Hawley Opens Flock Safety Investigation, Documents Due September 8

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for laying out the timeline here, because this is the story ALPR skeptics have been trying to tell for years: the audit trail is theater. A Milwaukee officer allegedly ran his girlfriend's plate 124 times and her ex's 55 times, typing 'investigation' as justification every single time, and Flock's own system never blinked. It took a private citizen checking a public lookup site to catch what the company's compliance tools were supposedly designed to catch. That's not an edge case, that's the whole business model failing at the one job it's supposed to do.

Now a sitting Senate Judiciary subcommittee chair is demanding documents on how Flock collects, retains, and shares this data, with a September 8 deadline. Whatever comes of it, the fact that this needed a Senator's subpoena power rather than Flock's internal controls tells you everything about how much trust to put in vendor self-policing. Every camera network normalizes a little more casual access to everyone's movements, and 'I typed a word in a box' is apparently sufficient oversight until someone outside the system starts asking questions.

If you want to know how many of these cameras are already logging plates in your own town, check our map, and if you want to push back on it locally, our take-action page has the tools to start.