Real-time crime-center software is a sometimes overlooked but powerful tool allowing police to aggregate immense amounts of data, significantly expanding their surveillance reach.
Page A208From§Eachthe morning edition — 8 October 2026
Senate searches for the bottom of a surveillance network while sitting on the bill that turns it off.
As it ran on the front
On September 3rd, Rep. The bill went to committee. It has not left.
Twenty days later, on September 23rd, a Senate panel held its first hearing on AI-powered surveillance cameras, titled "Always Watching: Flock's Nationwide AI Surveillance Network." The bill that would answer the question by turning off the money sat in the same building, in the same committee it reached twenty days earlier, for the length of the hearing.…
…(cont) The next day, September 24th, Flock itself asked a security researcher to take a map offline. Not a leak, not a rival's product — a map built from Flock's own camera locations, the most detailed public accounting anyone has made of where the devices sit. The company that runs the surveillance network wants the map of the surveillance network gone. The senators still "getting to the bottom of" what that network tracks have Massie's bill sitting exactly where it sat on September 3rd.
By October 8th, NPR reported that experts call other police surveillance tools — real-time crime-center software, the back-end systems that aggregate camera, sensor and license-plate data — more worrisome than Flock, and call that software "sometimes overlooked," built to pull together "immense amounts of data" while drawing less of the attention Flock's hearing just drew.
The fix was written before any of this happened. It has a bill number, a sponsor, and a committee of record, filed September 3rd. A hearing happened about the exact thing the bill addresses. The map its backers might have cited got pulled down by the company that owns the cameras. None of that required the bill to move. The bill did not move.
“They hold a hearing to "get to the bottom" of a camera network, then go sit right on top of the bill that would turn it off. Call it what it is: the oversight is theater, and the off switch has had a bill number since September. Every plate your car runs past gets logged somewhere, and the one guy who tried to cut the funding got a committee referral instead of a vote.”
“Committee review is how Congress makes sure a bill like this doesn't go too far, too fast — you don't shut down every license-plate camera in the country overnight. The hearing shows we're taking a hard look at Flock. Did I say "hard look"? We held one hearing. That's... thorough, actually.”
The receipts
A security researcher’s map revealed more locations of Flock devices than any other. Flock is trying to take it down. The post Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline appeared first on The Intercept .
· Massie unveils Flock-Off Act aimed at restricting surveillance cameras from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Senators try to 'get to the bottom of' AI-powered surveillance networks amid Flock concerns from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.