Vehicle registration plate

[intro music] The 713 Commute Mode, September fifteenth, twenty twenty-six.

In today's briefing, Houston could lose more than two hundred license plate cameras.

A Texas candidate's posts about University of Texas students draw Republican condemnation, and data centers could face penalties over water use reporting.

But first, the weather.

The rest of today's briefing is read by an AI voice, but every story in the seven one three Commute Mode is written and edited by our human journalists.

Now, the news.

[music] Houston police say the loss of state funding for Flock license plate cameras will cost the city more than two hundred devices.

The cameras are part of a license plate reading system that officers search tens of thousands of times each month.

I'm Matt Mattinson.

Along coastal North Carolina, some controversial FLOC roadside license plate cameras are coming down.

Commissioners in New Hanover County voted unanimously today to pull the plug on the county's FLOC camera network after heavy pushback over privacy concerns.

FLOC camera logs from an audit shows outside law enforcement agencies searching the local database almost 3 million times from January of 2025 through early June of this year.