Keith Self Islamification and the Surveillance State

Our Take

Texas Scorecard's interview with U.S. Rep. Keith Self, part of its REAL TEXANS series, is worth a watch for the surveillance-state portion alone — a sitting member of Congress on record saying the government's appetite for tracking Americans has gone too far. That's a conversation we want more lawmakers having, regardless of what network hosts it. Credit to Texas Scorecard for getting a federal official to put some of this on the record.

But the video's title and framing jam two very different issues into one segment, and that's a problem. ALPR networks like Flock Safety aren't a religious or cultural question — they're a bipartisan accountability question. Cameras logging every plate that passes, shared across thousands of agencies with little oversight, don't care about anyone's faith; they care about location, pattern, and who's watching the data afterward. Wrapping that into a culture-war narrative makes it easier for people to tune out the actual policy fight: who authorized this network, who audits it, and who gets access to your movements.

If Rep. Self is serious about reining in mass surveillance, that's a fight worth building on its own terms — transparency, retention limits, and real consent, not rhetoric about who the cameras are supposedly watching. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and head to our take-action page if you want to push your own representatives past the talking points and into actual policy.