Now, municipal governments around the country are ending their association with Flock Safety, a company that has cloaked the streets of the nation in surveillance cameras that automatically read license plates using AI.

Ars Technica, reporting on the proliferation of Flock cameras and their alleged misuse, released a recent report citing data that shows how in August alone, 93 US jurisdictions ended their contracts with Flock.

The data came via Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, and shows that since 2021, 214 jurisdictions have installed, and then removed, Flock cameras. As public outcry grew against what a Berkeley law professor described as "yet another Silicon Valley product… threatening to change people's lives [that no one asked for]" the rate of these removals has increased dramatically.

Ars Techinca received a statement from Flock Safety which said that contract cancellations were outnumbered by new county and municipal partnerships by 10 to 1, and that further improvements to its privacy standards were underway.

The United States is one of the only nations on Earth with any constitutional and/or legal protections against surveillance, so Americans don't always look for safeguards. But Flock cameras seemingly have triggered the nation. From the citizenry to the Senate, people are calling for their removal over privacy, abuse, and mass-data-collection concerns.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced that he was "investigating Flock Safety's collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras."

Hawley wrote a statement announcing the investigation, saying that in a few short years, Flock has assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network, boasting more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

"Instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search," wrote Senator Hawley.