National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027

Floor Speech

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Mr. HARRIGAN. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of my amendment. This amendment does one thing: It bars the Department of War from buying, installing, or operating automated speed cameras on military installations and requires any that are already in place to be decommissioned within 180 days.

These systems are not about safety. They are about revenue. They hand out fines without context, without discretion, and without due process for our servicemembers. We just spent the last few years working hard through the NDAA to increase lower enlisted pay, only to seemingly try to take it away from them.

Make no mistake, this is not just a financial risk. It is a security risk. We have seen what happens when camera networks tied to critical infrastructure get compromised. Reporting this year revealed that foreign intelligence services spent years secretly accessing Tehran's traffic camera network to track the movements of Iran's top leadership ahead of a strike that killed its Supreme Leader. These network systems are an open door for our adversaries to exploit.

To be clear about what this amendment does not do, installation commanders still keep the full authority to enforce speed limits through military police, exactly as they do today. Force protection, access control, and criminal investigation cameras at our facility gates will remain untouched. This amendment targets one narrow thing: automated speed enforcement, and nothing else.

Our troops should not be a captive customer base for a ticketing vendor or a soft target for our adversaries. This amendment closes that door while preserving every legitimate tool that a commander needs to keep a base safe.

Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. HARRIGAN. Mr. Chair, I appreciate my colleague from California's concern about overall base safety. I think if we step back and actually look at the big picture here, what we are talking about is simply a tax on our lower enlisted personnel.

We have military police to enforce safety standards that are already issued by the base commanders across every installation that we have. At the end of the day, we cannot deny that NIPRNet has been compromised by over 90 percent of our most serious and significant adversaries--the exact same net that these speed cameras would live on.

I think that is a significant concern for the safety and security of our installation personnel and the operations that are ongoing on our installations. For that reason, I encourage my colleagues to strongly support this amendment.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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