U.S. Senate holds hearing on automated license plate reader technology
The short version: ALPR executives, including Flock Safety, skipped a Senate subcommittee hearing on their own technology, leaving lawmakers and the public without answers.
Our Take
Credit to WBAY TV-2 for flagging something that should alarm anyone paying attention: when the U.S. Senate actually tried to hold these companies accountable, every single major ALPR vendor declined to show up. That's not an oversight, that's a strategy. These companies are happy to sell local police departments on 'transparency' and 'community safety,' but when it's time to answer to federal lawmakers about how millions of plate scans are collected, stored, shared, and sold, they'd rather stay silent.
This pattern should sound familiar to anyone who's tried to get a straight answer out of Flock Safety or its competitors at the local level. Cities sign contracts, cameras go up, and data starts flowing to networks that span state lines and agency boundaries, all while the companies profiting from it dodge scrutiny. A no-show at a Senate hearing isn't a technicality, it's a signal about who actually holds power in this relationship between surveillance vendors and the public they're supposed to serve.
If anything, this hearing is proof that oversight has to come from the ground up, because it's clearly not coming from the top down with any urgency. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and head to our take-action page if you want to push back where it actually counts: your own city council.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WBAY TV-2 | Green Bay, WI, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.