On October 9, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) director Sara Carter demanding the immediate public release of a privacy review that ONDCP commissioned from MITRE in 2024 — and refused to publish.[1][2]

Wyden wrote: “Flock’s AI surveillance cameras have sparked a nationwide backlash against unnecessary government intrusion into Americans’ lives” and asked ONDCP to release MITRE’s findings “as soon as possible.”[1]

The MITRE review — completed in 2024 — evaluates the privacy practices of the HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas) program, which aggregates location data on Americans derived from Flock, Axon, Motorola and other ALPR vendors’ cameras.[2][3]

404 Media (Koebler, Oct 9) reported that the HIDTA program has created “a complex system for the federal government to obtain license plate data from companies like Flock, Axon, and Motorola via a series of agreements with cities and towns across the country”.[2]

The ONDCP reply window falls on October 16 — the same day as Sen. Hawley’s vendor-response deadline for four ALPR vendors.[3] It is the first time a federal senator has explicitly named Flock + Axon + “other vendors” in a federal-disclosure-pressure letter about a program that aggregates ALPR data.[4]

State of Surveillance summarized the structural shift: “when a federal grant program concentrates plate reads from local agencies into a federal database, the privacy bargain is moved from the city council to the White House, with no public review of the budget”.[4]

The DOJ’s October 8 announcement on foreign-spy-tool seizures — a separate federal-investigation context — underscores that vendor-side U.S. federal exposure is no longer hypothetical.[5]

( historical precedent: the Hemisphere program — mass phone surveillance via AT&T — was shut down by the White House in 2025 after years of bipartisan pressure from Wyden and Rep. Andy Biggs; the pattern is now repeating with ALPR )

P.D. How many federal MOUs are active today on the camera stack your vendor operates in the U.S.? If you can’t answer that question in less than 24 hours, today is a good day to start asking.

📰 Source: [1] Wyden press release Oct 9 2026, [2] 404 Media Koebler Oct 9 2026, [3] State of Surveillance Daily Oct 11 2026, [4] State of Surveillance Weekly Oct 11 2026, [5] DOJ press release Oct 8 2026.

Sources

[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-calls-for-public-release-of-report-on-white-house-funded-surveillance-programs-including-national-database-of-flock-and-other-alpr-images — Wyden press release Oct 9 2026 [2] https://www.404media.co/following-404-media-investigation-senator-demands-info-about-white-houses-license-plate-surveillance-program/ — 404 Media Koebler Oct 9 2026 [3] https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/daily-surveillance-briefing-october-11-2026/ — SoS Daily Briefing Oct 11 2026 [4] https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/2026-10-11-weekly-surveillance-roundup/ — SoS Weekly Roundup Oct 5-11 2026 [5] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-fbi-seize-vulnerability-scanning-and-spear-phishing-tools-operated — DOJ press release Oct 8 2026