120,000 cameras, 20 billion scans a month — and Congress is only now asking who owns your drive to work

Flock Safety now runs something like 120,000 automated license plate readers across American towns, feeding roughly 20 billion plate scans a month into a searchable database. Nobody voted for that. It was assembled one city council contract at a time, usually with no warrant requirement, no retention limit anybody reads, and no notice to the drivers being logged.

Sen. Josh Hawley has opened a Senate investigation and demanded documents from Flock's CEO by September 8, 2026 — who queries the system, what federal agencies get access, and how long the pattern-of-life data on ordinary drivers is kept. Hawley's letter: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-08-26-Hawley-Letter-to-Flock-CEO.pdf

On the House side, Rep. Tim Burchett's Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act would bar federal agencies from buying or tapping this data outright — the obvious point being that a warrant requirement is meaningless if the government can just subscribe to a private company's dragnet instead. The White House says its stance is "under review."

The Fourth Amendment question isn't whether one photo of one plate is a search. It's whether a permanent, retroactively searchable record of where every car in a county has been for months is something the state should be able to buy without asking a judge. Congress is finally asking. Late, but asking.