Special to the News
Republican congressional candidate Case Dixon announced on Monday that, if elected to represent Alabama’s 6th Congressional District, he will reintroduce legislation in the next Congress to prohibit certain federal funding for jurisdictions that deploy Flock Safety cameras and similar automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems.
The legislation was originally introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who is leaving Congress at the end of his current term.
“Mass surveillance has no place in a free society,” Dixon said. “Americans should not have their movements tracked, recorded and stored simply because they drove down a public road. The Fourth Amendment exists to protect innocent people from unreasonable government surveillance, and Congress should take that seriously.”
Flock Safety cameras and similar automated license plate reader systems collect license plate information, along with the date, time and location of passing vehicles. When networked across jurisdictions, they can create detailed records of where law-abiding Americans travel, raising serious privacy and constitutional concerns.
“If elected, I will reintroduce this legislation in the next Congress,” Dixon said. “The federal government should not be subsidizing technologies that enable the routine tracking of innocent Americans without individualized suspicion or a warrant.”
“Public safety and constitutional liberty are not mutually exclusive,” Dixon said. “We can give law enforcement the tools they need to investigate crime without normalizing mass surveillance of the general public. Congress should be protecting the constitutional rights of the American people, not helping fund their erosion.”
