Alexandria pulls down license-plate cameras city hired; cameras Congress could defund nationwide stay plugged in

…(cont) Eight days after Arlington's vote, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism convened a hearing on Flock's nationwide surveillance network — live testimony, a subcommittee with subpoena power, watching the company that watches the cars. The planner liked what was already sitting on the shelf: a committee that could ask for documents, a microphone already turned on.

Nine days after that hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill to crack down on the cameras, telling The Washington Post the country is moving toward a surveillance state where a handful of companies profit from handing driver data to police. The tinkerer pulled that bill off the shelf next to the hearing transcript — two parts of the same mechanism, neither one bolted down yet.

Twelve days after that, Representative Rashida Tlaib filed a second bill, a flat ban on federal funding for the network her own measure counts at more than 120,000 cameras spread across 49 states. The muscle looked at that number and saw the real target: not Alexandria's dozen poles, the funding line underneath all of them.

Four weeks separate Arlington's vote from Tlaib's bill — two bills and one hearing stacked into the record in that span. None of the three has had a floor vote. Alexandria did by municipal contract what Congress's own committee could do by statute: pull the plug. The pilot's job was supposed to be the easy part — fly the bill from committee to the floor — and it never left the runway.