LIVE: Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing | AI Surveillance Cameras Flock Safety Under Scrutiny |N18G
The short version: CNN-News18 aired the Senate Judiciary subcommittee's "Always Watching" hearing, putting Flock Safety's nationwide ALPR network under rare congressional scrutiny.
Our Take
Credit to CNN-News18 for carrying this one live. It's not every day a Senate Judiciary subcommittee puts a single surveillance vendor's name in the hearing title. "Always Watching: Flock's..." says the quiet part out loud — lawmakers are finally asking in public what we've been asking for a while: who's watching the watchers, and who gets to see the data these cameras collect on ordinary drivers who've done nothing wrong.
We're not going to pretend we caught every word of testimony or put words in any senator's mouth. What matters here is that Flock's rapid, low-oversight expansion into thousands of towns has gotten big enough to land on the federal radar. That's a sign the patchwork of local police contracts and city council rubber-stamps isn't holding — and that the questions about retention windows, cross-agency data sharing, and ICE access are no longer fringe concerns, they're committee-room questions.
If a hearing like this makes you wonder whether your own block has one of these cameras, don't wait on Congress to tell you. Check our map to see what's already watching your street, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for your city council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CNN-News18, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.