Missouri U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley on Wednesday joined with the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocates to try to curb how law enforcement uses Flock automated license plate reader data.
“AI-powered cameras produced by Flock and its competitors are tracking and creating digital footprints of everyday Americans,” the Republican said in a statement.
Hawley called that “a nightmare for individual liberties unless Congress enacts meaningful rules and accountability.”
Hawley’s legislation would ban local governments from selling data from automated license plate readers.
It also would require a paper trail for police to search the data and mandate that driver data be deleted after 10 days unless it’s linked to an active investigation.
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed an executive order in mid-September requiring similar guardrails on driver data. That order required state and local agencies to delete data after 30 days.
Flock has created interesting political bedfellows.
Conservatives like Kehoe and Hawley find themselves on the same side as progressive organizations like the Institute for Justice and the ACLU.
“I think this is a textbook example of what is supposed to happen,” Kansas ACLU Executive Director Micah Kubic told KCUR. “When communities come out to say, ‘This is not what we want our city, our town, our state, our country to look like,’ folks in power respond to that.”
A federal jury in Texas on Monday found the Bexar County Sheriff's Office used automated license plate readers to operate a scheme to flag drivers for unconstitutional traffic stops and searches. The lawsuit was filed by the Institute for Justice.
“Motorists across this country are being watched by local, state and federal agents, flagged by AI-powered cameras, and then pulled over for a bogus offense,” Institute for Justice lawyer Christie Hebert said in a statement.
Flock has defended its camera system as a tool of public safety.
Earlier this month, a Flock spokeswoman emphasized the company’s claims about the power of its technology, telling the Associated Press it helped “solve approximately one million crimes and helped reunite roughly 10,000 missing people with their families.”
In a letter to Hawley, Flock suggested it welcomed federal oversight.
“Flock does not believe that Americans’ privacy should depend on one vendor’s good judgment, its current leadership, or its commercial incentives,” the letter said. "That is why Flock has consistently supported clear, sensible legislation governing how this technology is used."
Hawley’s legislation would also require police to preserve automated license plate reader audit logs.
“Supervisors must audit those logs on a regular basis, monitoring for red flags, such as repeat searches of the same person or suspicious justification,” his statement said.
Using those audit logs, KCUR discovered that local police department data was searched by out-of-state law enforcement hundreds of thousands of times.
The Institute for Justice tracks abuse of automated license plate readers on an interactive map and has documented 258 cases since 2018.
Five of those cases are in Kansas, and three are in Missouri.
One of the Kansas cases involved Canyen Ashworth. A KCUR investigation discovered that Lenexa police tracked Ashworth’s movements with automated license plate readers after he wrote a critical newspaper column about the department.
This week, five Indianapolis police officers were charged with abusing Flock data, using it to track ex-partners and stalk strangers.
