Hawley says Flock 'safety' cameras are creating a massive searchable database of people's public surveillance

Senator Josh Hawley revealed that Flock Safety’s AI-powered camera network can capture images of people inside their vehicles and that the company’s database can be searched for the presence of specific people in images. Hawley detailed the findings during a Senate hearing last week, calling it “quite extraordinary.”

During a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on September 23, Hawley highlighted the broad capabilities of Flock’s camera network. He pointed out that the cameras can collect images that can be searched using artificial intelligence for characteristics including vehicle make, model, color, location, date and time, dents, roof racks, bumper stickers, and other features.

“Flock can tell you if a car has a Trump sticker or a Harris sticker or a pro-life America sticker or an NRA sticker,” Hawley said. “Flock cameras can even recognize whether people are in the images, and in fact, Flock admitted in a letter to me ahead of this hearing that you can search their database based on people’s images. You can ask to search people.”

“This is really quite extraordinary,” Hawley added. “When you harness all of these things together, you get a capability, based on the reporting, that is different in kind than anything we have seen in this country.”

No Flock representatives testified at the hearing. Hawley had invited CEO Garret Langley to testify, but Langley instead submitted a written response to the subcommittee.

According to Hawley, Flock acknowledged in the response that it conducts “very little oversight” of client searches and relies on its customers to police their own use of the system.

“The underlying search records are owned and controlled by each customer agency,” the letter stated. 

Hawley further revealed that Flock clients control the data retention and, until last year, Flock customers could enter the reason for a search into a “free text field” without meaningful accountability. Hawley pointed to examples in which search reasons were entered simply as “search” or lol.”

Hawley has been highly critical of Flock Safety, announcing last month that he would investigate the company and the data it collects with its AI-powered surveillance cameras. Hawley issued a letter to Langley at the time demanding answers about what safeguards were in place to protect the data collected.

“In a few short years, Flock has assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network,” Hawley noted in the letter. “Your company boasts more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong."