Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. FLEMING. Mr. Chairman, I rise to offer an amendment to the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill that will prohibit the purchase of automated license plate readers that can record and indefinitely store innocent Americans' whereabouts as they drive by.

In the wake of the revelations about NSA data collection, Americans are now learning that police cars and traffic cameras are similarly accumulating a picture of their lives. In many States, there is no policy for how long the government may store the data, and so it is being retained indefinitely.

Just like phone metadata, this geo-location data with time stamps can be used to reconstruct intimate details of our lives, who we visit, where we worship, from whom we seek counseling, and how we might legally and legitimately protest the actions of our own government.

This language expands upon the prohibitions already adopted under previous MAP-21 reauthorizations preventing Federal funds from being used to purchase cameras for purposes of traffic law enforcement. Despite this prohibition, transportation grants can still currently be used to purchase cameras that collect and store license plate data even when no crime has been committed.

Certain highway safety grants within this bill can be used to purchase traffic monitoring systems that we see along highways. This amendment would not stop the purchase of such traffic monitoring cameras. It would only prohibit cameras that have the ability and the purpose of capturing and indefinitely storing the license plate information of innocent Americans.

Citizens of each State should have the opportunity to decide the question, but citizens of one State who oppose this policy should not subsidize such monitoring in other States. This amendment does not stop States from purchasing these cameras on their own. Each State should have an open and fair debate in their legislatures about what their citizens are comfortable with. This amendment gives States and local governments a 1-year pause on purchasing these cameras until Congress can deal with the issue more fully.

Therefore, I ask the support of all in this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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