The deputy was watching traffic on a Tulsa County highway one evening when a Mazda rolled past carrying California plates. Nothing else about the car was remarkable. And so, as U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill would later write in her opinion and order, Deputy Freddie Alaniz pulled onto the road and began to follow, for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate. In the America of the networked camera, that was reason enough.
Alaniz is a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy and a Drug Enforcement Administration task force officer. As he drove, he ran the Mazda’s plate through two automated license plate reader systems, Flock and VehicleManager, which do roughly the same work: they gather and organize historical vehicle location data for law enforcement. Back came a travel log. More than 50 records of one vehicle’s whereabouts over the previous month — Locust Grove, Oklahoma, out toward the California-Arizona border, then headed back toward Missouri. A short trip, quickly made, reconstructed without anyone ever asking a judge.
Only then did the deputy see the traffic violations: lane changes without a signal, a following distance of about 30 feet. He pulled the driver over — a stop Hill found lawful — and, after issuing a warning, told Melisa Susan Kyle that short trips to California usually meant drug trafficking. She refused a search, so he detained her for a police dog. According to the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office’s own Instagram account, officers found 91 pounds of methamphetamine in the Mazda; reporting by the Washington Examiner adds about $7,000 in cash. Kyle was charged federally, in the Northern District of Oklahoma, with possession with intent to distribute.
A beeper, forty years on
On October 1, Judge Hill ruled that the warrantless query of the plate-reader systems violated the Fourth Amendment — the extended stop too — and she suppressed everything that flowed from it as fruit of the poisonous tree. The drugs, the cash, the case: all of it sprang, she found, from a search made without a warrant or probable cause. This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance, she wrote. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.
The courts that have blessed these searches lean on United States v. Knotts, a 1983 Supreme Court case about a radio beeper hidden in a chemical drum, which held that drivers have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on public roads. Hill noted that nearly every court to consider plate readers has relied on it. Then she turned the old case around: *More than 40 years have passed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Knotts, and this Court is now faced with technology that appears to be approaching the dragnet type law enforcement practice Mr. Knotts warned of.* And she asked the question the ruling will be remembered by.
Why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time?
She relied instead on Carpenter, the 2018 decision on phone location records, and on Chatrie, in which the Supreme Court this year found that police access to location history is a search. Carpenter, she reasoned, concerned one identified person’s records; Flock’s network catalogs the whole driving population from the first photograph. Location tracking crosses the constitutional line, she wrote, 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 noted that cameras on Alaniz’s own patrol car feed the network. And she set down the principle underneath it all: The government cannot go snooping through our personal lives and business without an adequate basis to do so.
One judge against the current
It is one district judge’s reading. The order binds no other court, though 404 Media reports it is among the first times a federal judge has found a Flock search unconstitutional — which means defense attorneys now have an opinion to cite. Hill herself listed three recent Oklahoma federal decisions going the other way: Schoggins in the Eastern District, Brown in the Western, Acosta in her own Northern District. In March, the Fifth Circuit upheld the readers, according to The Washington Post. A researcher’s map counts some 300,000 of the cameras across the country, and audit logs obtained by 404 Media show officers running more than 100,000 warrantless searches of the Flock system every month.
Flock, which was not a party to the case, expects the government to fight. *The ruling goes against the overwhelming weight of authority in similar cases across the country, including multiple recent decisions in Oklahoma, and we expect it will be appealed and ultimately overturned, a spokesperson told 404 Media, adding that it sets no controlling precedent and does not affect agencies’ use of the technology. On X, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton wrote, Setting up for an interesting fight in circuit court if the government appeals.*
When the machine is wrong
Hill’s order concerns a real arrest and a query she found illegal. But the machinery has its own history of error, and it falls on the innocent. In Roseville, California, the system misread the plate in 71 percent of Flock alerts tied to stolen vehicles or felony cases over two years. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 27 cases of drivers mistakenly stopped, detained or arrested after a Flock alert — an Arkansas family held at gunpoint among them, and one Florida woman’s alert became 13 days in jail for the wrong person. The cousin technology, facial recognition, tells the same story: Jacksonville police arrested Jalil Richardson on an 85 percent match, and he spent 33 days in custody in North Carolina and 50 more in Jacksonville before the charges were dropped, losing his job, his car and his home in the meantime. Robert Dillon, arrested on a 93 percent match, was more than 300 miles from the McDonald’s where the crime was alleged; prosecutors dropped the case about two months later.
A country argues with its cameras
The counters are already running. Secure Justice, an Oakland advocacy group, has recorded 214 cities and counties that dropped Flock since 2021, 93 of them this past August alone. Denver’s council declined to renew after reports that the city’s plate data sat on a national network available to immigration enforcement. In Verona, Wisconsin, officials voted not to renew, then covered three cameras with trash bags; Flock had told the city not to take the cameras down itself. A company spokesperson counters that new partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals roughly ten to one this year. Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, has cut the default data-retention window from 30 days to 7, TechCrunch reports, and publicly apologized to women stalked by officers using the system.
The day after Hill’s order, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Ban Flock Act — two outlets name it so, though The Next Web reported it as the Block Flock Act, and notes two House members proposed a No FLOCK Act in September. The bill would bar federal agencies from using plate readers or touching their data, strip federal grants from state and local governments that use the technology, and let people sue the government over violations. We cannot allow America to become a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement, Sanders said. It is a long shot before the November midterms. Senator Josh Hawley has his own Stop Flock Abuse Act. And the pushback crosses party lines in the statehouses: Texas Governor Greg Abbott blocked state funding for new Flock cameras in August, after which the Texas transportation department stopped issuing permits for new readers on state roads, while Florida’s Ron DeSantis ordered permitted readers off state highways and his transportation department revoked local agencies’ permits outright, giving them 30 days to bring the cameras down.
So the question a judge asked on paper in Tulsa now travels upward, toward the appeals courts and perhaps beyond, while the cameras keep reading. Empires of information are rarely dismantled by the people who profit from them; they are usually stopped, if they are stopped, by small stubborn questions. One of them is now in the federal record, and every driver on every American highway is the subject it asks about.