Gina Hinojosa Says Flock Cameras Are ILLEGAL in Texas

Our Take

Credit to Texas News Rocks for putting a spotlight on something we've said for a while: a lot of Flock Safety deployments across the country rode in on municipal purchase orders and police department handshake deals, never passing through the kind of legislative scrutiny that's supposed to come before you blanket a state with networked license plate cameras. Rep. Hinojosa's argument isn't just political theater — it's a real question about whether local governments and private vendors can build a de facto surveillance dragnet without the legislature ever voting on it.

This matters because ALPR systems like Flock don't just catch the occasional stolen car. They log the movements of every single driver who passes a camera, retained in databases that get shared across jurisdictions, sometimes across state lines, often with minimal oversight on who can query them and why. When a sitting state representative says 'nobody authorized this,' that's not a technicality — it's the whole ballgame for whether mass surveillance infrastructure gets installed by legislative consent or by default.

If you're in Texas or anywhere else wondering how many of these cameras are already watching your commute, check our camera map, and if you want to push back the way Hinojosa is trying to, our take-action page has tools to get involved locally.