Critical Questions for Sen. Hawley to Ask in His Much-Needed Investigation into Flock’s National Surveillance Network

PICTURED: U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, has launched a welcome investigation into Flock Safety’s vast network of automated license plate readers.
 
In a letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, Sen. Hawley writes:
 
“In a few short years, Flock has assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network. Your company boasts more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong.”
 
Sen. Hawley adds that, instead of supporting discrete investigations, Flock’s camera data can be harnessed by artificial intelligence “to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search.”
 
PPSA commends Sen. Hawley for recognizing what a departure from American privacy norms Flock’s technology represents. Flock cameras record the movements of millions of innocent drivers. How that information is collected, stored, searched, shared, and ultimately used should not be governed solely by corporate policies and thousands of customized contracts with police departments scattered across the country.
 
As Sen. Hawley writes:
 
“Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church. The Supreme Court has recognized that a comprehensive, retrospective record of a person’s movements is different in kind from ordinary observation in public. Congress never authorized the network your industry has built.”
 
The investigation should closely examine how government access to Americans’ movements works – and the potential for that access to evolve into practices we associate with China’s surveillance state. Under Flock’s contracts, state and local police departments generally own the data their cameras generate. How do they use that data?
 
Here are questions for Sen. Hawley and his colleagues to ask:

• Are federal agencies buying, requesting, or otherwise acquiring that information from state and local law enforcement agencies?
  
  
• Are state-federal “fusion centers” providing another route by which locally collected data enters federal databases or investigations?
  
  
• Beyond Flock Safety’s recommendations, what are the longest periods for which state and local customers are retaining Flock data?
  ​
  
• Has any customer ever used Flock data to track political, journalistic, or religious activities protected by the First Amendment?

 
As Sen. Hawley concludes, “the American people want to know who has access to their personal data and how.”
 
Americans deserve to know whether such arrangements allow federal agencies to evade constitutional and statutory safeguards. This investigation should provide those answers – and set the foundation for national standards governing Flock data. At least two safeguards should emerge from this investigation.
 
An explicit prohibition is needed to prevent Flock data from being used to track Americans’ First Amendment activities.
 
Standards should also include strict limits on collection, retention, sharing, and secondary uses, as well as a clear requirement that police obtain a probable-cause warrant before using Flock’s network to track an American’s movements.

DONATE & HELP US DEFEND YOUR FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS