Flock’s CEO was a no-show Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, where a Florida woman described being sent to jail after police, using a Flock license plate camera, erroneously accused her of being the driver in a fatal car crash.
Lindsey Isaacs said she was sent to solitary confinement for her first three days, forced to wear suicide-watch garments, and driven to the depths of despair — all while knowing she was innocent of the accusations.
She said her black Dodge Durango was captured by a Flock camera several miles from the crash site, and authorities focused on her as the suspect even though her vehicle lacked any collision damage and 911 callers had reported a maroon Durango with a different license plate.
Despite those inconsistencies, she was arrested, denied bond and sent to solitary confinement because of the severity of the charges.
“The cell door was shut, and it was not opened for approximately 86 hours,” she told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism, tearing up as she recounted the start of a 13-day ordeal in jail.
She was eventually released on bond, and prosecutors dropped the case, instead charging someone else with the accident that claimed three lives.
Senators invited Ms. Isaacs to lead off the hearing, which explored the expansion of license plate readers — with Flock as the most prominent player — and the growing public backlash.
Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who chaired the hearing, said he had invited leaders from Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada to appear, but they declined, earning derision from senators.
“They’re nervous about being on camera,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat.
License plate reader cameras are mounted on the side of a roadway and photograph passing vehicles. They then use artificial intelligence to catalog details of each vehicle, allowing the vehicles to be tracked across space and time.
Backers, including President Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel, say the cameras help catch criminals. Mr. Patel told senators this month that Flock cameras have helped rescue kidnapped children and even helped track down the suspect in the shooting at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington.
License plate readers have been around for decades. They are used to mail bills from toll roads and to track activity along the southern border.
Yet Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said they have crossed into a new realm in recent years.
He said venture capitalists realized there was money to be made, so they invested in expanding the camera networks. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has enabled companies to build massive collections of data that can be sorted and searched, making it actionable.
“Welcome to the surveillance-industrial complex,” he said.
He said those seeking to exercise sometimes controversial rights, such as seeking an abortion or buying a gun, should worry that they could be tracked as they do that.
Mr. Hawley said the cameras go beyond license plates, cataloging other details of a vehicle, including bumper stickers or dents.
Flock, in a letter to him ahead of the hearing, said the system can even search for human images in its database.
Mr. Hawley also said Flock acknowledged that it relies on clients to police their own access and use.
For Ms. Isaacs, that system turned into a nightmare in Florida.
Ms. Isaacs said the item that got her through her time in jail was a Bible, left with her by a fellow detainee who was taken off to prison.
She slept with it as her pillow and even took it into the shower, fearing it might otherwise disappear.
“A flawed camera captured my vehicle a few miles from the scene of a terrible crash. 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,” she said.
Flock did not respond to a Washington Times inquiry for this report.
The firm’s truthfulness was called into question during the hearing.
When Mr. Hawley said Flock acknowledged that people could be identified in the images, Sheriff Ross Teeple, from Pinal County in Arizona, said he had asked about that and Flock had told him it was impossible to identify people.
He said that struck him as disingenuous, since he had photos from his county’s program and the people were identifiable. He has ditched his Flock cameras.
Mr. Hawley said Flock told another sheriff in Virginia that it had never been hacked.
Benn Jordan, a cybersecurity engineer, said that was true only by parsing the word “hacked.”
“But in the general definition of accessing unauthorized data, yes, I would say they’ve been hacked,” he said.
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