Josh Hawley opened a Senate subcommittee investigation into Flock Safety, demanding answers on who can access data from what he called a searchable national database of Americans’ movements.
Flock says its AI-powered license-plate reader system spans more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states and processes more than 20 billion vehicle scans a month for law-enforcement investigations.
Privacy advocates say the central risk is retrospective, warrantless tracking; Institute for Justice attorney Robert Frommer urged judges to approve most searches, with narrow emergency exceptions.
The scrutiny is already hitting local contracts: Pflugerville voted to shut off 28 cameras, Hood County ordered three disconnected, and Tempe said it will end its system and delete most stored data within 30 days.
Flock said it will respond to Hawley and defended its safeguards, while acknowledging it had mistakenly included two out-of-state agencies in a Texas statewide sharing network before correcting the error.