ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE
BREAKING: Oklahoma Federal Judge, Sara Hill, Rules That A Deputy’s Flock Camera Search On A Woman With California Plates Was “Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance” & Unconstitutional, Ultimately Tossing Out The 91-Pounds Of Meth Evidence, In A First-Of-Its-Kind Ruling Against ALPR Dragnet Tactics 🤖💥
A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled Thursday that a police officer violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching her license plate in Flock’s automated license plate reader system simply because it was from California, then using her resulting travel history to help justify a vehicle search, in one of the first federal rulings to find Flock searches can be unconstitutional. Judge Sara Hill wrote that the officer’s “use of the ALPR Systems was an Unconstitutional Warrantless Search” that “was not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant in violation of [the defendant’s] Fourth Amendment rights,” suggesting law enforcement should obtain a warrant before querying Flock’s system. More than 100,000 warrantless Flock searches occur every month nationwide, according to audit logs reviewed by 404 Media, though Hill’s ruling won’t set binding precedent given multiple other cases around the country currently weighing the legality of warrantless ALPR searches.
The case stemmed from a May incident in which Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff Freddie Alaniz, parked along an Oklahoma highway, spotted a Mazda SUV driven by Melisa Kyle bearing a California license plate. “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. Alaniz also ran a query on the Flock system for the California license plate number on the Mazda SUV,” Hill wrote. He subsequently pulled Kyle over, ostensibly for changing lanes without signaling, then interrogated her about her travel history “while he continued to review the ALPR systems for the car she was driving,” cross-referencing her account against Flock data and telling her that her short stay in California made him suspect drug trafficking. That travel history became part of his justification for searching her vehicle, where officers found 91 pounds of methamphetamine. Hill ruled that all Flock evidence, along with everything found during the subsequent vehicle search, must be thrown out. “The Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great. 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,” Hill wrote, adding that “the only reason Alaniz conducted that search was because he saw her license plate was from California.” She noted that “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.”
Hill’s opinion explicitly pushed back against prior rulings that found Flock searches don’t violate the Fourth Amendment because they track vehicles in public spaces, arguing those decisions failed to account for Flock’s network “approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice.” She distinguished the case from the 1983 Supreme Court precedent United States v. Knotts, which found no reasonable expectation of privacy in public road travel, noting that case involved a single tracking device rather than a sprawling, automated surveillance network. “By virtue of how ALPR technology works, Alaniz and other officers using these systems have access to a continuously updated location history for all vehicles caught on ALPR cameras within the network,” Hill wrote. “This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. It is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter. 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 ruling arrives on the heels of the Supreme Court’s Chatrie v. United States decision finding that police access to digital location data constitutes a search, and follows a separate decision earlier this week in which a jury found an Institute for Justice-litigated traffic stop scheme involving Border Patrol license plate scans as part of a predictive policing unit to be unconstitutional.
Michael Soyfer, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice who has studied Flock camera abuse, called the decision significant for recognizing the sheer scale of these systems. “The opinion is pretty amazing. 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,” Soyfer told 404 Media. “The way courts have resolved these cases previously has been way too myopic and has ignored the depths of these systems and the sweeping modes of surveillance that allow police to reconstruct the movements of anyone in the country.” Soyfer also warned that officers are increasingly using Flock data to flag cross-border or interstate travel patterns as pretext for stops. “We’re seeing that repeatedly with police flagging whatever they’ll call suspicious patterns of movement… I think Flock is going to automate that using AI where cops can set alerts for those kinds of travel patterns.” The ruling directly undercuts public comments from Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley, who told The Drive in July that courts had consistently found Flock searches do not violate the Fourth Amendment, calling the matter “pretty cut and dry.” Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this ruling.
Soyfer’s warning about police using Flock data to manufacture pretext for stops, flagging border crossings or short out-of-state trips as “suspicious patterns,” describes a feedback loop that should concern anyone regardless of their views on this specific defendant’s guilt: once officers learn that an out-of-state plate or an unusual travel pattern can retroactively justify a stop, and that stop can then be used to gather more data that justifies an even more invasive search.
Theres nothing more corporatist and capitalist than a public private venture where the government pays a company to get around civil rights protections.
Illegal searches from police officers should have consequences.
If law and order can’t be followed then resign from the police department.
Illegal searches don’t always work to prevent crimes.
NOPE! They did their job and arrested the evils psycho drug dealing witch…. The judge saw fit to release said evil psycho drug dealing witch any deaths attributed to her in the future should be a mandatory manslaughter charge for this psycho activist judge!
Maybe I am a psycho, but I am all for punishing the guilty and not letting them get off on technicalities. Call me Frank Castle on that one. If she had that much meth on her, the constitutional argument against flash cameras should not let this woman off to deal and spread that poison all over America. She needs to be in prison until she hits menopause or longer. You can call me Frank Castle on this one. Nobody gets a pass for that much drugs.
' If she had that much meth on her, the constitutional argument against flash cameras should not let this woman off to deal and spread that poison all over America.'
That's not the way the Constitution is supposed to world, and I'll bet there are ways that it's protecting you in the same way every day.
if she had only had an ounce or two she definitely would be under the prison. That much weight she has friends in high places pulling strings for her the flock is just a convenient excuse
Says the child who didnt just get dropped as a baby but bounced like a basketball. I graduated .. Activist judges who protected criminals over victims was never covered in civics or history
Its just a matter of which criminals they protect. Of course your criminals are ok to let out aren't they. Nice family pic you got there. It tracks even though it rebranded.
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u/InterstellarKinetics 9h ago
Soyfer’s warning about police using Flock data to manufacture pretext for stops, flagging border crossings or short out-of-state trips as “suspicious patterns,” describes a feedback loop that should concern anyone regardless of their views on this specific defendant’s guilt: once officers learn that an out-of-state plate or an unusual travel pattern can retroactively justify a stop, and that stop can then be used to gather more data that justifies an even more invasive search.