Flock Safety, the company behind a rapidly expanding network of automatic license plate readers, is facing a bipartisan backlash that has led hundreds of local governments to cancel contracts and prompted a Senate investigation. The scrutiny intensified after the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing dedicated to Flock and other ALPR systems, where musician and investigative researcher Benn Jordan testified.
Jordan, who lives in Atlanta — a city with more Flock cameras per square mile than anywhere else — began investigating the devices about two years ago after noticing them in his neighborhood. What he found was a sprawling surveillance infrastructure built with taxpayer money but shrouded in secrecy. «A lot of my focus now is on the lack of transparency from the government,» Jordan said. «The companies are always going to make money... but in this case, I feel like our government missed it.»
The fallout has been swift. Hundreds of cities, counties, and other local governments have begun canceling their contracts with Flock. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has opened an investigation into the company. And last week, Reuters reported that Flock plans to cut about 18 percent of its workforce — a sign that the political and financial pressure is taking a toll.
Yet Jordan is careful not to frame his work as a crusade against a single company. He says he doesn't hate Flock; rather, he views its posture toward critics as a colossal public relations failure that made it an easy target, while competitors like Axon and Motorola quietly build similar networks. He now communicates directly with Flock, including its CEO Garrett Langley, and reports security vulnerabilities when he finds them — an olive branch aimed at finding real solutions to surveillance overreach.
«We never voted for an insecure network of cameras on every street corner, and we're certainly not being asked if we're comfortable with access to this network being given to police officers with a penchant for abusing it,» Jordan said. He sees his YouTube videos and collaboration with other researchers, civil rights groups, and journalists as an accountability function that forces the conversation into the public square.
The broader issue, Jordan argues, is not one company but the interlocking relationship between private industry, government, and law enforcement that prioritizes secrecy over transparency. The pushback against Flock, he notes, is taking a shape similar to the growing resistance to AI data centers — a grassroots awakening to technologies that were deployed without public consent.
For now, the combination of local contract cancellations, congressional scrutiny, and workforce reductions suggests that the surveillance backlash is having tangible consequences. Whether it leads to meaningful policy changes or simply shifts the market to less visible competitors remains an open question.