Republican congressional candidate Case Dixon recently announced he would support legislation to prohibit certain federal funding for municipalities that deploy Flock Safety cameras and similar automated license plate reader systems if elected to represent Alabama’s 6th Congressional District.
“Mass surveillance has no place in a free society,” Dixon said in a statement. “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.”
More than 100,000 automated license plate reader cameras are used by law enforcement agencies across the country. The systems collect license plate information and record the date, time and location of passing vehicles without a judicial warrant, raising constitutional and privacy concerns.
Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based automated license plate reader company, has deployed tens of thousands of cameras in more than 6,000 communities across the United States.
Dixon said his pledge was inspired by a recent post on X by U.S. Representative Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, who announced that he would “soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law abiding citizens.”
Dixon said he would reintroduce Massie’s legislation if elected, assuming it does not pass before Massie’s term ends in 2027.
“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,” he added. “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.”
Dixon will face incumbent U.S. Representative Gary Palmer, R-Alabama, in an August 11 special primary election after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to revert to its 2023 congressional maps, which courts had previously found racially discriminatory.
The decision voided the May primary results, in which Dixon received 18.9 percent of the vote.
