This is a remarkably logical ruling by a judge that eviscerates the previous court ruling, as this goes beyond a single camera to a database of travel where they’re inferring conduct from detailed travel patterns and AI searches… Not to mention how some local law enforcement has used the technology to track citizen activists while trying to intimidate them by mentioning their travels, or seeing when they go by a camera to then tail them with no crime or driving infraction having been observed. Consequently, you’d have to think this federal judge isn’t compromised like so many others.
A federal judge said that police conducted an “unconstitutional warrantless search” by using Flock cameras to reconstruct a woman’s travels without probable cause.
By Drew Harwell
A federal judge in Oklahoma said Thursday that a police search of the license-plate-reader system Flock amounted to “indiscriminate mass surveillance,” adding fuel to a growing debate over whether the controversial policing technology conflicts with Americans’ constitutional rights.
The judge, Sara E. Hill, ruled that a deputy who used Flock to search the license plate of a car traveling toward the border of California had done so without probable cause, engaging in an “unconstitutional warrantless search.”
The judge’s order strikes a notable contrast to years of legal precedent concerning the technology, in which judges generally held that Flock and other license-plate readers did not violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches because they only recorded cars on public roads.
Hill said the systems’ prolific expansion merited a new way of legal thinking given how much information members of law enforcement could easily obtain about people’s travels without warrants or judicial oversight.
“Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts,” wrote Hill, a former attorney general of the Cherokee Nation who was appointed in 2024 by President Joe Biden to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma.
Flock spokesman Paris Lewbel said in a statement that “the ruling goes against the overwhelming weight of authority in similar cases across the country, including multiple recent decisions in Oklahoma, and we expect it will be appealed and ultimately overturned.”
Lewbel noted that Flock is not a party to the case and said the ruling “does not set controlling precedent and does not affect law enforcement agencies’ continued use of these important public safety technologies.”
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University Law School, said the case was notable in that it treated the technology as a “tracking system” rather than just a “fancy camera.”
“At the heart of the court’s ruling is that arbitrary searching of people’s travel histories violates a reasonable expectation of privacy and requires some judicial oversight,” he said.
There’s no guarantee that Hill’s order will reshape the legal landscape around license-plate readers. In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the systems’ constitutionality by noting that license plates are required by law, that the cameras operate on roads where there is no expectation of privacy and that the databases rely on discrete snapshots of cars that pose less of a surveillance risk than the 24-hour tracking of devices such as cellphones.
Hill’s order reflects a growing distrust of the technology in the United States, where The Washington Post has documented dozens of cases involving police misuse.
In her order, Hill wrote that it was “constitutionally problematic” for law enforcement to “indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient.”
The judge’s ruling was first reported by 404 Media.
Hill’s order was filed in a case concerning Melisa Kyle, a woman who was charged in May with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute.
The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office said at the time that a deputy pulled her over after seeing her make multiple illegal lane changes and then ran a police dog through her car, during which they found 91 pounds of meth in suitcases and $7,000 in cash.
In Hill’s order, however, the judge noted that the deputy, a Drug Enforcement Administration task force officer who investigated crimes on the highways around Tulsa, had been parked on the side of the road and first started following the woman “for no apparent reason” other than that her car had a California license plate.
The deputy, Hill said, ran Kyle’s license plate through Flock’s search tool and learned that the car had driven from Oklahoma toward the border of California and Arizona and was heading back to the Missouri area after a quick trip, raising his suspicion that the trip could have involved drug trafficking.
Police departments have routinely defended the technology as vital to stopping crime, and Hill noted that the technology brings “remarkable benefits that the Court cannot ignore.”
But the judge added that the legal precedent had been cemented in cases involving “much less sophisticated technology” and that the “Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great.”
“Why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time?” Hill wrote. “The government cannot go snooping through our personal lives and business without an adequate basis to do so.”