EXCLUSIVE: Congressman Wants Surveillance Cameras To ‘Get The Flock Out’ Of His District

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.”