Sen. Hawley Presses Flock Safety Over AI License Plate Data Access

Our Take

Credit to CISO Marketplace for surfacing this clip — it's a rare moment of a sitting senator asking the exact question we've been hammering on: why does a private surveillance vendor get to hoover up location data on nearly every driver in the country with less oversight than the cops who buy access to it? Twenty billion scans a month across 49 states isn't a public safety tool anymore, it's a national tracking network that happens to be run by a corporation instead of a government agency — which conveniently sidesteps a lot of the legal guardrails built for government surveillance.

The wrongful arrest tied to a misread plate is the kind of story that should scare anyone who thinks "the algorithm" is infallible. These systems make mistakes, and when a private company's bad read gets treated as probable cause, real people get handcuffed for driving a car that looks sort of like another car. Hawley pressing Flock on data access is a good start, but one hearing doesn't change the fact that thousands of these cameras are already bolted to poles in neighborhoods across the country, quietly building a searchable history of where everyone goes.

If you want to see how close this network is to your own street, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting these systems in front of your city council instead of just rubber-stamped behind closed doors.