AINEWS
ALPRs are cameras that read every passing license plate. The Sept. 23 hearing will test what cross jurisdiction police searches can do.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced on Sept. 18, 2026 that he had invited the CEOs of Flock Safety, Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Sept. 23, 2026. The hearing is titled "Always Watching: Flock's Nationwide AI Surveillance Network," and the ranking member is Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a pairing that pulls the moment out of partisan theater and into a procedural shift (Hawley press release; Senate Judiciary hearing page).
The four companies make the police-deployed devices most readers have not placed: automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that log every passing plate, time, and location; AI-powered networked camera systems; and the back-end search tools that let one department query another department's camera network. The Sept. 23 hearing is the first time the Senate has called the four largest vendors into one room to defend the cross-jurisdiction search and retention policies that local procurement fights have only nibbled at.
The Washington Post reported, per Gizmodo, that at least 50 law enforcement officials have been accused of misusing the Flock system to stalk wives or ex-girlfriends (Gizmodo). The Guardian's Aug. 20, 2026 reporting documents cities that turned Flock surveillance cameras off and were still being watched, because the network's search layer reaches across department lines (the Guardian). Local misuse plus a national search product is the mechanism Hawley's title names and Durbin's presence ratifies: a federal question, not a local one.
Verkada is already a no-show. CEO Filip Kaliszan declined the invitation, and a Verkada spokesperson told Gizmodo the company is "providing information" to the Subcommittee and emphasized that "none of our customers can search a national Verkada network – because none exists" (Gizmodo). That framing puts a defensible posture on the record before testimony: Verkada is drawing a line between its own products and the cross-jurisdiction search that the hearing title implies. Whether senators accept that line is a Sept. 23 question.
Flock, Axon, and Motorola have not commented on the record as of Sept. 18. The Axon posture is the most directly read in the public record: Axon president Josh Isner said on an earnings call earlier in 2026, per the Guardian, that customers switching to Axon from other vendors cited its privacy and ethics track record as a deciding factor (the Guardian). Motorola's product line is already in public view for a different reason: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented Motorola ALPRs concealed in orange traffic cones near the U.S.-Mexico border in Southern California, a placement that does not survive a cross-jurisdiction-search hearing gracefully.
What the hearing can and cannot do is concrete. Senators can put on the record, under oath, which CEOs show up and which decline; they can extract a public definition of cross-jurisdiction search (one department querying another department's camera network) and ask each vendor where its product line draws the line; they can press on retention: how long plate reads are kept, who can access them, and what audit trail exists. They cannot compel state and local procurement policies, where most ALPR rollouts live, and they cannot unilaterally force a vendor to change a product. The most credible federal floor the hearing can build: a public expectation that no vendor gets to sell a national search tool while marketing it as a local one.
Cities that have already turned Flock cameras off, or that have fought procurement in public, will be reading the Sept. 23 transcript for language they can lift into council hearings. The vendors will be reading it for the same reason. The reader who cares about police accountability in their own city can watch the hearing on Wednesday and the local procurement votes in the months after.