Thomas Massie Bill to KILL Federal Funding for Flock Cameras & ALL Mass Surveillance!

Our Take

Federal grant money is one of the main reasons your town suddenly has a dozen Flock Safety cameras logging every car that passes through. Local police departments rarely pay full price out of pocket — they lean on DOJ, DHS, and other federal grant programs to bankroll these networks, which means Washington has effectively been subsidizing a nationwide surveillance dragnet with little debate and almost no public input. If Hard Lens Media's reporting on Rep. Thomas Massie's bill is accurate, this is one of the first serious legislative attempts to choke off that funding pipeline at the source rather than fighting it city council by city council.

That matters because the patchwork approach — one town banning Flock here, another renewing a contract there — is slow and exhausting, while the vendors keep scaling. A federal funding cutoff, even a partial one, could force a real reckoning on how many of these systems only exist because someone else is footing the bill. We'll be watching to see whether this bill gets real traction or dies in committee like so many privacy bills before it, but credit to Hard Lens Media for putting a spotlight on the money trail.

If you want to see how far this funding has already spread, check our camera map, and if you want to push back locally while Congress sorts itself out, our take-action page has steps you can use right now.