A federal judge in Oklahoma has thrown out drug evidence found during a traffic stop after ruling that a sheriff's deputy's warrantless search of Flock Safety's license-plate database violated the Fourth Amendment, calling the company's nationwide camera network "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance."
The ruling, issued Saturday by Judge Sara Hill in the Northern District of Oklahoma in Tulsa, centers on a deputy who searched Flock's database using a driver's California license plate as the only basis for the query, according to court documents reviewed by TechCrunch. The search surfaced the driver's travel history, which the deputy then used to justify pulling her over and searching her vehicle, where investigators say they found 91 pounds of methamphetamine. Judge Hill ruled that because the deputy had "no apparent reason" for the database search beyond the out-of-state plate, all evidence gathered afterward must be suppressed.
"It Serves Up the Information on Demand"
Flock's automated license-plate readers, deployed by thousands of local police departments and sold as a tool for solving crimes and recovering stolen vehicles, log every passing vehicle's plate, location and time, regardless of whether the driver is suspected of anything. That design, Judge Hill wrote, is precisely the problem.
"This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. It is not targeted on a single individual... It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand."
Judge Sara Hill, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma
The decision adds a judicial rebuke to a political backlash that has been building against the company for months. Florida and Texas have moved to restrict agencies' use of Flock cameras, and Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation, the Block Flock Act, to bar federal agencies from using the technology at all. Flock Safety, which says its cameras have helped locate more than 10,000 missing people and contributed evidence in roughly one in five cleared cases in jurisdictions that use them, has already made changes in response to the criticism, cutting default data retention from 30 days to seven and adding mandatory multi-factor authentication and audit tools meant to catch misuse by individual officers.
A Narrow Ruling With Broad Implications
Technically, the decision applies only to the Oklahoma case and does not ban Flock's technology outright; it addresses how police query the database, not whether the cameras can keep operating. But because the reasoning — that the sheer breadth of Flock's data collection makes any search of it a Fourth Amendment event requiring a warrant — could be adopted by other courts, defense attorneys in jurisdictions that rely heavily on Flock evidence are already citing the opinion in pending cases. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has previously called for a "compromise between privacy and safety" and apologized for isolated incidents in which officers misused the system to track people outside of legitimate investigations, but the company has not said whether it will appeal the Oklahoma ruling or change how it advises police departments to use its database.
For now, the ruling gives privacy advocates and defense lawyers a concrete legal win to build on, even as Flock's cameras continue to spread to new cities and counties across the country.
