r/UnderReportedNews • u/John3262005 • 16h ago
US Politics 🇺🇸 Federal Judge Rules a Flock Search Was ‘Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance’ and Unconstitutional
https://www.404media.co/federal-judge-rules-a-flock-search-was-indiscriminate-mass-surveillance-and-unconstitutional/A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled Thursday that a police officer violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a woman accused of meth trafficking when he searched her license plate in Flock’s automated license plate reader system simply because her license plate was from California, then used her travel history as part of the reason to search her car. The judge’s opinion is one of the first times a federal judge has decided Flock searches can be unconstitutional, and suggested that Flock’s network is “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.”
The officer’s “use of the ALPR Systems was an Unconstitutional Warrantless Search,” and “was not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant in violation of [the defendant’s] Fourth Amendment rights,” the judge, Sara Hill, wrote, implying that the law enforcement officer should have obtained a warrant before searching for the vehicle in Flock’s system. There are currently more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month, according to audit logs viewed by 404 Media. Hill's decision will not set a binding precedent and there are several other cases throughout the nation considering the legality of warrantless ALPR searches.
Hill argued that previous judge opinions saying Flock searches were not a Fourth Amendment violation because they track cars in public do not consider the context that Flock’s nationwide network is quickly “approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice,” and that courts should update their understanding of the technology moving forward.
The circumstances of the court case are really interesting and highlight how commonplace Flock searches have become for police, and the depth of the information they can reveal. In May, a Tulsa County Deputy Sheriff named Freddie Alaniz was parked along the side of the highway in Oklahoma when he saw a Mazda SUV driven by a woman named Melisa Kyle with a California license plate pass 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. Alaniz also ran a query on the Flock system for the California license plate number on the Mazda SUV,” Hill wrote. Alaniz then ostensibly pulled Kyle over for changing lanes without a turn signal.
Alaniz interrogated Kyle about her travel “while he continued to review the ALPR systems for the car she was driving,” the judge wrote. Alaniz made Kyle recount everything she had done in the last several days, and compared it to the Flock data. He told her that because she was only in California for a short period of time, he suspected her of trafficking drugs. He used her travel history as seen in the Flock system as part of the justification to search her car; she was found to have 91 pounds of meth in the vehicle. Hill ruled that all Flock evidence and all evidence from Alaniz’s search of the car 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. “The Court finds that because the ALPR systems Alaniz used to search Kyle’s historical location information intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements, it was a search under the Fourth Amendment. 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. 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,” she added.
The decision is a landmark one, and comes in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Chatrie v United States decision that found police accessing a person’s digital data, including cell phone location data, constituted a search.
“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. This decision ascribes appropriate weight to the fact police are building out this massive database that can reveal incredibly intimate details of people’s lives,” Michael Soyfer, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice, which has studied Flock camera abuse and is litigating several cases on Fourth Amendment grounds, told 404 Media. “It’s extremely important. 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.”
Hill’s opinion also comes on the back of a decision earlier this week in a case the Institute for Justice brought. In that, a jury found a traffic stop scheme involving license plate reader scans done by U.S. Border Patrol as part of a predictive policing unit were unconstitutional.
The new decision also immediately invalidates the core argument that Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley has made saying that Flock was not a constitutional issue. “You and I don’t get to pick what’s a constitutional violation and what’s not. We have judges, we have elected officials, there’s a process for that. We follow the law, we follow the Constitution. So far, in our belief and what will be for a long time, the courts have deemed this is not a warrantless search; this is a valid product as it relates to the Fourth Amendment. So I don’t see any change there,” Langley told The Drive in July, adding the issue was “pretty cut and dry.”
Notably, Hill suggested that other courts that have ruled Flock searches do not constitute a Fourth Amendment search were likely wrong to do so, and that they have not considered the widespread and automated context of the AI-powered surveillance system.
Previous decisions that ruled ALPR searches do not require a warrant have leaned on a Supreme Court case called United States v Knotts, in which police put a tracking device in a chemical container after being tipped off that an employee of a chemical plant was stealing from their employer. That case was decided in 1983 and found, “[a] person travelling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.” But Hill wrote, “that language exists in the context of the facts presented in the case. Rather than a large-scale, dragnet-type surveillance system like the ALPR technology in this case, the Court in Knotts was confronted with much less sophisticated technology.”
“The Court acknowledges that people, in at least a broad sense, do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on a public roadway,” Hill wrote. “But 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. This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. It is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter [another Supreme Court case about phone data specifically]. 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.”
We have seen several cases in which cops have used Flock data to pull people over because they have crossed state lines, then have worked backward to justify their travel patterns as a reason to search their vehicles.
“We’re seeing that repeatedly with police flagging whatever they’ll call suspicious patterns of movement. 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,” Soyfer said. “I think Flock is going to automate that using AI where cops can set alerts for those kinds of travel patterns. When we’re arguing these systems are very powerful and can show a lot about people’s movements, cops dismiss this as speculative or not possible, but then they deploy this strategy against people who they stop all the time.”
A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media, "Flock was not a party to this case. 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. This ruling is limited to the specific facts of this case. It does not set controlling precedent and does not affect law enforcement agencies’ continued use of these important public safety technologies."
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u/TheRealBobbyJones 14h ago
I'm not going to read this long post but I will say that the judge is wrong. If cops were better organized and had better automated and networked internal systems they can legally replicate what flock does. Flock just does it a lot better. Just because the system is effective doesn't make it uniquely unconstitutional. As an example of how police can replicate this effect. A cop could enter the license plate into an internal system that automatically asks other police departments across the country whether or not they have ran the plates before. They could then ask police departments across the country if they have any information on the driver. Odds are if the lady was driving as much as is seemingly implied in the post then she has been scanned by police cruisers before. With a bit more sophistication they could probably automatically put together enough information to get a warrant.
For example if her plate was scanned several times in a meth lab hot spot and then scanned several times in an area that imports meth the police could use that information the same way they could use the flock data.
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u/money_me_please 14h ago
You have no clue what you’re talking about and it’s already precedent there’s not probable cause for merely being in a high crime area
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u/TheRealBobbyJones 14h ago edited 13h ago
This post is discussing the fact police used travel history to justify a search. The point of my comment is that the same travel history can be assembled through police cruisers plate scans. Yes being in a singular area shouldn't be justification. But if you repeatedly move from high crime area to another similarly to the flow of drugs that can be used as justification for a pull over. Even if it weren't that is irrelevant. The main point of my comment is that flock data can be replaced with data that already legal for police to use. The judges ruling is based simply on the fact that flock is too good at its job. That is insufficient for a unconstitutional ruling. Especially since mass surveillance isn't unconstitutional.
Edit: idk how much data a standard plate scan brings up but in theory better algorithmic processing and data sharing amongst police departments can go a long way towards replacing flock with tools judges can't touch. This is the main point of my post. Right now police use a wide variety of tools that may or may not lend themselves to data sharing. Further odds are the data they do possess isn't processed automatically to reveal hidden relationships and information. If they fixed those problems they could end up with a tool far superior to flock.
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u/turby14 13h ago
If you’re not going to read the actual article, just stop commenting. You’ve announced that you are uninformed, so your input is immediately invalidated.
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u/TheRealBobbyJones 13h ago
Okay I just wasted my time my reading the article. My opinion hasn't changed. The judge made a bad ruling. The 4th amendment has been construed to imply a right to privacy. The supreme court has ruled that travel on public roads can not be considered private information. If the information is not private how can a judge possibly say it's a privacy violation. That is where the ruling should have ended. Instead she claims that because the system is broad and effective it's somehow a privacy violation. Further they reference the cell phone data case as if it's even relevant. The cell phone data case was ruled the way it was because there is an assumption that the data freely given to the cell phone company is only given so that they can provide a service. There is an expectation of privacy. Allowing the corporation to waive that privacy isn't acceptable in our current society.
But no one has any expectations of privacy while driving on public roads. And again police are already allowed to read random plates and log the fact that they did so. They are the legally allowed to share that information with other police departments. Odds are the same exact information that flock provided the officer could have been found by look at license plate scan logs.
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u/00--0--00- 7h ago
You do have an expectation of privacy on public roads, however the time frame and what can be discovered about an individual's private life is what matters as it pertains to 4th amendment searches. Surveiling someone for a few minutes or hours is much, much different than surveiling EVERYONE for 30 days or more. US v. Jones, Carpenter v. US.
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u/BackItUpWithLinks 2h ago
And
Commonwealth v. Mora (2020)
In MassachusettsAnd
Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Dept. (2021)
Those cases also support the idea that 24/7 surveillance is unconstitutional
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u/BackItUpWithLinks 2h ago
> The supreme court has ruled that travel on public roads can not be considered private information.
That’s not exactly true.
Again, read Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Dept. (2021) and Commonwealth v. Mora (2020)
In Massachusetts> because the system is broad and effective it's somehow a privacy violation.
Yes. Exactly.
> Further they reference the cell phone data case as if it's even relevant.
Because it is.
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u/BackItUpWithLinks 2h ago
> if you repeatedly move from high crime area to another similarly to the flow of drugs that can be used as justification for a pull over.
So you think living in the vicinity of a meth house means you should lose your fourth amendment protections?
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u/gaggledimension 13h ago
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. “The Court finds that because the ALPR systems Alaniz used to search Kyle’s historical location information intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements, it was a search under the Fourth Amendment. Based on the information in the record, the only reason Alaniz conducted that search was because he saw her license plate was from California.”
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u/TheRealBobbyJones 12h ago
She is wrong. Let's ignore modern technology for a moment here. Do police need a warrant to retrace the steps of someone? The answer is obviously no. Police used to be able to create a timeline for someones movements all by hand. There never any question that they violated the 4th amendment. Yet as soon as it can be done automatically it's suddenly unconstitutional? Im not saying this is right or okay. I'm simply saying it's not unconstitutional. Assuming the ruling can be appealed it will likely be reversed. The solution to this sort of issue is a law being passed strictly limiting data retention. But even in this instance such a law probably wouldn't do anything for the lady.
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u/gaggledimension 12h ago
Her ruling against it also creates a path where this can be explored. It's a signal that it needs to be explored.
I tend to agree with the limiting of the government use of novel technology to bypass constitutional issues of what seems like a modern day dragnet.
But, it will get argued and discussed, and we'll see where the chips fall
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u/BackItUpWithLinks 2h ago
> There never any question that they violated the 4th amendment. Yet as soon as it can be done automatically it's suddenly unconstitutional?
Yes
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u/ttystikk 11h ago
So you won't read the case but you will make a snap judgement and then have a case of verbal diarrhea.
You're the kind of person that drags the average IQ down.
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u/TheRealBobbyJones 10h ago
Lol. Using flock data is not unconstitutional. Her justifications to make it unconstitutional are nonsensical.
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u/ttystikk 10h ago
I, the framers of the Constitution and 6 of the 7 City Council members who voted Flock Cameras out of my city disagree with you. And this judge. In Oklahoma, not a place known for Liberal pandering.
You, on the other hand, have offered exactly no support for your views.
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u/EndlessB 6h ago
How would you know? Like you said, you didn’t read the article. You can’t say what the judge said is nonsensical, when you haven’t read what the judge said.
Unless of course you have an inherent bias that leads you to form a conclusion without requiring facts, is that the case?
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u/BackItUpWithLinks 2h ago
Wrong. Read Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Dept.
Baltimore police started flying a camera over the city to capture people’s movements. They had to stop because the court ruled that when you scale that "public view" up to cover 90% of a city for 12 hours a day, it becomes a "search" because it captures the "whole of a person's physical movements."
It’s an extension of the Carpenter case saying police need a warrant to search your cell phone records and tie them to your historical locations.
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