Senator Josh Hawley's opening remarks at the subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism: Flock

Our Take

When a senator opens a hearing by pointing out that the only thing standing between your daily movements and a stranger's curiosity is a corporate policy document, you know the conversation has finally caught up to what we've been saying for years. Credit to the Orwell Day channel for posting Senator Josh Hawley's opening remarks at the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Crime and Counterterrorism, bluntly titled "Always Watching: Flock's Nationwide AI Surveillance Network." Hawley didn't mince words: 120,000-plus cameras, 49 states, roughly 20 billion scans a month, and a track record that already includes officers misusing lookups to stalk people and at least one wrongful arrest traced back to Flock data.

What makes this moment notable isn't just the numbers, it's who's saying them. This isn't an activist blog or a local news investigation, it's a sitting U.S. senator describing a privately built, functionally national surveillance database in a Senate hearing room. That's the kind of scrutiny this industry has dodged for years by selling itself city council by city council, county by county, with little public debate and even less oversight. When the aggregate network gets big enough, the sales pitch of 'just one tool for local police' stops holding up, and what's left is exactly what Hawley described: a system where the guardrails are whatever the vendor decides they are.

If your town has Flock cameras and you don't know it, or you're not sure how many are nearby, check our map to see what's already watching your neighborhood. And if this hearing makes you want to do more than just read about it, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back where you live.