Sen. Josh Hawley wants to know who is watching America's drivers and what happens to the data after they pass a camera. The Missouri Republican has opened a formal congressional investigation into Flock Safety, the private company whose AI-powered license plate readers now scan more than 20 billion vehicles every month across 49 states.
Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, sent a letter to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley demanding internal records on the company's data collection, retention, and sharing practices. The letter sets a September 8 deadline for the company to produce documents covering law-enforcement access policies, contracts, and every known instance of system misuse since 2021, Courthouse News reported.
The senator did not hold back about what he sees as an unregulated surveillance apparatus built without legislative approval.
"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."
Flock Safety operates roughly 120,000 cameras and holds contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, Newsmax reported. The company says its technology has aided approximately one million police investigations and helped locate around 10,000 missing persons. Those numbers form the core of Flock's public defense: the cameras work, and they save lives.
Hawley is not disputing that the technology can be useful. His concern is structural. No federal statute governs how Flock collects, stores, or shares the movement data of ordinary citizens. No congressional committee blessed the buildout. The company's own internal rules are, by Hawley's account, the only thing standing between Americans' daily travel patterns and potential abuse.
The senator framed the privacy stakes in plain terms during his announcement of the probe.
"Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church."
He also stressed the sheer volume of innocent people swept into the system. "The overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong," Hawley stated, as the Washington Examiner reported.
The investigation did not emerge from abstract policy concerns alone. Specific incidents of alleged misuse helped trigger the probe. In Milwaukee, a police officer allegedly searched a partner's license plate more than 100 times through the system. In St. Charles County, Missouri, a civilian employee at the police department allegedly ran unauthorized searches for personal reasons.
These cases illustrate exactly the gap Hawley is targeting. When a single employee can query a national camera network for personal motives, the question of who polices the system becomes urgent. Flock's cameras are not just passive tools waiting for a detective's warrant. They are always-on data collectors, and the access controls depend almost entirely on whatever policies the company and its local law-enforcement partners choose to follow.
The subcommittee's letter also cited broader patterns of false positive arrests tied to automated license plate reader technology. Misidentified plates can lead to armed felony stops of innocent drivers, a risk that grows as the camera network expands.
Hawley is not alone in raising alarms. The probe reflects a widening bipartisan coalition of lawmakers who view automated plate readers as a Fourth Amendment problem hiding in plain sight. Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed an outright ban on the technology. Rep. Tim Burchett has pushed to cut federal funding for local ALPR installations, Newsmax noted.
That left-right convergence is rare in today's Congress, and it signals that Flock Safety faces more than a single senator's inquiry. When a conservative subcommittee chairman and a self-described democratic socialist both want the same company reined in, the legislative threat is real.
Congressional scrutiny is only part of the picture. At the local level, communities are already making their own decisions. Pflugerville, Texas, unanimously voted to terminate its Flock contract and disable all 28 of the company's cameras within city limits, Fox News reported. City officials cited lost confidence in Flock's data and privacy standards.
Pflugerville is a suburb of Austin with a population of roughly 75,000. It is not a major metro. But a unanimous city council vote to rip out an active law-enforcement tool sends a pointed message: the trust deficit is not limited to Washington.
The Texas pullout also raises a practical question for Flock's business model. The company carries a reported valuation of $8.3 billion. That number depends on continued expansion of its camera footprint. If cities start canceling contracts over privacy concerns, growth projections could soften, and investor confidence along with them.
Flock Safety has not pushed back against the investigation. Paris Lewbel, a company spokesperson, told reporters that Flock "will be responding directly to the questions raised" and looks forward to working with Hawley and the subcommittee.
The cooperative tone is notable. Companies facing congressional probes sometimes lawyer up and stall. Flock appears to be choosing engagement over confrontation, at least publicly. Whether that posture holds once the subcommittee starts reviewing internal documents and misuse logs remains to be seen.
Flock's public talking points lean heavily on outcomes: the million-plus investigations assisted, the thousands of missing persons found. Those are real numbers, and they carry weight with law enforcement agencies that rely on the technology daily. But outcome statistics do not answer the constitutional question at the center of Hawley's probe. A tool can be effective and still lack the legal guardrails a free society requires.
The September 8 deadline will force several key questions into the open. Investigators will need to determine how long Flock retains scan data on vehicles not linked to any criminal investigation. They will need to examine whether the company shares or sells aggregated movement data to third parties for commercial purposes. And they will need a full accounting of every documented misuse incident since 2021, not just the handful that have reached public attention.
Hawley's letter also demands clarity on who, exactly, can access the system. With 5,000 law-enforcement agencies holding contracts, the number of individual users with query privileges could be enormous. Each one represents a potential point of failure, as the Milwaukee and St. Charles County incidents demonstrate.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether Flock maintains centralized audit logs that track every search conducted through its network. If such logs exist, they could reveal the true scale of personal-use queries. If they do not exist, that absence would itself be a damning data point for the subcommittee.
At its core, this probe tests a question the courts have not fully resolved: does mass automated surveillance of public roadways constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment? The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States held that long-term cellphone location tracking requires a warrant. Flock's camera network collects a different type of location data, but the privacy implications run parallel. Twenty billion scans per month can reconstruct the daily movements of virtually any driver in the country.
Hawley's investigation does not need to answer that constitutional question directly. What it can do is establish a factual record that forces Congress to act. If the subcommittee finds that Flock's internal safeguards are as thin as Hawley suspects, the case for federal regulation becomes difficult to ignore.
When a private company builds a surveillance grid that covers 49 states and no law on the books governs how it operates, the problem is not the technology. The problem is the silence from the institution that is supposed to create the rules.
