WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) chaired a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime hearing on Flock cameras and the threat they pose to national security and the privacy of everyday Americans. This hearing follows Senator Hawley’s investigation into major automated license plate reader (ALPR) companies and the nationwide AI surveillance network they have created. Hawley invited the CEOs of Flock, Axon, Motorola, and Verkada to testify in the hearing and provide answers to the American people. Each declined.
Flock did provide some answers in a written letter to Senator Hawley, agreeing that Congress needs to create a federal framework to regulate these cameras. Flock also admitted to instituting some guardrails on their products after coming under public scrutiny.
In the hearing, Chairman Hawley began, “There are many players in this industry, but there’s one name that really stands out above the rest, and that is Flock. If you haven’t heard of Flock, all I have to say is Flock’s probably heard of you. In fact, the truth is, you have probably been scanned and surveilled and tagged and logged multiple times this week alone, and that’s because Flock, by its own admission and its own statistics, maintains a network of 120,000 individual cameras in 49 states all across this country. It estimates that those cameras scan and then generate some 20 billion images. That’s what it means: 20 billion images of individuals in their cars or on their motorcycles or other vehicles every single month.”
He continued, “Flock is a privately held company. Based on what we know, it’s backed by a venture capital firm. It’s worth about $10 billion, and it has amassed in a very short time frame a surveillance network unlike any we’ve ever seen in this country. And really, what makes it unique, based on what we can tell from the reporting and the reporting on what these networks can do… What seems to make these networks unique is not just the sheer number of cameras, it’s the fact that they’re all linked together and powered and searchable by AI. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country before.”
“This is still the United States of America, and it shouldn’t be that when you walk out your door in the morning, you just have to agree and assent and accept the fact that you’re going to be on camera morning, noon, and night,” Hawley asserted.
Chairman Hawley asked Alasdair Whitney, Legislative Counsel for the Institute of Justice, “What’s the difference between this technology that we’re talking about today, this AI-powered technology, and a traditional license plate reader technology? … My understanding is what we’re talking about here today, with this linked network of private cameras all uploading to the cloud, searchable and powered by AI, is something very different.”
“You said it. The fact that this technology is now interlinked with cameras across the country in this network that allows a government official or an officer in one side of the country, say California, reconstruct the past movements over weeks or even months of somebody driving in Maryland or Virginia is something that is both qualitatively and quantitatively different than … a technology that we’ve ever seen before, and that is why we are concerned about this,” Mr. Whitney responded. “A couple of years ago, you couldn’t possibly sift through 20 billion images with just a few officers, or even 100 or 1,000 officers. But AI now makes it much easier to do that with, again, a click of button or a couple of keystrokes.”
Hawley questioned, “If you have hundreds of billions of images now that are being collected and collated and available on the cloud, and you’ve got AI able to search them, you really can reconstruct, or the AI can reconstruct, the very granular movements of individuals over long periods of time. Isn’t that right? I mean, they could track me driving from Missouri out here, taking my kids to school, going to church, doing everything that it is that I do, and you could do it for days and weeks at a time using this this vast network. I mean, am I exaggerating? Is that is that right?”
Whitney answered, “You are not exaggerating. That is exactly right. I mean, again, we’ve heard from the proponents of this technology … that they don’t use it to track people. I think that that’s just simply not true. The value of this technology is tracking the people and is determining where they are and what they’ve been doing.”
Chairman Hawley then asked Benn Jordan, a cybersecurity engineer, “The the CEO of Flock has said … that Flock has never been hacked … Now, based on what you know, is that accurate?”
Mr. Jordan responded, “I would say that’s inaccurate. The company has, at various times, changed the definitions of the word “hacked, tracked data, breached. But in the general definition of accessing unauthorized data, yes, I would say that they’ve been hacked.”
“How how vulnerable, in your professional opinion, are flux systems that contain all of these images, billions with a B, billions of images?” Hawley questioned.
“The Flock devices that we tested were running on an old version of Android that has been out of service for years, and newer devices of Flocks run on a modified kernel of Android, which is far from government-grade security,” Jordan answered.
“How easy would it be for a bad actor to download, modify, and/or upload false ALPR data into this system?” asked Senator Hawley.
Jordan said, “I did find an administrative interface, as I mentioned earlier, online of live cameras, which is easy as clicking a link and then hitting a delete button to get rid of footage or something like that … In some cases, I was able to go back a week and read what was on someone’s phone screen as they were texting somebody walking under the camera.”
Hawley then turned to Lindsey Isaacs, a women wrongfully accused because of a Flock camera.
He said to her, “I just want to come back to you and your extraordinary story, because I think it illustrates the the dangers here of this technology if it’s not properly cabined and accounted for. I think we have a picture of you with your your beautiful new Durango, here it is. I think right. This is this is you, and that Durango does look like it’s in pristine shape.”
“That was the day I got it,” Ms. Isaacs responded.
“Now, as I understand it, the Durango that was involved in the vehicular crash that indeed caused three other people to die was a vehicular homicide. That Durango was maroon, red. Is that correct? This this Durango doesn’t look red to me. What color is this?” he asked.
“This is a black Durango,” she affirmed.
Senator Hawley queried, “You are returned as a false positive out of an AI search in the flock system. We know it wasn’t a traditional license plate search because they weren’t your your car was never there, correct? There are no images of your car at the scene. Is that correct? And there was no assertion by anybody ever that you were there. Is that correct? It was just that the flock cameras, based on some description, some general description entered into them. The AI pulled out your car and said, ‘This this is a match,’ correct? And that led to 13 days in jail for you, including solitary confinement, and you very, very nearly lost your entire livelihood. Isn’t that right?”
Isaacs responded in the affirmative to all his questions.
Chairman Hawley concluded, “The Constitution is as valuable and as valid today as it was when it was first written. If anything, the Bill of Rights protections are probably more important today than they were all those years ago because the threats to our liberties are actually much greater, and the technology that both bad foreign actors, private actors, corporations, and government have at their disposal are much more powerful. We need the Bill of Rights more than we ever did, and we’ve got to find a way to enforce it.”
Watch the full hearing here.
Read more about Senator Hawley’s investigation here.