FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide License Plate Tracking for $36 Million

Our Take

If Hake Hardware's reporting holds up, this is the moment ALPR surveillance stops being a patchwork of local police contracts and becomes a federally procured, nationwide tracking grid. A $36 million request for proposals, split into six regions, isn't a pilot program — it's infrastructure. The FBI doesn't need to install a single new camera if it can just buy read access to the ones already bolted to intersections, HOA entrances, and gas stations in every state.

This is the natural endpoint of years of local agencies signing up for Flock Safety and similar systems one city council meeting at a time, with little public debate about where that data ends up or who gets to query it later. Once a federal agency can draw a single procurement contract over six regions, local control is basically theater. The license plate reader outside your kid's school was never just a local tool — it was always a node waiting to be plugged into something bigger.

We'll keep digging into what's actually in this RFP as more details surface, but don't wait on us to find out if you're being tracked. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your routes, and hit take action if you want to push back at the local level before it gets federalized.