A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled on Thursday that a sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights when he searched her license plate in Flock Safety’s camera network, and she threw out everything the search produced, including 91 pounds of methamphetamine.
The decision by Judge Sara Hill is one of the first in which a federal court has found that querying Flock’s automated license plate reader system amounts to a search requiring a warrant. The network, she wrote, is “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” — a tool that collects information about every vehicle passing any connected camera at all times and serves it to law enforcement on demand — and it is fast “approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice.”
The system is heavily used: more than 100,000 warrantless searches of it run every month, according to audit logs viewed by 404 Media, and one researcher’s count puts the camera network at roughly 300,000 devices.
The stop at the heart of the case happened in May, when Freddie Alaniz, a Tulsa County deputy sheriff, sat parked alongside a highway and watched a Mazda S.U.V. with California plates go by. “Alaniz then pulled his vehicle on the highway to follow the Mazda for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate,” Judge Hill wrote. The deputy ran the plate through Flock, then stopped the driver, Melisa Kyle, ostensibly for changing lanes without signaling.
As he questioned Ms. Kyle, the deputy kept reviewing the plate-reader records for her car, the judge wrote. He made Ms. Kyle recount her movements over the previous several days, compared her answers with the Flock data and told her that her short stay in California made him suspect her of trafficking drugs. Her recorded travel history became part of the justification for searching the S.U.V., where officers found the meth. Judge Hill suppressed all of it: the Flock evidence and everything the search of the car turned up.
“Alaniz’s search in just the ALPR system provided him with more than 50 individual records of Kyle’s whereabouts across the country for an entire month,” the judge wrote. “Based on the information in the record, the only reason Alaniz conducted that search was because he saw her license plate was from California.”
“The factors that the government relies upon are the same type of circumstances that everyday Americans encounter on long road trips for many legitimate reasons,” she added. “Many of us drive longer than we want to get to a desired destination, or to no destination at all other than the road and sights ahead.”
Earlier rulings permitting warrantless plate searches leaned on United States v. Knotts, a 1983 Supreme Court decision about a tracking device slipped into a chemical container, which held that a driver has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements on public roads. Judge Hill wrote that the quoted language “exists in the context of the facts presented in the case,” and that Knotts involved “much less sophisticated technology” than “a large-scale, dragnet-type surveillance system.” Her opinion follows the Supreme Court’s more recent Chatrie v. United States decision, which held that police access to a person’s digital data, including cellphone location data, constitutes a search.
Michael Soyfer, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice, which is litigating several Fourth Amendment cases against Flock searches, said the opinion’s breadth was rare. “The opinion is pretty amazing,” he told 404 Media. “It recognizes one thing that courts ignore which is the sheer breadth of these systems, that they collect so much information about so many people in a way that sets them apart.” Earlier this week, a jury in a case his group brought found a Border Patrol traffic-stop scheme built on plate scans unconstitutional.
Officers around the country have used Flock data to pull over drivers who crossed state lines, then worked backward to recast ordinary travel as suspicion, according to 404 Media’s reporting. “Federal agents were using ALPRs to monitor cars making day trips across the border and back to manufacture a basis to stop them, interrogate the drivers and search them,” Mr. Soyfer said.
The ruling also cuts at the company’s core legal argument. “So far, in our belief and what will be for a long time, the courts have deemed this is not a warrantless search,” Garrett Langley, Flock’s chief executive, told The Drive in July, calling the issue “pretty cut and dry.”
Judge Hill’s decision binds no other court, and several cases nationwide are weighing the legality of warrantless ALPR searches. In a statement, a Flock spokeswoman said the company was not a party to the case and that the ruling “goes against the overwhelming weight of authority in similar cases across the country.” The company, she said, expects the decision will be appealed and ultimately overturned.