Josh Hawley Asks Cybersecurity Engineer: How Vulnerable Are We If Flock Cameras Are Hacked?

Our Take

It says something that it took a Senate hearing to ask the question a lot of us have been asking for years: what happens when, not if, this sprawling network of license plate cameras gets hacked. Credit to Forbes Breaking News for capturing the exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley and cybersecurity engineer Benn Jordan, because this is exactly the kind of scrutiny Flock Safety has mostly avoided as it's quietly wired thousands of communities into a single, centralized surveillance grid.

Flock's pitch has always been about catching bad guys. But a database that tracks where every car in a city goes, tied to timestamps and often shared across agency lines, is also a massive single point of failure. It doesn't matter how well-intentioned the local police chief is if the system itself has weak security architecture, murky data-sharing agreements, or vendors who treat breach disclosure as a PR problem rather than a public safety one. When lawmakers start asking 'how bad could this get,' that's a signal the rest of us should be asking the same thing about the cameras in our own towns.

This is why we keep pushing people to actually look at what's near them, not just take it on faith that it's harmless. Check our camera map to see what's been documented in your area, and if you want to push back on deployments or demand real accountability from your city council, our take-action page has concrete steps. Hearings like this one are useful, but they only matter if they translate into actual guardrails.