Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is taking aim at the sprawling network of AI-powered license plate cameras operated by Flock Safety, launching a Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigation into how the company collects, stores, and potentially monetizes the driving data of millions of Americans.
In an op-ed published Wednesday, Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, said the technology has outpaced the law, leaving the privacy of hundreds of millions of drivers in the hands of a single private company’s internal policies.
‘Every month, AI-powered cameras take 20 billion snapshots of cars in America,’ Hawley wrote. ‘In almost every case, these photos capture drivers who did nothing wrong.’
The Missouri Republican said the network now spans more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, capturing images of everyday Americans commuting, shuttling kids to school, or heading to church — and raising fundamental questions about what happens to that data.
A Historical Parallel
Hawley rooted his concern in a pre-Revolutionary era, invoking Boston lawyer James Otis’s 1761 fight against writs of assistance — court orders that gave British customs officers sweeping authority to search homes and ships for contraband without specific warrants.
Otis, Hawley noted, did not oppose law enforcement or the need for searches. He objected to ‘open-ended authority without any limiting rules.’ John Adams later credited that moment as the birth of American independence.
Today, Hawley argues, Congress has written no rules governing AI camera networks built by Flock and similar companies. Older statutes and Fourth Amendment doctrine may apply, but those are ‘unsettled questions,’ he said.
‘For now, for practical purposes, the only privacy protections for hundreds of millions of Americans are those found in one company’s internal policies,’ Hawley wrote.
Abuse Already Documented
Hawley’s investigation was triggered in part by incidents in his home state. The St. Charles County Police Department canceled its Flock contract this month after an audit revealed a civilian employee running searches for personal reasons.
But Missouri is hardly alone. In Milwaukee, prosecutors charged an officer with running 124 searches on his girlfriend’s license plate and 55 on her former boyfriend’s — each time typing the word ‘investigation’ into the software’s justification field. The system’s audit did not catch him, Hawley noted; a private citizen did, after looking up his own plate on a public website.
The senator also highlighted false-positive errors with serious consequences. A Florida woman spent 13 days in jail on eight felony counts, including three for vehicular homicide, after investigators searched Flock’s network for a vehicle description and arrested the wrong owner. Prosecutors later dropped the charges.
Los Angeles terminated its Flock contract after an audit found officers had stopped 161 drivers wrongly flagged as driving stolen cars. Another California police department discovered that 71 percent of its alerts were incorrect.
Data, Valuation, and Commercial Pressures
Beyond misuse, Hawley raised concerns about what happens to the records the cameras generate. Flock boasts an $8.3 billion valuation, he said, which brings commercial pressures. Americans deserve to know whether and how their driving data is licensed, sold, or used, he argued.
He also flagged reports that Flock has used gig workers in the Philippines to classify data captured by cameras, and that ‘powerful AI models automate parts of the process’ — amplifying worries about cross-border data handling and foreign storage.
‘Adding insult to injury, the systems make mistakes,’ he said, referencing the California and Florida cases.
Balancing Policing and Privacy
Hawley was careful to state that he supports police having access to effective tools. Cameras can help recover stolen cars, find missing children, and catch fleeing criminals, he acknowledged.
But, he added, the Supreme Court has recognized that people hold a reasonable expectation of privacy against a ‘comprehensive’ record of their movements. ‘Americans do not surrender all their privacy rights every time they leave the house,’ he wrote.
The senator said he has sent Flock a list of ‘common-sense questions’ about how long it keeps data, who controls and can search it, what protections are in place, and whether anyone is buying the information.
He hopes the company commits to answering them — but said Congress should not simply take a company’s word. ‘We should write protections into law,’ he wrote, adding that safeguards must apply to every company and outlast current CEOs.
‘More fundamentally,’ Hawley concluded, ‘the rules protecting Americans should be set by law and by the people, not by venture capital funds, AI executives, or big tech companies.’
Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Wire.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/josh-hawley-why-i-am-investigating-flock