Hawley: "If you haven't heard of Flock… Flock's probably heard of you"
The short version: A C-SPAN clip shows Sen. Josh Hawley warning a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that Flock's ALPR network has quietly become a national tracking system few Americans know exists.
Our Take
When a Republican senator starts sounding like a civil liberties group, it's worth paying attention. The C-SPAN clip of Sen. Josh Hawley's subcommittee remarks captures something we've been saying for a while: Flock Safety's camera network has scaled up so fast and so quietly that most people have no idea their daily movements are being logged, timestamped, and stored in a database they never consented to join. Hawley's line about Flock probably knowing you even if you've never heard of it is blunt, but it's not wrong.
What makes this moment notable isn't just that a senator is raising alarms — it's that the concern is bipartisan. Mass surveillance infrastructure built by a private company, sold to thousands of local police departments with little public debate, doesn't fit neatly into left-right politics. It's a civil liberties problem, full stop. When elected officials start asking who has access to these plate-read databases, how long the data is kept, and who's accountable when it's misused, that's a sign the conversation is finally catching up to the technology.
Credit to C-SPAN for getting this exchange on the record. If you want to see how close this surveillance infrastructure 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.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of C-SPAN, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.