Two governors, two narrow orders
On August 31, 2026, Florida's Department of Transportation issued a memorandum revoking permits for automated license plate readers (ALPRs) installed in state highway rights-of-way, citing "concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes," and gave local agencies 30 days to pull the cameras down (WEAR-TV). Governor Ron DeSantis framed it in blunt terms: "If you want to get in your car and go down to Buc-ee's in St. Augustine, that's none of the government's damn business." Three days earlier, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had ordered state agencies to stop spending public money on Flock Safety's camera network, after a Texas Tribune investigation found a state agency had funneled at least $30 million into building it out (Texas Tribune).
Both orders are real and both matter. Neither is the sweeping rollback the coverage implies. Florida's authority here comes straight from statute: Fla. Stat. § 316.0777 gives FDOT discretionary approval power over ALPRs on the state highway system and explicitly requires removal within 30 days of notice — this is FDOT exercising a power the legislature already gave it, not a novel executive action (Florida Senate). And Abbott's directive, per his spokesman, only reaches funds that flow through Texas agencies; local police departments can keep running Flock cameras bought with local or federal money, and existing installations stay up.
The case for the crackdown is real
The strongest argument for these moves isn't abstract privacy theory — it's documented abuse. An Angelina County grand jury indicted a Lufkin, Texas police officer on 100 felony counts after records showed he ran more than 45,000 Flock searches over roughly 200 days, including over 10,000 queries tracking an ex-girlfriend and her family. That is exactly the kind of unaccountable, warrantless tracking the Supreme Court warned about in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which held that government acquisition of location data revealing a person's "physical movements" is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant — even when a third party holds the data (Supreme Court opinion). ALPR networks aggregate exactly the kind of movement history Carpenter found constitutionally sensitive, and unlike cell carriers, most ALPR vendors and police departments have no warrant requirement at all. A CBS Miami review found 18 Florida law enforcement agencies received state funding for roughly 440 readers, some tied to immigration-enforcement grants — a use case well outside license-plate readers' original traffic-safety and stolen-vehicle rationale (CBS Miami). Critics who call this an overdue check on function creep have a real point, and EFF is right that grassroots pressure — not just these two orders — is what's driving departments nationwide to reconsider Flock contracts (EFF).
Why the fix should be rules, not bans
But removing cameras from state highways doesn't touch the underlying problem, which is governance, not hardware. ALPRs genuinely help solve car thefts, Amber Alerts, and hit-and-runs — Flock has said 2026 new-city partnerships are outpacing cancellations roughly ten to one, suggesting most local governments still find the tradeoff worth it. The Lufkin case wasn't caused by too many cameras; it was caused by too few controls on who could query the database and why, with no audit trail catching 45,000 anomalous searches until a criminal complaint forced the issue. A blanket removal from state rights-of-way doesn't add a single audit log or warrant requirement to the thousands of local cameras that remain — including, per EFF, ALPRs on city streets, county roads, and private property, which fall entirely outside both governors' orders.
The better model is what Flock itself says it wants: statutory guardrails — mandatory audit logging, purpose limitation, retention caps, and a warrant or documented-investigation requirement before a query — enforced with real penalties for misuse, rather than removal-by-press-release that can be reversed by the next governor with equal informality. DeSantis has said he wants legislation; Florida's legislature should write ALPR use standards into Chapter 316 now, while the political will exists, rather than leaving the policy to rest on a discretionary FDOT memo that a future administration could quietly rescind. Texas lawmakers, who return to session in January 2027, have the same opening. Proportionate regulation here looks like Carpenter-style rules of the road for querying the data — not a fight over whether the poles stay standing on I-10.
The bottom line
These orders are a genuine, if narrow, win for accountability — they were triggered by real, documented misuse, not speculative harms. But they regulate geography (state highways, state dollars) when the actual risk is unaudited access to aggregated movement data, wherever the camera sits. Lawmakers who stop at removing hardware from highway shoulders will have addressed the headline, not the harm.