On September 23rd, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network,” examining the privacy risks, data sharing, and misuse of private automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks.
The hearing was chaired by Sen. Hawley (R-MO) and featured five witnesses, including Lindsey Isaacs, a wrongfully accused driver, Alasdair Whitney from Legislative Counsel Institute for Justice, Sheriff Ross Teeple, Benn Jordan, a self-proclaimed “hacker”, and policy counsel analyst Chad Marlow from the ACLU, where they have coined a campaign called “Get the Flock Out.”
The hearing highlighted pertinent concerns about how ALPR technology can be used and shared. Public concern about Flock cameras has also grown in recent months. A September 2026 Navigator Research survey found that 62% of registered voters were concerned about Flock camera use, including 66% of Democrats, 55% of Republicans, and 70% of Independents.
Flock Safety was founded in 2017 by CEO Garrett Langley, operating as a small startup meant to provide ALPR cameras to homeowners associations and neighborhoods looking to reduce petty theft and local property crimes. Now, it has grown into something alarmingly dystopian: an AI powered network of over 120,000 cameras across 49 states that photograph, scan, tag, and log every driver that passes, whether or not they are suspected of any crime.
License plate reader technologies have existed since the 1970s, in the form of speed, toll, and red-light cameras. These are only triggered by a specific action, such as running a red-light or driving through a toll booth, and only track license plate numbers. The entry of venture capitalist funding and advanced AI technology into the mass surveillance industry has transformed these automatic traffic enforcement cameras into a complex web of invasive surveillance tools.
During the hearing, ACLU’s Mr. Chad Marlow argued that companies operating ALPR systems are profiting from the collection and sharing of information about people’s movements. The ACLU has called for greater limits on how ALPR data can be collected, accessed, and shared.
Privacy concerns extend to how ALPR data can affect people seeking reproductive health care. During the hearing, Sen. Booker (D-NJ) raised concerns that states could use ALPR technology to track people traveling to obtain reproductive care. The concern comes amid documented cases of law enforcement using vehicle surveillance systems to investigate people seeking or suspected of seeking abortion care.
Unfortunately, this ‘hypothetical’ scenario has become the reality for women across the country.
Witnesses Alaster Whitney and Sheriff Ross Teeple both testified about the overreach of Flock’s ALPRs, with Whitney highlighting jurisdiction concerns which police officers have already been accused of taking advantage of.
In Texas, a sheriff’s deputy used 83,000 Flock ALPRs to track a woman who allegedly performed a self-administered abortion, at the behest of her abusive partner. In Massachusetts, a police officer used Flock networks to stalk a former romantic partner who said she had changed her identity to escape from his abuse. In Kentucky, a police officer was accused of searching his child’s mother 1,000 times through Flock’s network, though she has a protective order. The Institute for Justice has catalogued more than 200 incidents of these ALPR abuses, including romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use and other types of misconduct.
These encroachments do not just stop here, as Sen. Padilla (D-CA) spotlights the use of loopholes within Flock, which ICE officers take advantage of to track immigrant communities. While Flock has guaranteed no direct access to the Border Patrol subagency, Witness Marlow points out all it takes is one sympathetic person connected to ICE for the agency to obtain access to billions of pictures of citizens, including facial properties.
Concerns about ALPR surveillance have crossed traditional political lines. During the hearing, Sen. Hawley noted that supporters of the Second Amendment have “long feared national databases of any kind.” This has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum highlighting the bipartisan opposition.
While Flock operates as a leading company which produces ALPRs, they are not the sole producers. Companies like Axon and Motorola have slowly begun increasing outputs as Flock cameras have gotten more attention and dissent. Amid Flock’s controversy, many cities like Denver are publicly terminating their Flock contracts only to quietly replace them with Axon.
Witness Mr. Benn Jordan, a self proclaimed “hacker” testified on finding 65 security vulnerabilities within Flock’s system, exposing the missing security settings needed to protect data from both national and international threats. Following this testimony, Witness Jordan urged the Senate to “…create clear, effective, and unified federal privacy laws on par with the GDPR [the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU].”
Jordan concludes his statement: “ALPRs are used all over the world, but viewing license plates as personal data with modern privacy guardrails would have prevented nearly every single problem that we are learning about in this hearing. This is an opportunity for Congress to build the overdue framework to protect the privacy of Americans for generations to come.”
