Pass Comprehensive Privacy Legislation to Stop Federal ALPR Surveillance Overreach

Pass comprehensive privacy legislation that puts real limits on how the federal government can collect, aggregate, and share Americans' location data. The Trump administration is using a 1980s anti-drug grant program called HIDTA to vacuum up license plate reader data from local Flock and Axon cameras across all 50 states and funnel it into federal surveillance databases controlled by the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy. This isn't a hypothetical threat — it's already happening, and it's been designed specifically to evade oversight. The scheme works by coercing cities into signing memoranda of understanding that require them to send their ALPR data to HIDTA centers, which then feed into the DEA's National License Plate Reader Program. Because HIDTAs are structured as quasi-governmental entities, the DEA has argued in court that their records aren't subject to FOIA. The DEA's own privacy impact assessment admitted this system risks "ongoing tracking of individual's travels" for "law-abiding drivers not relevant to criminal investigations." The administration just handed HIDTA $277 million more in July. Congress needs to act. That means requiring judicial oversight before federal agencies can aggregate location data at scale, closing the loophole that lets grant programs operate outside public records laws, and giving people a meaningful right to know when their movements are being tracked. Local communities have tried to set limits on this surveillance — the federal government is deliberately routing around them.