Senators from both parties unloaded Wednesday on AI-powered automatic license plate readers capable of tracking people’s every movement, criticizing the likely infringement on privacy rights as the “surveillance network” faces backlash from communities across the country.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, had invited the CEOs of Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada to testify about their ALPRs and the vast database of images they generate, but all four declined the senator’s invitation to Wednesday’s hearing.
After the hearing, in which legal and technological experts and law enforcement, as well as a woman who was wrongfully jailed as a result of ALPRs used in an investigation, testified, Hawley said he hopes the conversations on Wednesday mark a shift in how companies address concerns brewing from coast to coast.
“I hope that today will be a turning point,” Hawley told the Washington Examiner. “I’m sure that they’ll say, ‘Oh well, this was wrong or that’s wrong.’ OK, well, come and testify and tell us about it.”
Senators focus on privacy rights concerns
Flock, the largest focus of the hearing, operates more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and says its network generates about 20 billion vehicle scans each month. Hawley emphasized that the cameras capture images of every vehicle that passes by, regardless of whether or not it is involved in a crime, and collect a “digital fingerprint” of a vehicle.
“If you haven’t heard of Flock, all I have to say is Flock’s probably heard of you,” Hawley said in his opening statement.
The hearing centered on whether the increasingly interconnected networks allow authorities to reconstruct a person’s movements without the legal and cybersecurity safeguards normally required for other forms of government surveillance.
Hawley said the networks could potentially reconstruct a person’s movements over days or weeks, showing trips to schools, churches, medical checkups, or other locations. Rather than simply checking a license plate against a hot list, Hawley said newer systems can catalog details including a vehicle’s make, model, color, location, and allow authorities to search information collected across a broader network.
That distinction drove much of the bipartisan concern Wednesday.
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Ranking member Dick Durbin (D-IL) focused on the collection of information about people who are not suspected of committing crimes.
“The bottom line is they collect the information before there’s any specific allegation that wrongdoing has taken place,” Durbin said.
Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) similarly argued that Congress does not have to choose between giving police useful technology and protecting the public from warrantless surveillance.
“I think two things can be true at the same time,” Britt said. “One, we want to keep and make sure that our law enforcement officers have what they need to keep Americans safe to help make sure that children who have been abducted get home. But we must protect people’s Fourth Amendment rights.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) described the situation with Flock cameras and similar technologies as being “out of balance,” in that people want to be protected by law enforcement but are not willing to sacrifice their rights.
“To me we have gone way out of balance now,” Booker said. “When it comes to certain societal interests in public safety, concerns there with violating the average American’s sense of fundamental rights to privacy. … We are way out of balance right now. In fact, we are out of control for any government, state, local, or federal, to easily abuse the fundamental rights that we all assume we have a right to.”
Witnesses describe security and investigative failures
Those broader concerns were underscored by Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman who told senators she spent 13 days in jail after investigators relied in part on a Flock camera while investigating a fatal crash.
The camera captured Isaac’s vehicle several miles from the crash scene. Investigators were looking for the same make and model, but witnesses had described a different colored car and provided a partial license plate that did not match hers.
“I came here today because I want you to understand that surveillance technology does not exist in a vacuum,” she said. “Information collected by technology can become part of an investigation that affects a real human being.”
Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Ross Teeple approached the issue from the other side. He told senators his department uses license plate readers and considers them valuable tools but canceled its contract with Flock after he became concerned about the scope of the network and the answers the company provided about its technology.
“If we rely on private camera networks to act as a dragnet, continuously logging the habits of innocent Americans without a warrant, we are paving the way to an AI-driven surveillance state,” he said.
Alasdair Whitney, legislative counsel at the Institute for Justice, told senators the technology allows authorities unprecedented access to an individual’s movements and said data-sharing features allow tracking to go beyond county lines.
“ALPR technology now lets the government do something it can never do before, and that is travel back in time and reconstruct your movements, where you’ve been, and with whom we’ve associated, all without a warrant, and with the ease of running a Google search,” Whitney said.
Cybersecurity researcher Benn Jordan raised a separate concern over the security of the massive amount of information being collected. He said he found several vulnerabilities in Flock systems, including Flock law enforcement accounts for sale on the dark web, and that he was able to hack into the systems.
“What I’ve been asking for around the country is for privatized government surveillance vendors to require independent security testing and inspections,” Jordan said. “I cannot legally open a restaurant or a barbershop without a health inspector and a fire marshal making sure that it’s safe for people to enter. Yet there is not a single city or police department in this country that requires this from a third-party company tracking their citizens.”
What Congress could do next
Witnesses raised several possibilities for possible federal guardrails, including requiring warrants to search historical location information, limiting how long data can be retained, and imposing stricter rules on who can access ALPR databases and for what purpose.
Teeple told senators he does not believe the technology should be eliminated altogether. Instead, he advocated drawing a clearer line between narrowly tailored law enforcement uses and systems capable of continuously recording movements of people who are not suspected of crimes.
“We must establish clear statutory boundaries for automatic license plate readers. We cannot wait for a future Supreme Court ruling to correct AI overreach. We must protect the Fourth Amendment today,” Teeple said.
President Donald Trump endorsed the use of Flock cameras earlier this month, saying he “likes them,” noting their use by law enforcement to arrest criminals. However, the president recognized that the cameras are unpopular because some “think it’s an infringement.”
When asked about Trump’s opinion on Flock, Hawley said he understands how such a tool could be valuable to law enforcement.
“I think what the president has said is that he wants law enforcement to have tools, and that license plate readers are valuable and traditional law enforcement tools, and they are,” Hawley told the Washington Examiner. “I mean, we use those in Missouri all the time. But I think you know today was an effort at trying to gather the facts, and you know what we heard today is that this technology is very different.”
Hawley made clear after the hearing that he sees room for legitimate uses of the technology but believes those uses should be constrained.
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“There may be great uses for it, but it’s got to be constrained for like legitimate law enforcement purposes, and it needs to be limited in a way that reflects the constitutionality,” he said after the hearing.
The four companies could still face additional scrutiny. Hawley said issuing subpoenas to testify would require a vote of the full Senate Judiciary Committee and that he planned to speak with Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) about the issue.