08/27/2026
🚨 Senator Josh Hawley’s decision to open a formal investigation into Flock Safety’s AI-powered license plate readers confronts a surveillance network that has expanded with almost no real accountability.
In just a few years the company has placed more than 120,000 cameras across forty-nine states, producing roughly twenty billion vehicle scans every month and feeding the images, timestamps, and locations into a searchable national database.
Most of the drivers captured in those records have done nothing wrong, yet their everyday movements (commutes, school runs, errands) are routinely logged and made available for query by thousands of agencies whose safeguards have proven thin.
Officers have used the system to track romantic partners obsessively; one Milwaukee officer allegedly searched a girlfriend’s plate 124 times and her former partner’s 55 times, simply typing “investigation” as the reason.
In Missouri a civilian employee ran personal searches until the local department finally canceled its contract.
False alerts have carried heavier costs: a Florida woman spent thirteen days in jail on multiple felony counts after a Flock hit later proved wrong, one California agency found that 71% of its alerts were inaccurate, and the Los Angeles Police Department dropped the system after officers made 161 incorrect stops of vehicles wrongly flagged as stolen in only two months.
A permanent digital dragnet already records the movements of millions who have broken no law, places that data in the hands of operators with demonstrably weak controls, and treats constitutional limits as optional.
Hawley’s demand for records on data retention, access controls, documented misuse, and commercial practices by September 8 is therefore an urgent and necessary intervention against a technology that has already begun to erase the boundary between public safety and total, unaccountable tracking of everyday American life.
If we fail to rein it in now, the cameras will simply keep watching while the last remnants of privacy disappear.