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By Hannah Parry
Associate News Editor
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Senators called for tighter rules and privacy safeguards around AI-powered license plate readers Wednesday, as they raised concerns about the potential consequences of errors and unrestricted access to vehicle-location data.
The demands emerged Wednesday during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing focused on Flock Safety, whose network has grown to more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, according to the company.
Flock says its connected network allows law-enforcement agencies to share vehicle evidence across jurisdictions, with searches subject to audit controls. But senators and witnesses said the growing scale of the network raises new questions about privacy and Fourth Amendment protections.
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Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who chairs the subcommittee, said lawmakers need answers about what surveillance companies collect, who can access it, how long information is stored and how searches are conducted. He also criticized the CEOs of Flock and other major surveillance companies for declining invitations to testify.
“Our Bill of Rights is still good no matter what the technology of the day is,” Hawley said.
The concern is not simply that cameras record passing vehicles. Modern systems can make those records searchable across a large network, potentially allowing investigators to reconstruct where a vehicle has traveled over time.
“Flock customers are even able to assemble a pattern of life,” Hawley said.
Ranking Member Dick Durbin, a Democrat, acknowledged that license plate readers had existed for a number of years and could have legitimate law-enforcement uses.
“This has been around for a long time,” Durbin said. “The volume of the undertaking is new.”
Durbin said Congress needs to find a way to protect privacy while preserving law-enforcement capabilities.
“We have got to find a way to balance in America privacy and security,” he said.
That capability has prompted calls for restrictions on historical searches, data retention and access between law-enforcement agencies.
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A Fourth Amendment Issue
Alasdair Whitney, legislative counsel for the Institute for Justice, told the panel that networked license plate readers have transformed what was once a point-in-time identification tool into a system capable of reconstructing movements.
“A technology now lets the government do something it can never do before, and that is, travel back in time and reconstruct your movements,” Whitney said.
The Fourth Amendment protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that people can retain Fourth Amendment protections in location information collected by third parties.
In Carpenter v. United States, the court held in 2018 that the government's acquisition of historical cell-site location information constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. The court emphasized that long-term location records can reveal detailed information about a person's life.
Whether similar protections apply to extensive automated license plate-reader records is now emerging as a legal and legislative question.
Whitney urged Congress to require warrants before law enforcement searches historical location data and to impose limits on how long it can be retained. He also said federal funding could be conditioned on states and localities adopting similar safeguards.
“The warrant requirement is the bare minimum,” Whitney said.
Sheriff Urges Congress To Act
Sheriff Ross Teeple of Pinal County, Arizona, offered an unusual law-enforcement perspective. He said automated license plate readers can help recover stolen vehicles, locate missing people and respond to alerts.
But Teeple said he terminated his department's contract with Flock because he believed newer AI-powered systems posed additional constitutional concerns.
“I will never allow technology to supersede your rights,” Teeple said. He also questioned whether an AI-generated record of a vehicle's movements should be treated differently from a physical tracking device.
“If my deputies need a search warrant to put a physical tracker on a vehicle, where is the line for camera systems that build an identical AI-driven map of a citizen's life?” he asked.
Teeple called for Congress to establish statutory limits rather than waiting for courts to settle the issue.
“We must establish clear statutory boundaries for automatic license plate readers,” he said.
The Consequences of Mistaken Identity
The hearing also featured testimony from Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman who said a Flock camera sighting of her car became part of a fatal-crash investigation that ultimately led to her wrongful arrest.
Isaacs said investigators were looking for a black Dodge Durango, while witnesses had described a maroon vehicle. She said her vehicle was photographed by a Flock camera roughly two to three miles from the crash scene.
She was subsequently arrested on three counts of vehicular homicide and spent 13 days in jail before prosecutors declined to prosecute her, she testified.
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“I could not understand what was happening,” Isaacs told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee Wednesday. “I was terrified I was facing the possibility of spending the rest of my life in prison for a crash I knew I had not been involved in.”
Isaacs said she had wanted to share her story, "because I want you to understand that surveillance technology does not exist in a vacuum,” Isaacs said.
“Information collected by technology can become part of an investigation that affects a real human being.”
Flock Says It Has Added Safeguards
Flock has made several changes to its policies as scrutiny of the technology has increased. The company says its standard retention period is now seven days, down from 30 days, although different periods can apply under customer agreements or local law. Flock says agencies can preserve specific information needed for active investigations through its Evidence Mode.
The company also says every search is logged, access is controlled by local agencies and users are assigned permissions based on their roles. Flock says it has introduced mandatory case codes and offense filters for law-enforcement searches, along with tools designed to identify unusual activity and enable administrators to review or lock accounts.
Flock says customers own and control their data and that the company does not sell it. Its privacy policy says its license-plate-reader systems collect plate information, vehicle characteristics, dates, times and camera locations, but not driver identity, biometric information or facial-recognition data.
The company has argued that these safeguards allow communities to use the technology for public safety while protecting privacy.
But the senators and witnesses at Wednesday's hearing are asking whether company policies and local rules are enough—or whether Congress should establish a federal standard.
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What Are Flock Cameras and What Do They Do?
Flock Safety cameras are automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, designed to photograph vehicles as they pass. The system uses software to identify license plates and vehicle characteristics including make, model, color and distinguishing features. Flock says its cameras also record the date, time and location of each sighting.
Unlike a conventional security camera, the system turns those images into searchable data. Flock says its search tools can filter vehicles by characteristics and partial or missing plate information, allowing investigators to generate leads even when they do not know a full license plate number.
Flock says its network connects agencies across 49 states and that customers control whether their data is shared with other agencies. The company says sharing is not enabled automatically and that searches are logged for review.
The scale of that network is central to Wednesday's Senate hearing. Hawley said the system's ability to connect vehicle sightings across jurisdictions can allow investigators to reconstruct patterns of movement over time.
What States Do Not Have Flock Cameras?
Flock says its connected network currently operates in 49 states, meaning one state does not have a Flock-connected camera network.
The company does not identify the 49-state network on its website in a way that clearly names the one state outside it. During the hearing, however, Durbin asked which state was missing and received the answer Hawaii.
The number of cameras in a state can also vary significantly, and the absence of a connected Flock network does not necessarily mean a state has no automated license plate readers. Other vendors operate ALPR systems, and state and local governments can use different technologies.
Why Are Flock Cameras Controversial?
The controversy largely centers on the amount of information that can be accumulated when individual vehicle sightings are connected into a searchable network.
Privacy advocates argue that a database containing repeated records of where vehicles appear can reveal sensitive information about people's lives, even when those people are not suspected of crimes.
At the hearing, Whitney said modern ALPR systems allow the government to “travel back in time and reconstruct your movements.”
Critics have also raised concerns about who can search the data, how agencies share information across state lines, how long records are retained and what happens when investigators make mistakes.
Flock says its systems are designed for specific public-safety investigations rather than general monitoring. The company says searches require authorized users, are logged and must be tied to a public-safety purpose.
The company has also introduced additional safeguards as scrutiny has increased. Flock says its standard retention period is now generally seven days, although longer periods can apply under local law or customer agreements.
The ACLU, meanwhile, has argued that those changes do not go far enough and has called for much stronger restrictions on ALPR surveillance.
Do Flock Cameras Have Facial Recognition?
Flock says its license plate reader cameras do not use facial recognition. According to the company's current privacy materials, Flock LPR systems collect license plate images, vehicle images and characteristics, along with the date, time and camera location. Flock says they do not collect biometric data, driver information or facial-recognition data through the ALPR system.
That distinction is important to the debate. Flock's technology is designed to identify and search vehicles, rather than identify a person from their face.
However, critics argue that a system does not need facial recognition to create detailed information about people's movements. If a vehicle repeatedly appears at different locations, historical records can potentially provide information about where that vehicle has traveled.
That distinction—between facial identification and vehicle-based location tracking—is one of the central issues in the debate over how these systems should be regulated.
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