Surveillance CEOs Skip Flock Hearing As Opponents Push for Restrictions
Congress held a hearing on the extensive surveillance systems that have spread throughout the country. Zero advocates for Flock or similar companies showed up. The CEOs of Flock, Motorola, Axon, and Verkada were invited, but they all declined to appear to defend their product. The committee’s ranking member pointed out the irony. It appears the heads of these surveillance systems “were nervous about being on camera.”
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism held the “Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network” hearing on Wednesday. It was led by Chairman Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and the stated focus was scrutiny into automated license-plate readers (ALPRs). The fact that this technology is still referred to as ALPR is misleading since it goes far beyond capturing license-plate numbers. As Hawley pointed out, modern ALPR systems assemble “a pattern of life.”
Ubiquitous Surveillance
“Practically every state in the union has them — hundreds of thousands of them recording billions of images every single month,” Hawley said in his opening statement. “You have probably been scanned and surveilled and tagged and logged multiple times this week alone.” He showed a poster illustration of a couple on a motorcycle with graphics indicating the plethora of data points a Flock camera captures. Among those data points were bumper stickers. He implied that that kind of information could signal political affiliations and activist proclivities, things authorities have no business knowing about.
Flock alone has put up 120,000 cameras in 49 states, according to Hawley, although some sources say that number is just over 127,000 cameras. In case you’re wondering about the state that doesn’t have Flock cameras, Hawley said it was Hawaii. But the website flockcamera.app, which has compiled a list of the number of Flock cameras by state, says there is another state without Flock cameras: Alaska. California leads the way with over 19,000 cameras across the Golden State. Texas is not far behind with 15,600, according to the app. A bit surprising is the state with the third-most Flock cameras: Georgia. The Peach State has double the number of Flock cameras New York does, 2,000 more than Illinois, and nearly triple those of its red-state neighbor to the north, Tennessee.
Building a Net
Hawley touched on the unprecedented surveillance power of the Flock system. “What seems to make these networks unique is not just the sheer number of cameras, it’s the fact that they’re all linked together and powered and searchable by AI,” he said. “It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country before.” One of the witnesses, Alasdair Whitney, an Institute for Justice legislative lawyer, provided this summary about the system’s vast network:
Agencies pool their data into a multijurisdictional database that tracks a person’s movements across cities, states, and the entire country, so an officer in California or Texas has the power to see where a motorist has traveled in Missouri or Illinois. Flock alone now operates more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states and logs more than 20 billion vehicle scans a month. These cameras sit in front of doctors’ and attorneys’ offices, places of worship, hospitals, military installations, even homes.
He added this bit of commentary: “Networks that dense let the government track anyone cheaply for weeks at a time. That is exactly why law enforcement likes them.”
Falsely Accused
Another witness, Lindsey Isaacs, was falsely accused of three counts of vehicular homicide thanks to officers’ overreliance on Flock footage. Isaacs was arrested and held in jail for 13 days because law-enforcement officers trusted the technology more than witnesses who provided accounts that, had they been taken seriously, would’ve never implicated her as a suspect. Isaacs occasionally cried while telling her story, which goes like this:
The saga began in October 2025. State and county law-enforcement officers went to her parents’ home at 1:00 a.m. looking for her. The police told her parents that she was involved in a fatal crash that killed three people. A few hours later, the police descended on Isaacs’ home, where they impounded her SUV. She told the state troopers that she hadn’t been involved in a crash. She told them where she’d been that night and even provided receipts of the items she bought on her way home. The troopers, however, insisted that her vehicle had damage “consistent with” the report. Isaacs disputed this, saying her vehicle was “in immaculate condition.”
In April, law enforcement arrested her. She was put in solitary confinement for three days because of the severity of her charges. She was forced to wear a suicide dress with a broken Velcro that exposed her. Then she was transferred to a mental-health unit before being put in a maximum security housing unit, where she stayed for 10 days. “I was terrified,” she said. “I was facing the possibility of spending the rest of my life in prison for a crash that I knew I had not been involved in. … At my lowest point, I didn’t want to be alive.”
Isaacs said she learned that a Flock camera had captured her Dodge Durango about three miles from the scene of the crime, prompting investigators to look for a black Durango. She learned that witnesses, however, said they saw a maroon Durango involved in the crash. 9-1-1 callers relayed similar information, and reports included a partial license plate number. She appeared to imply the partial number should’ve exonerated her as well had it been taken seriously. Despite these witness accounts, investigators continued looking at her.
Her attorney eventually obtained and handed over to the judge pictures of her SUV, which was sitting in the impound lot, without the damage that state used to justify arresting her. The state took a second look at her case, and the next day she was allowed to bond out. By May, the state had dropped the charges against her and ended up charging someone else.
Isaacs’ story is part of a pattern of police showing up to people’s houses and accusing them, on the basis of Flock footage, of crimes they never committed.
Officers Abusing Technology
Whitney provided examples of other kinds of abuse, mainly by officers entrusted with this technology. For example, a Kentucky officer allegedly searched the database for his child’s mother thousands of times. The woman had a restraining order out on him. In North Carolina, an officer was arrested over suspicion that he looked up an undercover investigator’s vehicle “at the request of a drug suspect.” Moreover, “images from these cameras have been shipped to gig workers in the Philippines to train Flocks’ AI.” He said these types of abuses are “growing by the day.”
Violating Citizens’ Rights
Ross Teeple, a sheriff in Arizona, ended his county’s contract with Flock. “I believe the latest camera networks, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, are capable of violating our citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights,” Teeple said. “If my deputies need a search warrant to put a physical tracker on a vehicle, where is the line for camera systems that build an identical, AI-driven map of a citizen’s life?”
Security Vulnerabilities
Cybersecurity engineer Ben Jordan added to the ominous reports about this technology, providing a slew of examples showing the vulnerabilities within these systems and how easily they can end up in the wrong hands. Jordan said that in 2025 he discovered Flock law-enforcement accounts for sale by a Russian vendor on a dark web site. He worked with another cybersecurity expert, Jon Gaines, who revealed 55 security vulnerabilities related to Flock. According to Jordan’s testimony:
The most alarming of Jon’s reported vulnerabilities was in the most common model of Flock’s ALPR camera. I publicly demonstrated that by pushing the button on the camera 3 times, I was able to access all of the data or reprogram the device however I wanted in under a minute. A backdoor. Malware. I’ve even played Doom on a Flock camera. In addition to this, Jon and myself found insufficiently protected sensitive information stored on Flock cameras including photos, license plate data, logs, API keys, passwords, and communications.
Jordan said he was able to tap into 60 Flock Condor cameras that allowed him to “view, delete, and modify 30 days of streaming camera footage from cameras across the country in potentially sensitive areas like forest trails, people’s front porches, and playgrounds, as well as zoom in on people’s mobile phone screens.”
These vulnerabilities have allowed Chinese hackers to access the Flock system and maintain a hidden backdoor for more than a year, he noted.
He added that Flock invited him to review their technology, signaling “that they’re taking security a lot more seriously than they were a year ago.”
New Privacy Laws Needed?
Jordan believes Congress should pass strong privacy laws. In his testimony, he even takes a shot at FISA 702 extensions. “From a security perspective, it would be absurd to be concerned with the scenarios playing out with Flock while supporting bills like Combating Organized Retail Crime Act or the extension of FISA 702. That would be the equivalent of feeding a monster in an attempt to defeat it.”
Whitney, the lawyer from the Institute for Justice, spent a good deal of his testimony making the case that Flock and Flock-like systems violate Americans’ constitutional rights.
“The Supreme Court made clear that we do not surrender our constitutional rights when we are in public,” he said, using case law to support his statements. He cited Coolidge v. New Hampshire, Chatrie v. United States, and Carpenter v. United States. In Carpenter, SCOTUS determined that “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements” and required a warrant for seven days of cell-site records, which is far less than what ALPRs capture. And this June, in Chatrie, the Court said the police invaded a reasonable expectation of privacy by obtaining “only two hours” of a suspect’s location history from Google. But “here we are talking about weeks or months,” added Whitney, referring to Flock.
Before any of this technology existed, said Whitney, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that efficiency alone could excuse the government from asking a judge for a warrant. The warrant requirement, SCOTUS said in Coolidge, is “not an inconvenience to be somehow ‘weighed’ against the claims of police efficiency.”
Like Jordan and the committee members who think Congress needs to step in to restrain this technology and those using it, Whitney’s group believes the answer is in both enforcing existing laws and hardening protections with new legislation.
The Importance of Warrants
First off, those who want access to the data need to get a warrant. The Institute for Justice’s model legislation, the Protecting Everyone from Excessive Police Surveillance (PEEPS) Act, “requires a government official to obtain a warrant before accessing historical location information — data more than two hours old — from any database, public or private, that can reveal where a person or vehicle has been.” The proposal also
bars sharing across jurisdictions without a court order and bars any sale. It requires a record of every access, employee supervisor audits every 30 days, and an annual public report. Importantly, it caps data retention at seven days absent a warrant, and it makes evidence obtained in violation of the Act inadmissible.
Whitney urged legislative action “before these cameras end up on every street corner,” which “is Flock’s stated goal.”
Hawley concluded his opening statement with this poignant observation:
This is still the United States of America and it shouldn’t be that when you walk out your door in the morning, you just have to agree and assent and accept the fact that you’re going to be on camera morning, noon, and night; you’ll be tracked by anybody and everybody in the world; you’ll have no privacy whatsoever. You’ll be tracked when you take your kids to school, and tracked when you go to church and when you go to the grocery store. … That isn’t the free society that we’ve known. We’ve got some work to do to make sure that the Constitution is real and protected in this area.
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