TODAY: US Senate hearing follows ANF investigations exposing police Flock abuse

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – Chief executives from four major surveillance and law enforcement technology companies—including Atlanta-based Flock Safety—have been invited to testify before a congressional panel on the expansion of artificial intelligence-powered monitoring networks across the United States.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism scheduled the hearing, titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network,” for Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026.

HOW TO WATCH:

Atlanta News First will be streaming the hearing as it happens beginning at 2:30 p.m. You can watch the hearing here and on the Atlanta News First YouTube channel.

Lawmakers have called four industry leaders to appear:

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety
Rick Smith, CEO of Axon Enterprise
Greg Brown, CEO of Motorola Solutions
Filip Kaliszan, CEO of Verkada

The federal scrutiny comes after extensive reporting by Atlanta News First Chief Investigator Brendan Keefe exposed widespread vulnerabilities and misconduct surrounding Flock Safety’s surveillance network.

Keefe, who is attending the Senate hearing, uncovered at least 19 instances over a single year in Georgia where police officers were arrested or relieved of duty for using the company’s vast automated license plate reader (ALPR) system for personal reasons, including tracking estranged romantic partners and conducting unauthorized stalking operations against fellow officers and civilians.

Keefe’s investigation detailed how more than 120,000 Flock cameras nationwide capture vehicle movements that are stored and searchable by law enforcement agencies for 30 days.

Watching the Watchers: Flock ANF Investigation | An Atlanta News First investigative series exposing safety failures, legal blind spots, and personal misuse behind Flock’s massive surveillance network.

While Flock rolled out an AI-driven “audit assistance” tool in 2026 to flag suspicious queries for municipal supervisors, Keefe revealed that victims often only discovered they were being tracked through independent public records requests and specialized lookups, such as the citizen-created website haveibeenflocked.com.

The reporting also highlighted growing transparency concerns raised by privacy and open-records advocates after Flock made sweeping changes to its system logs.

Keefe reported the company removed officer names from external network searches — replacing them with anonymized ID numbers — and eliminated license plate numbers from network audit trails entirely, effectively shutting down the public’s ability to verify whether their own vehicles had been improperly searched by law enforcement agencies outside their local communities.