A growing number of Americans are alarmed about Flock spy cameras..

The concern reached critical mass.

And Josh Hawley just put Flock Safety on notice in a way that has the Flock camera CEO scrambling.

120,000 Cameras, Zero Congressional Authorization

US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, sent a letter to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley recently announcing a formal investigation into the company’s “collection, retention, and dissemination of the data” generated by its AI-powered surveillance cameras.

Flock Safety has built a network of more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras spread across 49 states. Those cameras conduct more than 20 billion vehicle scans every single month.

Think about that number for a second. Twenty billion. Every month. And the overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records, as Hawley put it in his letter, “did nothing wrong.”

Hawley’s core charge is straightforward and damning: “Congress never authorized the network your industry has built.”

That one sentence deserves to sit on its own, because it says everything. A private company, valued at a reported $8.3 billion according to the American Bazaar, assembled what amounts to a national surveillance infrastructure — one that feeds location data on millions of law-abiding citizens into a searchable database — and it did so without any legislative authority whatsoever.

“Your company’s internal policies are, in practice, the only safeguards for hundreds of millions of Americans,” Hawley wrote to Langley.

So the only thing standing between every driver in America and warrantless mass tracking of their movements is the internal rulebook of a tech company chasing an $8 billion valuation. That is not a constitutional safeguard. That is a marketing document.

Stalking, False Arrests, and a Florida Woman Who Spent 13 Days in Jail

Hawley did not come to this fight with vague concerns. He came with documented examples of what happens when a surveillance network this size operates with “the woeful lack of safeguards in these systems,” as he described it in his letter.

In Missouri’s St. Charles County, the police department terminated its Flock contract after an audit revealed that a civilian employee had run Flock searches for personal reasons entirely unrelated to law enforcement, according to the Washington Examiner’s reporting on Hawley’s letter.

A Milwaukee police officer allegedly searched his partner’s license plate more than 100 times, according to the Washington Examiner.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, documented 30 instances where officers used these cameras to “stalk romantic interests,” according to reporting on the investigation.

And then there is the Florida woman. According to Hawley’s letter as reported by The Hill, she spent 13 days in jail and faced eight felony counts — including three counts of vehicular homicide — for a crime she did not commit, after investigators relied on a Flock network search that produced a false match.

“Errors and false positives add insult to injury,” Hawley wrote.

That is an understatement. Thirteen days in jail on vehicular homicide charges because an AI-powered license plate camera got it wrong. And this is the technology that has been quietly installed in communities across 49 states, often with minimal public debate and no federal oversight.

The Los Angeles Police Department terminated its Flock contract after an internal audit discovered officers had made 161 incorrect stops over a two-month period based on false stolen-vehicle flags, according to the American Bazaar. Elsewhere, local testing recorded false positive rates reaching as high as 71 percent, that same reporting noted.

What Hawley Is Demanding — and What Flock Is Saying

Hawley set a September 8 deadline for Langley to produce documents covering law enforcement access policies, camera placement, data handling, revenue sources, and investor records.

He also wants a full accounting of “any known or suspected misuse of Flock systems” since 2021, along with files on the cameras’ accuracy and whether they collect anything beyond license plate information, according to Axios, which first obtained the letter.

Hawley is also pressing on whether driver data could be commercialized or sold to third parties — a pointed question given the company’s reported valuation.

Flock Safety spokesperson Paris Lewbel told Axios that the company intends to cooperate. “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,” she added.

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley had also announced several changes to the company’s systems earlier this month, including tightening the data retention period to seven days and requiring that any search be tied to a case number, according to the Washington Examiner.

But voluntary internal tweaks announced under political pressure are not the same as congressional authorization, judicial oversight, or a warrant requirement. The Fourth Amendment does not have a carve-out for companies that promise to be more careful.

The letter itself did not threaten subpoenas, but Hawley could seek one to force document production if Langley does not comply, according to Axios.

The Backlash Is Already Spreading

Hawley’s investigation did not arrive in a vacuum. Cities and counties across the country have been pulling the plug on Flock contracts at a growing pace.

The Pflugerville City Council in Texas voted unanimously to end its agreement with Flock, according to Fox News. City staff were directed to shut off all 28 automated license plate reader cameras covered by the contract and disable system access entirely.

Flock has reportedly seen contracts canceled in 23 states, according to the Washington Examiner.

Members of Congress from both parties have raised concerns about the network. Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida said she was working on legislation to ban these cameras outright, though that bill had not yet been introduced as of the latest reporting from the Daily Caller. Republican Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee introduced the “Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act” to ban federal agencies from purchasing or operating Flock cameras or any form of automated surveillance that identifies, tracks, or records individuals, according to the Daily Caller.

Not a single bill to ban Flock cameras or other automated license plate readers outright has yet passed Congress, according to the Daily Caller.

This Is What Warrantless Mass Surveillance Looks Like in Practice

The Fourth Amendment was written to protect Americans from exactly this kind of government reach — searches conducted without individualized suspicion, without a warrant, without any judicial check. The fact that a private company is doing the logging before handing it to law enforcement does not change what is actually happening to the person driving to work, dropping kids off at school, or going to church.

Hawley made that point directly. “Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, when they drop their kids off at school, or go to church,” he wrote in the letter, according to the American Bazaar.

That is not a radical position. It is a restatement of what the Constitution has always said. What is radical is a system that logs the time-stamped location of every vehicle passing 120,000 cameras, pools that information into a national database searchable by law enforcement agencies across jurisdictions, retains it for weeks or longer, and does all of this without the knowledge or consent of the people being tracked.

The argument that Flock cameras help catch criminals is real. Law enforcement agencies genuinely use them to find stolen vehicles and missing persons. But the question Hawley is asking is the right one: at what cost, and under what rules? Because right now the rules are whatever Flock Safety decides they are on a given Tuesday.

And the documented record of misuse — stalking, false arrests, a woman jailed for two weeks on homicide charges she didn’t commit — shows what happens when a surveillance tool this powerful operates with no meaningful external check.

Congress has never been asked to vote on whether Americans should be subject to blanket vehicle tracking by a private AI company. They never authorized it. And that is precisely the point Hawley is making — not as a partisan attack, but as a basic constitutional observation that both parties, at least in their better moments, have been willing to make.

The September 8 deadline Hawley set for Flock Safety is the opening move. What Langley produces — or refuses to produce — will tell a great deal about how seriously this company takes the privacy rights of the hundreds of millions of Americans whose movements it has been quietly recording.

Sources: Axios; The Hill; Washington Examiner; Daily Caller; American Bazaar; Fox News; Gizmodo