A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a police officer's warrantless search of a license plate in Flock's automated reader system violated the Fourth Amendment. The case involved a Tulsa County deputy who ran a California plate through Flock simply because the car was from out of state, then used the driver's travel history to justify searching her vehicle. The judge, Sara Hill, described the practice as "indiscriminate mass surveillance" and ordered all evidence from the search thrown out, including 91 pounds of meth found in the car.
Hill's ruling is notable because it rejects the common argument that tracking cars in public is not a search. She wrote that Flock's nationwide network is approaching a "dragnet-type law enforcement practice" and that courts should update their understanding of the technology. The officer's search gave him more than 50 records of the driver's movements over a month, which Hill said intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of her physical movements."
The decision does not set binding precedent, and other cases on warrantless ALPR searches are pending across the country. But it comes shortly after a Supreme Court ruling that police access to cell phone location data constitutes a search, and it directly contradicts Flock's CEO, who has said the company's product is not a constitutional issue. Legal observers say the ruling gives appropriate weight to the sheer breadth of data these systems collect about ordinary people.