Two states, two gestures, one surveillance network still running
Within a week, two of the country's largest states delivered a rare bipartisan rebuke to automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. On August 26, 2026, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop spending public money on Flock Safety cameras, as the Texas Tribune prepared to publish an investigation showing the state's Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority had quietly funneled at least $30 million into building out the network since 2023 (Texas Tribune, Aug. 28). Three days later, on August 31, the Florida Department of Transportation revoked every ALPR permit on state highway rights-of-way and gave operators 30 days to remove the equipment or have FDOT remove it for them, citing "concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes" (EFF, Sept. 2).
The strongest case for these moves is not abstract. The Texas Tribune traced the $30 million to a 2023 law that added $1 to every Texan's auto insurance premium — passed unanimously, and sold to legislators as a fix for catalytic converter theft, with no discussion of funding a camera network (Texas Tribune, Aug. 28). That is a legitimate story about a fee being repurposed without the appropriations debate that should accompany any surveillance buildout. Misuse, too, is documented rather than hypothetical: a Lufkin police officer now faces 100 counts of misusing public information after allegedly using Flock cameras to track 11 people for over a year, and at least six Texas agencies have placed officers on leave or filed charges over camera misuse. Florida's rulemaking body invoked similar concerns in citing an "exponential increase in deployments" outpacing any oversight structure. None of this is manufactured outrage — it's the predictable result of installing a searchable, retroactive map of everyone's movements and then not building guardrails around who can query it.
What actually changed — and what didn't
That's the steelman. The reality is that both actions are narrower than the headlines suggest. Abbott's order blocks new state spending; it does not require a single existing camera to come down. The Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed it will keep operating its network — nearly 1,200 cameras under an existing three-year, $15.9 million contract with the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority — and will merely "pause installing additional cameras." Abbott's own spokesperson framed it as up to "city officials themselves to unplug the Flock cameras," not the state. The one operational change with teeth is that DPS is narrowing database access from roughly 3,075 law enforcement agencies to about 206 with signed agreements — a real tightening, but one driven by liability optics after the Tribune's inquiries, not by the governor's order itself.
Florida's action is more concrete but also more limited in scope: it applies only to cameras physically installed in state highway rights-of-way under General Use Permits issued pursuant to Florida Administrative Code Rule 14-20.010. It does nothing to municipal streets, county roads, or the private-property installations — parking lots, HOA entrances, retail chains — that make up a large share of ALPR deployment nationally. A camera bolted to a state highway sign comes down; the identical camera 200 feet away on a county road stays up.
The proportionate answer isn't elimination, but it also isn't a press release
EFF's institutional position, published days before these actions, is that ALPR networks should be eliminated outright because aggregated location data cannot be made safe with any amount of policy — a claim that echoes the Supreme Court's reasoning in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which held that persistent location tracking implicates the Fourth Amendment even when each individual data point is technically public (Carpenter v. United States opinion, supremecourt.gov). That reasoning is sound as far as it goes: continuously logged, cross-jurisdictionally searchable plate data is a fundamentally different privacy exposure than a single officer spotting a stolen car.
But elimination throws out a tool that demonstrably recovers stolen vehicles and helps solve hit-and-runs and Amber Alerts, and neither Texas nor Florida actually eliminated anything — they each did the minimum that generates a favorable headline while leaving the underlying architecture, and most of the cameras, in place. The honest fix is statutory, not gubernatorial: warrant or reasonable-suspicion requirements before querying historical plate data, hard retention limits, mandatory audit logs of every search with the officer and reason attached, and a ban on sharing state databases with federal immigration enforcement absent a judicial order. That is proportionate regulation — it preserves the legitimate use case while closing the exact abuse pattern the Lufkin case and Florida's memo both describe. A funding freeze that leaves 940-plus cameras running and a permit revocation that covers one category of right-of-way are not that. They're useful pressure, and worth citing as evidence that bipartisan appetite for ALPR reform now exists in red and purple states alike — but readers should not mistake either for the cameras actually going dark.