Senators unload on Flock surveillance cameras after tech CEOs

Of all the tech dystopias we've watched creep into American life, the Flock license plate readers might be the sneakiest one yet. There's no dramatic doorbell video or vibrating phone in your pocket — just a camera on a pole that logs your truck's plate every time you drive to the hardware store. And now, Republicans and Democrats are finding rare common ground in saying they're sick of it. That should tell you something.

Sen. Josh Hawley deserves real credit for dragging the Flock CEOs in front of his subcommittee. He landed a good punch when he zeroed in on ingredient in this surveillance network moment: the product's growth depends on building a searchable history of ordinary people's daily movements. That's not intelligence gathering; that's the government and a private company playing tag with your commute. If those tools were cracking cold cases and nothing else, maybe the trade is defensible. But these databases retain weeks of data on every vehicle that passes, whether you're a suspect or just someone grabbing groceries.

We've heard the "if you have nothing to hide" argument for years. It's tired, and it misses what bothers people in red states and blue states alike. The concern is about who holds the power later, not who uses the tool today. A company hawking plate readers to a friendly sheriff today doesn't bind the next sheriff. And a technology that works for law enforcement doesn't automatically need to operate as a regional surveillance dragnet. That's the tension the left-wing privacy groups won't level with you about, and the tech CEOs can't hand-wave away.

The proper conservative instinct here is to slow down and demand guardrails. Flock can make a public safety argument; they point to real recoveries and arrests, and that matters. But the burden should be on proving limited, targeted use cases — not on communities to show why they're uncomfortable with a camera on every corner. If the company needs a nationwide grid of plates to function, that's a business model problem, not a liberty problem. We should treat it as such while Hawley keeps the pressure on.