20 billion cars a month, photographed. Bernie Sanders wants it to stop
A company called Flock Safety has cameras in more than 6,000 American towns. They scan 20 billion vehicles a month. This week a US senator said he will write a law to shut that down.
If you drive in the United States, there is a decent chance a camera has already logged your car this week — what it looks like, where it was, and when. The company behind many of those cameras is Flock Safety, founded in 2017 and based in Atlanta. It says it has installed more than 120,000 AI-powered cameras.
On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont posted a long message on X that opened with capital letters: "STOP FLOCK. STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE." He said the cameras scan and record 20 billion vehicles every month across over 6,000 communities, and he promised a bill to rein the technology in. He also said Flock is backed by tech figures Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
The part that turns a camera into something else is what happens after the photo. Sanders says Flock's newer AI can take an image of a person and their vehicle and match it against databases of phone numbers, relatives and court records — enough to work out who you are and where you're going. A photo of a car is a photo of a car. A photo of a car joined to your cousin's phone number is a map of your life.
Flock's answer is narrower than the accusation. The company says its cameras don't use facial recognition and usually keep footage for 30 days. CEO Garrett Langley has argued that critics tend to soften once they understand the cameras mainly photograph vehicles. He also recently apologised for calling anti-Flock activists a "terroristic organization."
Both things can be true at once: no face scanning, and still a record of where your car was on 20 billion occasions a month.
What's new here is not the outrage — towns have been cancelling contracts for a while, from Los Angeles to Monroe County, Indiana, and activists in dozens of states have vandalised or disabled the devices. What's new is that the fight moved from city councils to Congress. Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie says he plans legislation to withhold federal funding from agencies that deploy the cameras. Sanders, from the other end of American politics, now says he'll write a bill too.
Anyone who drives, or gets driven, past a corner in one of those 6,000-plus communities — school run, doctor's appointment, a date, all logged, in Sanders' description. And anyone in their twenties deciding whether to work in this industry: the surveillance-camera business has raised money from some of the biggest names in tech, and it is now the thing two members of Congress from opposite parties want to legislate against. That is a career risk and a career opportunity in the same sentence.
Two bills to watch, neither of them written yet: the one Sanders promised at the end of his post, and Massie's plan to cut federal money to agencies that install the cameras. Neither has a date, a number or a text — Sanders said only that he will introduce it. Also worth watching: which town cancels next, after Los Angeles and Monroe County, Indiana.
Sanders and Massie agree on almost nothing. They now agree on this. When the left and the libertarian right start drafting the same law, it usually means the thing they're aiming at has quietly become normal — and someone finally looked at it.
Sources: Decrypt, "Bernie Sanders Vows Legislation to 'Stop Flock and AI Mass Surveillance'", Aug 29, 2026; Sen. Bernie Sanders on X, August 26, 2026.
Сеть из 120 тысяч камер с распознаванием номеров уже фиксирует передвижения обычных людей по всей стране, и теперь вопрос о её легальности впервые дошёл до Сената.
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