Senator Josh Hawley is expanding his investigation of AI-assisted surveillance-camera and vehicle-tracking systems beyond Flock Safety.
Senator Josh Hawley last week sent letters to the CEOs of three more companies – Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada – informing them that they are now part of the probe, and requesting they provide a raft of information and documents concerning their products and policies.
Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, first targeted Flock Safety on August 26. The investigation concerns the collection, retention, and dissemination of data generated by AI-powered cameras.
In his new letters, Hawley wrote, “Flock does not stand alone in this industry; you and others are building large camera networks, assisted by artificial intelligence, that intrude on the privacy of all Americans.”
All three companies are asked to respond by September 16 and provide details about the data their products collect, how long it is retained by default and how those retention periods can be changed by customers. Hawley also wants to know if customers can search data statewide or nationwide, what geographic scope is covered by default, and what conditions must be met before a search can be launched.
The senator is interested in learning if the systems have the capability to track biometric data and is requesting documents that would describe the process. The letters also ask if the cameras can be linked to data brokers or public record aggregators, and if any data that has been breached has been used.
The companies are asked to disclose if and how they share data with other police departments, federal agencies, foreign governments, private entities, and data brokers. The number of confirmed and suspected cases of misuse of their systems since 2021 is another piece of information Hawley wants, along with the way those cases were discovered.
In the letters, Hawley cites media reports about Flock Safety, including one about a St. Charles County, Missouri audit that found a civilian police employee had been using the system to run searches for personal reasons. In another case in Milwaukee, a police officer is accused of searching for his girlfriend’s and her former boyfriend’s license plates repeatedly.
The senator further wrote that these incidents show “a woeful lack of safeguards in these systems,” and that the Milwaukee case was not even discovered by Flock’s own audit system.
He also noted that the US Supreme Court has ruled that this kind of comprehensive record of a person’s movements is different from ordinary public observation.
Hawley is also interested in the accuracy of the systems, the rate of false positives, and how secure the data is. Another question is how much of the companies’ revenue comes from government contracts and lobbying.
