US Senator Josh Hawley is taking on Flock Safety and other surveillance companies over how and where their cameras, and their data, are used. In a bipartisan hearing Wednesday, Hawley said Flock subscriptions allow unrestricted nationwide access to personal information from hundreds of thousands of cameras.
“A customer in a Flock network, for example, just needs to buy a single camera and a subscription that I’m told costs about $3,000 annually. And in return for that, they get access to a nationwide database of 10s of thousands of cameras, about 120,000 in Flock’s case, and billions of images,” he said as he opened the hearing as chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism.
Another problem, Hawley says, is how the images are being used to make arrests.
“It sounds as if, based on the reports we’ve heard, it’s treating every citizen in America. I mean, by now, surely almost all of us have been scanned and logged as if we are criminals, yet without any due process, without any reasonable suspicion, without any articulable suspicion whatsoever,” he said.
Lindsay Isaacs of Palm Coast, Florida, testified about being wrongly linked to a deadly car crash through surveillance technology. She spent 13 days in jail, accused of involuntary manslaughter. A closer look at the footage found her car was not a match.
Hawley says he wants answers from the surveillance companies. He and the committee’s Ranking Democrat Dick Durbin asked Flock executives to attend the hearing. Senator Durbin, like Hawley, was frustrated.
“Senator Hawley, good hearing,” Durbin said. “For the Flock CEOs, obviously they’re nervous about being on camera, but I sure wish they would have joined us today. It would have been interesting to hear their explanation of the statistics that have been given us by Senator Hawley. 120,000 Flock cameras in 49 states.”
At least seven local governments in Missouri have stopped using the Flock system in part because of citizen privacy question or cases of individual law enforcement misuse. In some counties, like Boone County, Flock use has helped some difficult murder cases. Gov. Mike Kehoe has imposed safeguards on state agencies and state-funded law enforcement until the Missouri Legislature can step in
