by Misty Severi
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley sent a letter Wednesday to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley, questioning the company’s “collection, retention, and dissemination of the data” from its AI-powered surveillance cameras.
The probe comes as the company faces bipartisan blowback for its network of 120,000 cameras, which help law enforcement track the movement of vehicles.
The senator defended the investigation, which is part of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism, by pointing to incidents of alleged police misuse of Flock cameras and arrests made based on false positive matches.
Hawley claimed Congress never “authorized the network your industry has built,” and that Americans are seeking information on “who has access to their personal data and how.”
“To be sure, I want law enforcement to have tools to catch offenders and keep the public safe. But Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church. The Supreme Court has recognized that a comprehensive, retrospective record of a person’s movements is different in kind from ordinary observation in public.8 Congress never authorized the network your industry has built,” Hawley wrote.
“Your company’s internal policies are, in practice, the only safeguards for hundreds of millions of Americans,” he added. “People across the country are now discovering that fact and demanding answers from their elected officials.”
Flock Safety has defended its practices and said it is improving its privacy feature. It also argued its cameras have aided roughly one million police investigations and helped find around 10,000 missing people.
“We have received Senator Hawley’s letter and appreciate the opportunity to provide the Subcommittee with additional information about Flock and our technology,” Paris Lewbel, a spokesperson for Flock Safety, told Axios.
“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.
The senator is seeking a list of “any known or suspected misuse of Flock systems” since 2021, along with files on Flock cameras’ accuracy, security and any other data besides license plate information the company collects.
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Misty Severi is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
Photo “Flock Camera” by Paul Goyette. CC BY 4.0.
Flock cameras are just one of the many data streams that will be fed into the AI data centers with the resulting outcome of total surveillance of American citizens. And, as flock cameras are currently being abused to spy on individuals, so will the collected data of innocent American citizens be abused by nefarious individuals and government entities.