Flock Safety’s AI surveillance system can now hunt down your car based on where you drive — no name, no license plate needed.
The company’s OS Investigate tool ranks drivers’ “associates” by tracking how often their vehicles appear together at the same camera, according to WIRED reporting. Website code reviewed by the outlet revealed 45 functions feeding the AI — plate scans, camera metadata, arrest records, case files, and 911 dispatch logs all mined to identify suspects.
“This really crosses a line from a tool that’s used to investigate suspicious people to deciding who is suspicious.”
Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, warned the system flips the script on American policing.
“It increases the chances that you are going to get put under the microscope by law enforcement because some algorithm thinks your driving patterns are ‘suspicious,'” Stanley said.
Stanley predicted the AI industry will shift toward localized models to combat privacy concerns — hospitals, police departments, even homes running their own AI for contained tasks.
“I’ve talked to police officers who are like, ‘yeah, I want to use AI, but I can’t use AI in our internal stuff. We can’t let that leave the premises,'” he said.
Sen. Rand Paul called out Flock CEO Garrett Langley after Langley told Fox News that Americans must accept a “compromise” between safety and privacy.
Flock CEO @glangley wants you to “compromise” away your 4th Amendment rights.
Our Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves at this suggestion.
pic.twitter.com/NMCSLktcBn— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 25, 2026
“When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing. What we have to prioritize as a country is ‘compromise,'” Langley said in the Fox interview. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy.”
Langley later pushed back on Paul’s criticism, insisting Flock believes in the Constitution.
Senator – that was not my comment. We believe in the constitution at Flock.
I hope you can agree that Americans deserve to be safe.
— Garrett Langley (@glangley) August 25, 2026
Alex Marthews, national chair of Restore The Fourth, argued law enforcement lacks training to challenge AI-generated suspect lists — and won’t wait around to verify them carefully.
If police ask the AI to surface “the top 10 real goddamn asshole problems” in their jurisdiction and the AI hallucinates, innocent people get arrested without due process, he warned.
Marthews pointed to Calvary Chapel San Jose, which defied COVID mandates by holding indoor services. The government later used phone-location data to monitor who attended. Just as those worshipers never anticipated surveillance targeting them, the same pattern could repeat with Flock’s AI tools.
“This system can be targeted against anyone. Governments change, ideologies change, state enemies change, and we do not know in setting up a system that 10 years down the line we won’t be the targets of it,” he said.
Flock describes its FlockOS platform as a command center that operates anywhere. Major Patrick Krieg of the Dunwoody, Georgia, Police Department praised it on the company’s website.
“We watched the vehicles enter through LPR, tracked them across the city, and our teams were in place before the suspects even got out of their cars,” Krieg said. “It was the first time we said: this platform is powerful.”
James Czerniawski, head of emerging technology policy at Consumer Choice Center, said the problem isn’t AI itself — it’s how the government wields it.
“AI is simply a tool. It’s going to get utilized in many ways that are great, and it’ll get utilized in many ways that are bad. But we don’t regulate the tool itself, we regulate based on the outcome,” Czerniawski said. “In this case, the outcome is that you have people’s Fourth Amendment rights getting violated by the government, and there’s no good path to fixing that right now.”
Czerniawski pointed to one safeguard: warrants.
“‘Warrants’ is your best friend for both law enforcement and for people’s due process consideration,” he said, arguing a warrant forces cops to justify AI-assisted searches.
Mayor Glenn Jacobs of Knox County, Tennessee, called for federal and state legislation in an August interview.
“I think that as this issue becomes more prevalent around the country, Congress will take it up,” Jacobs said.
Republican Texas Rep. Keith Self is trying to write warrant requirements into federal law.
“The PRIVACY Act prohibits federal agencies from using output from applications such as Flock Safety’s OS Investigate without first obtaining a warrant,” Self said.
Self’s proposed legislation would limit retention of data captured by these cameras to 30 days with a warrant, provided the information is not evidence for prosecution or a court grants an extension.
“AI has supercharged the surveillance state, trampling our God-given right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects,” Self said. “These cameras are no longer just license-plate readers looking for vehicles of interest; OS Investigate shows they are being used to aggregate an expanding amount of personal data, raising constitutional questions and putting individual privacy at risk.”
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley launched a Senate subcommittee investigation into Flock cameras Wednesday, according to his letter to Langley.
The Institute for Justice identified more than 100 cases of ALPR abuse, according to a database the group published Aug. 12. Among these cases: a Georgia police chief who conducted 600 searches to track his ex-girlfriend and her daughter, the Washington Post reported.
