A federal judge has ruled that pulling a driver's location history from Flock's license-plate camera network without a warrant is an unconstitutional search.
Judge Sara E. Hill found on Oct. 1 that a Tulsa County sheriff's deputy, working a Drug Enforcement Administration task force, violated the Fourth Amendment by using a cross-state Flock database to track driver Melisa Kyle. The deputy stopped Kyle, searched her car, and found methamphetamine, initially citing only "suspicious driving" as the reason for the stop. It later emerged that the stop followed a Flock lookup showing Kyle had made a quick round trip toward the California border, the kind of pattern officers treat as a drug-courier tell. Hill ruled that accessing that data without probable cause amounted to what she called "indiscriminate mass surveillance."
The timing matters: senators Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jeff Merkley introduced the Ban Flock Act just a day after the ruling, aiming to bar federal agencies from using automatic license-plate readers altogether. Courts have mostly treated license-plate reader data as no different from an officer watching a public road, so a federal judge calling it "dragnet-style surveillance" is a genuine dent in that reasoning. It also hands civil liberties groups, who have spent years documenting officers using Flock to stalk partners or track activists, their first favorable court opinion to cite.
Flock told reporters it expects the ruling overturned on appeal, which is exactly what a company says right before its legal footing gets less comfortable.