 200-camera rollout.
Cities across several states have canceled contracts outright after public hearings went badly for the sheriff. That's federalism working as designed, and it moves faster than litigation. Congress should finish the job.