Introduction & Core Questions
I attended the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing, “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” Although Flock cameras are frequently characterized as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), they can also identify individual drivers. According to hearing testimony, roughly 120,000 Flock cameras across 49 states feed into a searchable network that can be used to piece together someone’s movements and, as one witness put it, “assemble a pattern of life.” And that database is accessible to anyone with a subscription, not just law enforcement. And while ALPRs can help law enforcement find missing people, recover stolen cars, and investigate serious crimes, Flock’s interconnected network and subscription-based model raise serious concerns about (1) how easily the system could be abused, particularly given who can access it; (2) what data it retains; and (3) whether the system effectively treats every American as a suspect, even without reasonable suspicion or due process. The challenge is how to preserve the technology’s public safety benefits without sacrificing privacy.
Implications
The growing use of AI within these systems has major implications for both public safety and privacy. As Institute for Justice counsel Alasdair Whitney explained, even a few years ago, the sheer volume of images would have made it difficult to search this data at scale. AI can now sift through billions of photos and recognize patterns within them. Chad Marlow, policy counsel for the ACLU, emphasized that this makes it relatively easy to identify a driver’s intimate patterns of life, including visits to doctors’ offices, religious institutions, political meetings, or businesses.
In practice, witnesses warned that a state with restrictions on reproductive health care could use Flock data to track women who leave the state to seek abortion care. An AI search could identify routes to clinics, match them with camera sightings along major highways, and flag patterns of travel. That information could then be used to investigate, or potentially prosecute, the people identified.
Policy Recommendations
Whitney argued for constitutionally grounded legislative reform, emphasizing that the Fourth Amendment should be a floor, not a ceiling, for privacy protections. He urged Congress to require warrants for federal searches of Flock data, limit how long the data is stored, and tie federal funding to those safeguards.
Marlow went further, calling for a ban on ALPR use by law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding. He also urged Congress to address the market for personal data: “That means taking action to prohibit government entities from circumventing the Fourth Amendment by buying personal data from data brokers… [and regulating companies that] seek to generate, collect, and combine our personal data so they can enable their customers to track all of us and make dangerous predictions about who among us presents a threat.”
Both witnesses emphasized the limits of state laws when cameras feed into a shared national database. An Illinois restriction, for example, could be bypassed if ICE accessed the data through a federal process or found an officer willing to search on its behalf. Congress should set national rules for access, retention, and oversight that preserve legitimate public safety uses while protecting people’s private lives.