Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley opened an investigation Wednesday into Flock Safety cameras and its access to Americans’ data.
Hawley sent a letter to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley requesting that he send all documents and information by Sept. 8 to investigate the company’s “collection, retention, and dissemination” from its artificial intelligence (AI) powered surveillance cameras. The senator chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which will lead the investigation.
“Congress never authorized the network your industry has built. Your company’s internal policies are, in practice, the only safeguards for hundreds of millions of Americans,” Hawley wrote. “People across the country are now discovering that fact and demanding answers from their elected officials. In light of this abuse of driver information, the American people want to know who has access to their personal data and how. This investigation will seek those answers.”
“To facilitate that, please produce all documents and information specified in the attached annex no later than September 8, 2026. If you have questions about the scope of these requests, please contact my office to discuss,” Hawley continued.
The letter didn’t mention using subpoenas to extract the requested documents from Flock.
Flock Safety spokesperson Paris Lewbel told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the company intends to cooperate with Hawley’s demands.
“We have received Senator Hawley’s letter and appreciate the opportunity to provide the Subcommittee with additional information about Flock and our technology,” Lewbel said. “We will be responding directly to the questions raised and we look forward to working with Senator Hawley and the Subcommittee to provide additional context about how our technology works, the safeguards built into our platform, and how law enforcement agencies use Flock to solve crime and find missing people.”
Hawley noted that the majority of people in the cameras’ records committed no crimes and that the “lack of safeguards” in the system had serious consequences.
“In Milwaukee, prosecutors charged a police officer who allegedly searched his girlfriend’s license plate 124 times and her former boyfriend’s plate 55 times, entering “investigation” as his justification each time. Worse still, the officer was not caught by the company’s audit systems—he was caught because a private citizen looked up his own plate on a public website,” the letter stated.
Flock also collected information about a Florida resident who spent 13 days in jail and faced eight felony counts, including three counts of vehicular homicide, for a crime she did not commit, according to the letter.
Hawley asked Langley to answer a series of questions, which included stating the parameters which customers can conduct statewide or nationwide searches of vehicles or driver data, according to the letter. The letter asked Langley to state the total number of confirmed instances of misuse since Jan. 1, 2021, describe what a user must enter to justify a search and name every restriction Flock imposes on the purposes for which its systems can be searched.
Not a single bill in Congress has yet been introduced to ban Flock cameras or other automated license plate readers (ALPRs) outright. Republican Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said on July 22 that she was working on a bill to ban them completely, though that bill has yet to be introduced.
Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett introduced the “Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act” in July to ban federal agencies from purchasing or operating Flock cameras or any form of automated surveillance that “identify, track, or record individuals.” Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie said he planned to introduce a bill aiming to withhold federal funds from local municipalities and police departments using Flock and ALPRs.
Flock previously told the DCNF that Congress should consider “strong, clear safeguards” rather than outright banning automated surveillance.
“We believe public safety, privacy, and Fourth Amendment rights can and must coexist,” a Flock spokesperson told the DCNF. “More than 40 courts across the country have considered LPRs in the context of the Fourth Amendment and ruled overwhelmingly that the use of these tools in public spaces does not require a warrant. Rather than banning a critical public safety tool, Congress should consider strong, clear safeguards that ensure accountability, oversight, and responsible use are enshrined in law.”
“We do not have to choose between protecting privacy and giving law enforcement the tools it needs to keep communities safe. We can — and should — do both,” the spokesperson continued.
Federal officials have a history of violating laws that were intended to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, including the FBI’s repeated abuse of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Surveillance concerns mounted as officers used these systems to stalk ex-girlfriends or romantic interests. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, found30 instances where officers used these cameras to “stalk romantic interests.”
A former officer in Milwaukee secretly used the Flock system to search the location of his romantic partner 124 times. An innocent driver in Wisconsin was held at gunpoint in early August after a camera made a mistake.
Due to these concerns, some cities cancelled their Flock contracts.
President Donald Trump said on Aug. 17 that Flock cameras have “pros and cons.”
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