By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-24 03:22:03 | Updated at 2026-09-24 04:32:12
1 hour ago
WASHINGTON—Executives from Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, and Motorola declined to voluntarily testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday as the upper chamber moves to investigate their camera technology over concerns about mass surveillance and constitutional violations.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, described the behavior as “so typical.”
“For the Flock CEOs, obviously they’re nervous about being on camera,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), ranking member of the Judiciary panel. “I sure wish they would have joined us today.”
Public interest in the event was high, with the hearing being held before a full audience as journalists crowded outside of the Senate panel’s chambers.
Hawley had invited multiple CEOs to speak before the panel voluntarily, including Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley, Axon Enterprise CEO Rick Smith, Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown, and Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan. None appeared before the panel Wednesday.
The issue is largely bipartisan, with several Democrats joining Hawley in expressing concerns.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Dela.) discussed the hearing with The Epoch Times, saying that the CEOs “should have been there.
“It is a legitimate concern—that I’ve heard from many of my constituents—that in the United States we balance security and privacy, and so we need to find a way to put reasonable guardrails around the potential for over-surveillance,” Coons said.
Subcommittee Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) had harsh words for the CEOs who skipped the hearing.
“Their refusal to come forward and answer questions is a sign that they have something to hide, and they are refusing to be accountable,” Blumenthal said.
The committee instead heard from civil liberties experts and Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman who spent 13 days in a jail cell after being wrongfully accused of a crime due to a Flock camera report.
Isaacs’ vehicle was incorrectly flagged by the Flock system as having been involved in a fatal car accident.
“That piece of information became part of an investigation that ultimately led to my arrest on three counts of vehicular homicide and 13 days in jail for a crash I had nothing to do with,” Isaacs told the committee.
The charges have since then been dropped.
While the license plate-reading cameras developed by Flock have gotten the most airtime in recent weeks—prompting nationwide, viral moments of activist vigilantes destroying or disabling the cameras amid public opposition to the technology—competitors at Axon Enterprise and Motorola offer similar options for police and local governments.
The Los Angeles Police Department is currently planning to roll out a 10-year contract with Axon, a $235 million arrangement that would equip America’s second-largest metropolis with more than 1,600 license plate readers.
For municipalities, companies like Flock, Axon, and Motorola offer a potential melding of technology and traditional surveillance tech to reduce crime and make roadways safer. But the cameras they operate have boosted a growing artificial intelligence-powered surveillance network accessible by thousands of U.S. law enforcement agencies, which critics say runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
Hawley warned during the hearing that, if not addressed, this would have troubling implications for Americans.
“This is still the United States of America, and it shouldn’t be that when you walk out your door in the morning, you just have to agree in assent and accept the fact that you’re going to be on camera morning, noon, and night,” Hawley said.
“You’ll be tracked by anybody and everybody in the world. You’ll have no privacy whatsoever. You’ll be tracked when you take your kids to school and tracked when you go to church and tracked when you go to the grocery store.”
Some high-profile abuses of the data collected from these cameras have made headlines.
In one recent case, Indianapolis authorities announced that five police officers had been charged with misusing data from Flock.
“The allegation is that the officers were searching or running the license plate information and tracking individuals through the Flock system. Very often times they had direct relationships with these individuals,” Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears explained after these charges were announced.
Meanwhile, lawmakers have demonstrated increased interest in the issue in recent weeks.
“Law-abiding citizens should never be treated as criminals,” Hawley wrote in a post on X ahead of the hearing. “Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work or drop their kids off at school.”
Hawley emphasized during the hearing that, in an earlier letter, Langley had admitted that Flock’s database could be used to search for humans in images. Hawley described the admission as “very concerning.”
In another segment of the hearing, cybersecurity engineer Benn Jordan testified that, after he learned that Flock didn’t require clients to use multi-factor authentication, he investigated.
He found that Flock law enforcement accounts—which have access to the data from the cameras—were being sold online by a dark web vendor.
“I want to use my time here to ask our legislators to take this rare bipartisan agreement to view Flock as a canary in a coal mine and understand that this doesn’t go away by removing one company from the equation,” said Jordan.
He said that Axon and Motorola have similar aims.
