Ban Flock Act Proposed in the US Sente

What about reading (federally mandated, unencrypted) TPMS sensors

It basically bans use of "automatic license plate readers" and "captured plate data" by the Federal Government unless authorized by Congress or used solely to "assess, bill, collect, audit, dispute, or enforce the payment of a toll".

In the case of use for tolling there are 4 pages of restrictions, disclosure requirements, retention limits and deletion requirements, and security and accountability requirements.

Then a few pages on inadmissibility of evidence obtained in violation of this bill and various means of relief if this is violated.

Next is a section cutting off funding from various agencies to states and local governments unless they have a law or policy in effect against ALPRs at least as strong as this bill.

Finally a section that prohibits using Federal funds directly or indirectly to purchase ALPRs except for use in tolling.

The definition of ALPR seems a bit broad:

    (1) AUTOMATIC LICENSE PLATE READER.—The
  term ‘‘automatic license plate reader’’ means a sys-
  tem that—

        (A) uses cameras, sensors, software, data-
    bases, or a combination of technologies to cap-
    ture, record, analyze, and store vehicle license
    plate information;

        (B) identifies, locates, and tracks a vehicle
    through the license plate or other persistent vis-
    ual identifier of the vehicle; or

        (C) compares license plate numbers
    against databases to generate alerts and create
    records of vehicle activity.

Note that the coordinating conjunction for that list is "or". When an officer pulls a car over for speeding and manually enters the license plate into the squad car computer and that tells them the car is stolen that seems like it would count as using an automatic license plate reader, even if the plate was manually entered into the database from the hand written police report from the officer who responded to the call about a stolen car.

This bill defines "captured plate data" as

> any plate number, image, date, time, location, direction of travel, vehicle characteris- tics, confidence score, associated photographs or video, and any information derived from those records

and

> data produced by or derived from fixed cameras, mobile readers, police vehicles, trail- ers, drones, tolling infrastructure, parking sys- tems, private security networks, homeowners’ associations, commercial parking operators, and data brokers

This also seems a bit broad and likely to cover cases not intended.

The prohibition of funds to state and local governments is also quite broad. The bill as written covers all grants by the Department of Justice, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or the Department of Homeland Security.

The Federal government is allowed to attached strings to grants but those strings have to related to the thing the grants are for. There is no way anyone is going to be able to make the case that, say, Medicaid reimbursements from the Department of Health and Human Services to states for the state's health services to low-income residents are in any way related to ALPR.