Oklahoma Judge Rules Flock ALPR Search Was Unconstitutional

In May, a Tulsa County sheriff's deputy parked along Interstate 44 saw a Mazda SUV with a California license plate, started following it "for no apparent reason" other than the plate, and queried Flock's automated license plate reader network to pull the vehicle's recent travel history.

The query returned more than 50 records of Melisa Kyle's whereabouts across the country over roughly a month. 404 Media reported that on October 1, U.S. District Judge Sara Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma ruled the search violated the Fourth Amendment and suppressed every Flock-derived piece of evidence in the case.

"This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance," Hill wrote. "The Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great." The ALPR search, in her words, "intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements."

Hill distinguished Flock from the cell-site tracking the Supreme Court addressed in Carpenter v. United States, writing that the system "is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter" but instead "collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times." Deputy Freddie Alaniz, who also sat on a Drug Enforcement Administration task force, "should have obtained a warrant before searching for the vehicle in Flock's system," the judge wrote.

The stop that followed turned up roughly 91 pounds of methamphetamine and about $7,000 in cash in Kyle's SUV. All of it is suppressed.

Scale is part of Hill's reasoning. She noted that "there are currently more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month" and that the network is "approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice."

The ruling lands into a long run of surveillance-tech coverage on our tracker (40 stories in the last 90 days on AI surveillance), and it is one of the first times a federal judge has decided a Flock search can be unconstitutional.