On May 9, 2025, a deputy with the Johnson County Sheriff's Office in Texas entered a reason into a search log: "had an abortion, search for female." That query swept across 83,000 cameras in 6,809 law enforcement networks across the country, including cameras in Washington and Illinois, states where abortion is fully legal. No warrant was required. No judge signed off. No one in those states was notified.

This was possible because of Flock Safety's National Lookup tool, which gives any participating law enforcement agency instant access to a coast-to-coast license plate reader network. More than 5,000 law enforcement departments use Flock. Over 75 percent of them share their data into the national pool. In a single 30-day period in spring 2025, more than 450,000 searches hit the national database, according to the ACLU of Massachusetts. Search justifications are free-text fields, and most say only "investigation."

The abortion case caught attention because the deputy was unusually candid. If he had typed "investigation" instead, this story would not exist. That is the real problem.

The same surveillance grid that hunted this woman can track gun owners, protesters, immigrants, or anyone else a local agency decides to investigate. There is no federal law requiring a warrant to run a nationwide license plate search. There is no federal law restricting cross-state data sharing. There is no oversight mechanism that would have stopped this search, or flagged it.

Representatives Sylvia Garcia and Raja Krishnamoorthi have asked Flock Safety's CEO for answers. Asking is not enough. Congress needs to pass federal legislation requiring warrants for cross-state license plate searches and establishing enforceable limits on surveillance data sharing.

Sign this petition to demand federal law protect all Americans from warrantless surveillance, regardless of why they are being tracked.