Twenty Billion Scans a Month, and No One Asked You First

On August 26, Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, demanding records by September 8. The subject: a private license-plate camera network that now scans roughly 20 billion vehicles a month across 49 states, feeding location data to more than 7,000 law enforcement agencies, immigration authorities among them. The letter arrives three years after the network reached that scale, four months after a Florida woman spent 13 days in jail for a crash she didn't cause, and roughly a year after the first cities began tearing the cameras down. The investigation is not early. It is, at best, on time for the second act.

What Flock Actually Built

Flock Safety sells itself as a public-safety tool: solar-powered cameras that read license plates, log time and location, and flag vehicles tied to Amber Alerts or stolen-car reports. More than 120,000 of them are now mounted on street poles in neighborhoods that mostly never voted on installing them, because a city council or a homeowners' association signed the contract, not a ballot measure. Each camera feeds a searchable national index. An officer in Ohio can query where a car was seen in Oregon last Tuesday. Flock calls this the largest camera network in the country. It is not describing a metaphor.

The pitch has worked. Flock's cameras are marketed as a substitute for the officers cities can't afford to hire, which is part of why more than 5,000 police departments and HOAs signed on without much public debate. The company is privately valued in the billions. It is also, functionally, a surveillance utility with no equivalent to a public utility commission looking over its shoulder.

Wrong Ninety Percent of the Time Doesn't Sound Like Much, Until It's You

Hawley's letter cites a California police department where an internal audit found 71 percent of Flock alerts were incorrect. The Los Angeles Police Department ended its Flock contract entirely after an audit turned up 161 vehicles stopped on the strength of erroneous flags. These are not abstractions. In April, Florida Highway Patrol arrested 23-year-old Lindsey Isaacs on eight felony counts, including vehicular homicide, after a Flock hit placed her Dodge Durango near a fatal October 2025 crash on I-4. She spent 13 days in jail. The original 911 call had described a maroon Durango with a partial plate that didn't match hers; the car struck in the crash left maroon paint; her airbag hadn't deployed. Investigators had this evidence from day one and pursued Isaacs anyway. Charges were dropped in May, the same day patrol arrested a woman with a maroon Durango showing matching crash damage. Isaacs is now suing.

The failure mode here isn't exotic. It's the ordinary failure mode of any system that lets a database hit substitute for an investigation: once the algorithm names a suspect, the humans downstream stop looking for reasons it might be wrong.

The Loophole With ICE's Name On It

Flock has said for years that individual agencies control who sees their data, and that departments can decline to share with federal immigration authorities. In practice, that consent has been porous. Any agency in the network can run a search on behalf of another, meaning a local department that hasn't authorized ICE access can still be asked to query the system by a department that has. Between June 2024 and May 2025, state and local police searched Flock's plate-reader data more than 4,000 times for immigration-related reasons, according to public-records reporting, and ICE has informally reached camera networks in more than 5,000 communities this way, including in states like Illinois where using the data for immigration enforcement is against the law. Flock added a one-click toggle in January to let agencies turn off federal sharing. A toggle is not an audit. More than 55 localities have canceled their Flock contracts in the past year, which is either the market correcting itself or the closest thing to accountability this system has produced so far.

What a September 8 Deadline Actually Buys

Hawley chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which gives the letter more weight than a press release but less than a subpoena. Flock can comply, slow-walk, or negotiate the scope of what "all relevant documents" means, and any of those paths is available to a company that has spent three years building goodwill with the exact law enforcement agencies now supposed to be reviewing it. The letter asks who has access to Americans' movement data and how the company verifies its own accuracy claims. Those are the right questions. Whether Congress does anything with the answers is a separate question, and history suggests a cautious one.

Twenty billion scans is not a number most people can picture, so picture the smaller one instead: thirteen days in a cell for a car that was never there. The system that produced that error is still running, in your neighborhood, tonight, and the paperwork asking it to explain itself is due in two weeks.

Sources

• Sen. Josh Hawley launches probe into Flock Safety over national surveillance concerns — The Hill
• Republican Senator Launches Investigation Into Flock as Backlash Sweeps Country — Gizmodo
• Josh Hawley Opens Senate Probe Into Flock Camera Network, Demands Records by September 8 — WLT Report
• Florida woman spent months in legal hell after cops used Flock to ID the wrong car — Reason
• Florida woman spent 13 days in jail after Flock camera alert pointed police to wrong vehicle — Yahoo News
• Flock Can Share Driver-Surveillance Data Even When Police Departments Opt Out — ACLU
• Reported: ICE using automated license-plate-reader cameras via state/local police — Immigration Policy Tracking Project
• Flock Safety — Wikipedia