Federal judge calls Flock ‘indiscriminate mass surveillance’

A federal judge in Tulsa ruled this week that a sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights by conducting a warrantless search of Flock Safety’s license-plate database to find her vehicle. Judge Sara Hill said the deputy had no apparent justification for the search beyond the fact that the car carried a California license plate, and she ordered that all evidence obtained after the Flock search be suppressed as "the fruit of a poisonous tree."

The deputy used the Flock search to compile the woman’s travel history and then relied on that history to justify a subsequent search of her car, where officers allegedly found 91 pounds of meth. Hill wrote that because the initial database query was unconstitutional, the later evidence could not be admitted.

In her opinion the judge criticized warrantless, system-wide searches of license-plate databases, writing that although people’s movements in public places are observable, it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can "indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient." She described the Flock system as a tool that collects data on all vehicles passing networked cameras and makes that information available to police on demand.

The decision comes as Flock has faced growing criticism and cancellations from across the political spectrum. Several local and state governments, including Florida and Texas, have said they will stop using the technology. On the federal level, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Block Flock Act, which would prohibit federal agencies from using automated license-plate readers like Flock. Flock CEO Garretty Langley has called for a compromise between privacy and safety, apologized to women who say they were stalked by officers using the system, and the company has reportedly offered voluntary buyouts to employees amid customer cancellations.