Our government isn’t helping us. It’s like pulling teeth to get anything done.

And now Americans are furious after Congress admitted they are doing nothing to stop this dangerous threat.

Republicans in Congress have spent months thundering about the dangers of Flock’s automated license plate readers turning America into a surveillance state. So where’s the bill to actually kill the program? As of this week, it doesn’t exist. Not one piece of legislation currently before Congress would ban Flock-type cameras outright, despite growing bipartisan alarm over what these systems are capable of tracking.

Plenty of lawmakers, overwhelmingly Republicans, have introduced or promised bills addressing automated surveillance in some fashion. None of them go all the way to an outright ban on the technology that’s quietly blanketing American communities with government-adjacent tracking capability.

Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna announced back on July 22 that she was drafting legislation to ban Flock cameras entirely. “I’m working on legislation to ban these,” Luna posted at the time. Nearly a month later, that bill still hasn’t materialized, and her office didn’t respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s questions about the delay.

Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett has gone further than most, introducing the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act in July, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing or operating Flock cameras or any similar automated surveillance system designed to “identify, track, or record individuals.” It’s a serious step, but it only covers federal agencies — leaving the thousands of local police departments already running these systems untouched.

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act back in April, requiring federal and local agencies to obtain a warrant before conducting surveillance on American citizens. That bill would block warrantless facial recognition scanning in public spaces and restrict use of license plate readers like Flock, but again, it stops short of a full ban. Massie has separately promised legislation to strip federal funding from any local municipality or police department using Flock or similar automated license plate reader systems. “I’ll soon be introducing a bill to withhold all federal funding for cameras used to track American citizens,” he said.

Texas Rep. Keith Self, joined by Arizona Rep. Eli Crane and Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, introduced a bill in July requiring law enforcement to get a warrant before accessing state and local surveillance data, while also restricting federal funds for purchasing or installing the systems. Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman has vowed to pursue his own legislation after a Flock camera falsely flagged his license plate and got him pulled over — a personal experience that clearly radicalized him on the issue, though his bill remains in the early stages. “The repeated misidentification of innocent Americans and warrantless surveillance of millions are my two largest concerns with Flock cameras,” Stutzman told the DCNF. “No matter who you are or what you do, areas with Flock cameras are tracking you.”

Flock itself, unsurprisingly, wants Congress to stop short of a ban. A company spokesperson told the DCNF that lawmakers should pursue “strong, clear safeguards” rather than outlawing the technology outright, insisting that “more than 40 courts across the country have considered LPRs in the context of the Fourth Amendment and ruled overwhelmingly that the use of these tools in public spaces does not require a warrant.” Convenient for a company raking in government contracts nationwide.

But the real-world abuses tell a different story than Flock’s corporate talking points. Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, warned the DCNF that these systems have “abysmally high false positive rates” that put innocent Americans directly in harm’s way. “How many people is this going to happen to? What if someone gets killed? What if an officer gets a false positive from someone who’s armed and one of them dies? Because that’s a real possibility. It’s only a matter of time before either a citizen, a cop or both get killed because of this,” Fox said.

That’s not hypothetical fear-mongering — it’s already happening. The Institute for Justice documented 30 separate instances of police officers using license plate readers to stalk romantic interests. One former Milwaukee officer secretly used the Flock system to track his romantic partner’s location 124 separate times. An innocent Wisconsin driver was held at gunpoint in early August after a camera made an outright mistake.

None of this should surprise anyone who’s paid attention to how federal surveillance powers have been abused in the past. Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in 2020 to altering an email used to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump’s own 2016 campaign. The FBI abused Section 702 of FISA nearly 300,000 times between 2020 and early 2021, running over 23,000 searches after the January 6 Capitol riot alone, hitting Jan. 6 suspects, congressional campaign donors, and Black Lives Matter protesters in the process. Despite that documented abuse, congressional Republicans largely supported extending Section 702 anyway — only 19 House Republicans, including Burchett, Massie and Boebert, voted against reauthorization in June.

Where are Democrats in all this? Largely silent or worse. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi called for an investigation into Flock’s cybersecurity failures back in November, but neither introduced actual legislation to fix the problem. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, whose state hosts Flock’s Atlanta headquarters, hasn’t made any public statements on the cameras despite widespread use of the systems throughout Georgia communities. His office didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment either.

It’s also worth noting where Flock’s money has gone. The company spent $920,000 on lobbying in 2025 and another $430,000 in the first half of 2026, employing seven lobbyists to protect its interests on Capitol Hill. Company employees have made political donations overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates and causes — including Flock CEO Garrett Langley’s $1,000 contribution to a leadership PAC affiliated with Sen. Ossoff — with over $15,000 of the company’s $17,260 total in donations going to Democrats like Fair Fight and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Even President Trump himself has hedged on the issue, saying Monday only that Flock cameras have “pros and cons” — hardly the kind of full-throated opposition grassroots conservatives worried about government overreach are hoping to hear from the man they elected to rein in the surveillance state.

The bottom line is simple: for all the tough talk from Capitol Hill Republicans about Flock cameras threatening American privacy and constitutional rights, not a single piece of legislation currently before Congress would actually ban the technology. Americans concerned about warrantless tracking, false accusations at gunpoint, and officers stalking their exes using taxpayer-funded surveillance tools are still waiting for Washington to match its rhetoric with real action.

The Left has plenty of bad policies. But some go way too far.

And now a socialist Democrat says he’ll go even further than Bernie Sanders.

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed said he wants to push past Bernie Sanders’ public-ownership model for major artificial intelligence companies, telling a left-wing podcast in June that “some system of public control” over the industry doesn’t go far enough on its own — comments now drawing fresh scrutiny as he carries his brand of politics into a marquee general election.

Asked on the June 12 “Head in the Office” podcast whether he backed Sanders’ public ownership proposal for major AI firms, El-Sayed didn’t hesitate. “I want to actually take it a step further,” he said. “I agree that we need public ownership, but I also agree that we need some system of public control.”

A Democratic Nominee Pressed On How Far “Public Control” Goes

El-Sayed stopped short of calling for the government to seize or take ownership of private AI companies outright, instead pointing to measures like public representation on corporate boards or a dedicated oversight body. “I just think it’s really important for us to be thinking what is democratic control over this industry? What does it look like?” he said, framing AI as an “existential” risk that demands aggressive public oversight.

He cast the fight in populist terms, accusing tech companies of trying to sidestep democratic accountability in Washington. “Democracy is supposed to fix these problems, and, right now, they’re trying to slip democracy, and we cannot allow that,” El-Sayed said. “We need leaders who both understand the technological risk and are not bought off by the AI industry itself.”

Senior Democrats Have Tried To Soften The Socialist Label

The comments surface at an awkward moment for Democratic leadership, which has worked to downplay how far its rising socialist wing wants to go. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., recently argued that young Americans identifying as socialists aren’t embracing traditional Marxist doctrine, telling reporters he didn’t believe they meant “I want to socialize the means of production,” and characterizing the movement’s goals as “greater equality and opportunity” rather than “dialectical materialism” or the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

That framing sits uneasily next to more explicit language from some of the movement’s leading figures — including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who told a 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America conference that one of the movement’s core beliefs was the “end goal of seizing the means of production.”

A Test Case For How Far The Party’s Left Flank Can Go

El-Sayed, who has drawn frequent comparisons to Mamdani, now heads into the general election against Republican Mike Rogers carrying a platform built around “Medicare for All” and calls to abolish ICE — with his June remarks on AI industry control adding another data point for Republicans arguing that his brand of politics sits well outside the mainstream in a state President Trump narrowly carried in 2024.

The resurfaced comments also feed into a broader argument Republicans have made throughout the midterm cycle: that whatever Democratic leaders in Washington say publicly about the limits of their party’s socialist wing, some of its highest-profile candidates are, in their own words, pushing to go further still.