Flock answers Congress's second attempt to ban its cameras by adding facial recognition to them.

…(cont) In between, on September 23, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing on Flock's network. The hearing's own title promised constant coverage; the subcommittee's own calendar shows one hearing, on one Wednesday afternoon, with testimony from stakeholders on both sides of the cameras.

The pitch runs alongside the two bills meant to rein the network in, not after them.

Then the data arrives. No federal statement sits in the record addressing the claim either way. What is filed is the podcast's account, and nothing else yet.

Put the clauses in the order they were filed: a camera network draws two separate bills across four weeks, a hearing names the network without stopping it, a vendor offers to bolt face-matching onto the hardware already running, and the bureau that would enforce federal privacy law turns up itself as a line in somebody else's hacked dataset. Each of those sits in its own filing, dated separately. None of them required the other three to happen. They just did — in the same month, on the same network.