Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

A federal judge ruled this week that a Tulsa, Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching the Flock Safety license-plate database for her plate without a warrant. As reported by 404 Media, the ruling does not create binding precedent, but it is one of the first times a federal judge has found a Flock search unconstitutional.

In the case, Judge Sara Hill said the deputy should have obtained a warrant before searching Flock’s database, since he had no apparent reason for the search other than that the woman’s vehicle had a California license plate. The deputy then used her travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly found 91 pounds of methamphetamine — evidence that Judge Hill ruled must be excluded entirely, since it stemmed directly from the unconstitutional search.

Judge Hill also took broader aim at warrantless searches of the Flock database, writing that tracking people’s location — even in public places — becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog someone’s whereabouts over an extended period and use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. “This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance,” Hill wrote, distinguishing it from Carpenter v. United States, a Supreme Court case focused on targeted government access to an individual’s cellphone location data: unlike that case, she said, Flock is a tool that collects data on all vehicles passing any network-connected camera at all times and serves it to law enforcement on demand.

Hill’s ruling adds to a growing wave of criticism of Flock from across the political spectrum. Several state and local governments, including Florida and Texas, have said they will stop using the technology, and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Block Flock Act on Friday, which would bar federal agencies from using automated license-plate readers like Flock. Flock CEO Garretty Langley, who TechCrunch is scheduled to interview on stage at its Disrupt conference, has called for a middle ground between privacy and safety and apologized to women who have been stalked by law enforcement officers using the system; the company has also reportedly offered voluntary employee buyouts to shrink its workforce.

Why it matters

The ruling adds judicial weight to a bipartisan backlash against automated license-plate tracking, and its Fourth Amendment reasoning — that indiscriminate, continuous location tracking is categorically different from a single targeted search — could shape how other courts, and Congress, treat similar surveillance tools, even though this decision itself sets no binding precedent.