Hawley Opens Flock Safety Investigation

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net) for surfacing a story that should worry anyone who thought "audit logs" meant actual oversight. A private citizen ran his own plate through a public lookup tool and found it had been searched 124 times — with no flags, no alerts, nothing catching the pattern. That's not a glitch, that's the system working exactly as designed: log everything, review nothing, and hope no one asks questions.

Now Senator Hawley has opened an inquiry and given Flock Safety a September 8 deadline to explain itself. Whatever comes of that deadline, the underlying lesson doesn't change: these networks generate mountains of searchable data on ordinary people's movements, and the "audit trail" everyone points to as a safeguard is only as good as someone actually looking at it. A citizen stumbling onto misuse by accident is not oversight — it's luck.

This is exactly why we keep pushing people to check what's watching their own streets. Look up the cameras near you on the map, and if you want to push back on unaccountable ALPR deployment in your town, our take-action page has concrete steps.