EXCLUSIVE: Congressman Wants Surveillance Cameras To ‘Get The Flock Out’ Of His District
Republican North Carolina Rep. Pat Harrigan spoke out against Flock Safety’s vast network of surveillance devices and proposed a way Congress can rebuke the heavily scrutinized tool on Capitol Hill.
WASHINGTON — Republican North Carolina Rep. Pat Harrigan spoke out against Flock Safety’s vast network of surveillance devices and proposed a way Congress can rebuke the heavily scrutinized tool on Capitol Hill.
A diverse bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, local officials and citizens alleged that artificial intelligence-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—Flock’s flagship product—violated Americans’ civil rights by tracking them without warrants. Harrigan told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview that he believes the tracking devices have created a “surveillance state” and his fellow lawmakers must treat them exactly like a Bush-era law the FBI used to spy on everyday Americans.
“Get the Flock out,” the freshman lawmaker and Army Special Forces veteran told the DCNF when asked to clarify his stance on the camera network.
Harrigan added that the ALPRs are “way worse” than the automated speed cameras on highways and city streets, for which he proposed a bill in September 2025 to stop. At the time he denounced the cameras saying they “aren’t about safety, they’re about revenue.”
“I want to ban them all, I hate those things,” he told the DCNF about the speed cameras, noting that they were “depriving” Americans of their due process by sending them automated tickets which amounted to “a tax on the middle class.”
However, one year after proposing a single bill to take down these ticket-producing machines, the lawmaker sees the growing Flock empire as a new challenge that requires a more creative legislative solution to dismantle.
“We have to approach this in a 702-like manner,” he told the DCNF, comparing the cameras to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),” he said. “While the 2008 law is expressly intended to help federal agents collect intelligence on foreign nationals, it also creates a backdoor allowing them to surveil American citizens without obtaining a warrant.”
The section notably lapsed on June 12 after Congress failed to extend it.
“We’ve got to put very, very serious 702-like guardrails on this, where that information comes from, what warrants are required in order to actually query or search the system,” Harrigan told the DCNF. “Like I said, Flock and associated cameras like Flock distributed across our entire country, has created a surveillance state.”
If Congress does not treat surveillance cameras like 702, they “will be abused and it will harm the rights of American citizens,” he stressed.
“We’re already seeing it. We already had one in our district where we had a local police officer misuse the system,” the North Carolina Republican added. “They were arrested for it, because of something that they that they did that was totally improper and it was personal. But that’s the type of abuse that we need to prevent. We owe that to American citizens.”
He noted that he voted againstextending 702 for three years in April — making him just one of 22 Republicans to do so. At the time he called the section a “critical national security tool” but warned that “Congress cannot keep rubber stamping a surveillance program that has been used to spy on American citizens.”
“This is like 702 on steroids. That’s pushed down not just the CIA, not the FBI and not the NSA,” Harrigan told the DCNF. “But now that’s matriculating down to the local level with all these different municipalities, thousands of municipalities across the United States of America, — what could possibly go wrong? How could this possibly be abused?
President Donald Trump came out in favor of the cameras on Sunday telling a reporter aboard Air Force One that he likes them, noting that this was “because law enforcement.”
Fellow law enforcement personnel accused Mooresville, North Carolina, police officer Elizabeth Snowman in August of accessing Flock footage 31 times to spy on her boyfriend’s ex-wife.
Proponents of Flock cameras — like Trump —alleged that they help the police solve cases and are just a normal, albeit high tech part of “tough on crime” policies.
Law enforcement officials told the DCNF that the cameras do more good than harm with one conservative California sheriff likening opposition to them to the left’s “love affair with criminals.”
Harrigan told the DCNF that he does not “buy that argument.” “The police need to do their jobs and we need to not create a surveillance state in the United States,” he said.
Those in power should not “be trading our freedoms for our security when it comes to American citizens,” the congressman noted.
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