Federal Judge Rules a Flock License-Plate Search Was Unconstitutional Mass Surveillance

A federal judge in Oklahoma, Sara Hill, ruled Thursday that a police officer violated the rights of a woman accused of meth trafficking when he ran her license plate through Flock's automated license plate reader (ALPR) network without a warrant. It is one of the first times a federal judge has found such a search unconstitutional.

What happened

In May, Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff Freddie Alaniz was parked beside a highway when he spotted a Mazda SUV driven by Melisa Kyle bearing California plates. According to the judge, he pulled out to follow her "for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate," then immediately queried the car in Flock. He stopped her, ostensibly for changing lanes without signaling.

As Alaniz kept reviewing the ALPR data, he made Kyle recount her travels over the previous days and checked the account against the system. Because she had only been in California briefly, he suspected drug trafficking and used her travel history as grounds to search the vehicle. Officers found 91 pounds of meth. Hill ruled that all Flock evidence and everything found in the search must be thrown out.

The court's reasoning

Hill stressed that the ALPR search alone gave the officer more than fifty records of Kyle's whereabouts across the country over a month. The system, she wrote, does not target one suspect but collects information on every vehicle caught by any network camera and serves it up to police on demand — "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance."

She pushed back on earlier rulings that leaned on United States v. Knotts (1983), a case involving far cruder tracking technology. The context has changed: Flock's nationwide network is "approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice." Audit logs viewed by 404 Media show more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the system every month.

Why it matters

The decision sets no binding precedent, and several similar cases are pending nationwide. But it undercuts the position of Flock CEO Garrett Langley, who argued in July that courts deemed the product lawful and called the matter "pretty cut and dry." Michael Soyfer, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice, called the opinion "amazing" for recognizing the sheer breadth of these systems, which can reconstruct nearly anyone's movements across the country.

Soyfer notes that police increasingly flag "suspicious" travel patterns, and predicts Flock will automate this with AI so officers can set alerts for such routes. Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Source: 404 Media