“THEY COULD TRACK ME FOR WEEKS”: Hawley Questions Flock Camera Network And Americans' Privacy Rights

Our Take

When a senator known for conservative culture-war fights starts asking pointed questions about a camera network that can track your movements for weeks at a time, it's worth paying attention. The Financial Express's clip of Hawley grilling witnesses over Flock's AI-powered plate readers captures something we've been saying for a while: this isn't a left-right issue. It's a power issue. Once a system exists that can quietly log where every car goes, day after day, it doesn't matter who's holding the keys today — the capability itself is the danger.

Hawley's line about being tracked "for weeks" gets at the core problem with Flock's business model: these cameras don't just catch a plate once, they build a timeline. Multiply that across the thousands of jurisdictions now renting Flock hardware and you get a de facto national movement-tracking system, built without a single vote in Congress and often without real public input at the local level. A Senate hearing putting that on the record, even briefly, is a small but useful crack in the wall of silence surrounding this industry.

Credit to The Financial Express for surfacing the exchange. If you want to see how close this surveillance net already is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting these questions in front of your own city council.