Hawley takes the response to Flock Safety to the Senate: the 'Stop Flock Abuse Act' seeks limits on AI cameras that track license plates

By Zendoric · October 5, 2026.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri announced that he will introduce the Stop Flock Abuse Act, a bill to regulate AI-powered surveillance cameras that read vehicle license plates, KQ2 reported. The initiative follows an investigation by Hawley and a Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing focused on Flock Safety, the company that operates much of this camera network in the United States, and on the risks these systems pose to privacy and national security.

Flock Safety declined to testify at the hearing but responded to Hawley in writing, asking Congress to create a federal framework to regulate the technology; the company also admitted it had added some safeguards following public scrutiny, according to the article. It is an interesting position: a surveillance company asking to be regulated, most likely because a uniform federal framework is easier to manage than a patchwork of state laws or the threat of local bans.

The bill's specific content, as Hawley describes it, is fairly detailed. It would ban selling or sharing vehicle location data with non-governmental third parties, require written authorization and audit logs for every search, mandate that data be encrypted and stored only on U.S. soil, force the deletion of drivers' data after ten days, prohibit the use of hardware and software from "foreign adversaries" (a standard Washington reference to China) and bar facial recognition within these camera networks. At the hearing, Hawley summed up his underlying objection: "It sounds like you are treating every citizen of the United States as if we are criminals, without any due process, without reasonable suspicion, without articulable suspicion of any kind."

It is worth placing this in a broader context. Automatic license plate reader cameras have been deployed for years in hundreds of U.S. cities, sold as a tool against vehicle theft and local crime, but generating databases that record the movements of practically any driver, whether or not they commit a crime. AI did not invent this problem — license plate cameras have existed for decades — but it does multiply it: automatic recognition and correlation at scale turn a scattered record into a map of movements searchable in seconds, and that is what has set off alarms among both conservative lawmakers wary of state power and civil liberties organizations.

This is not an isolated item on Washington's already long list of regulatory gestures on AI: it is part of a pattern in which Congress, unable to pass comprehensive federal AI legislation, advances along specific vertical strips — biometric surveillance, facial recognition, location data — where the political framing of the problem is easier to package than horizontal regulation. Our reading is that this kind of sectoral law, limited though it is, is precisely the terrain where AI governance is most likely to advance in the short term in the United States: not a sweeping framework law, but specific patches on concrete, verifiable uses, such as data retention or facial recognition, where it is easier to draw auditable red lines.

That it is Flock Safety itself calling for federal regulation is also a signal worth noting: AI surveillance companies are beginning to prefer clear rules — even restrictive ones — to the uncertainty of being dragged case by case through hearings, state lawsuits or municipal bans. It is a pattern we have already seen in other areas of AI: when public and political pressure builds, industry tends to prefer a predictable framework, even one that imposes limits, to operating under constant scrutiny with no written rules. If the Stop Flock Abuse Act moves forward, it will be a case study in how to tame a specific and already widespread use of AI without having to legislate on the technology in the abstract — something we will probably see repeated in other verticals of surveillance and automated identification in the coming years.