A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a sheriff's deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by searching Flock Safety's license plate reader network without a warrant, and ordered the evidence that followed thrown out. TechCrunch reported the decision Saturday, citing 404 Media's reporting and the court filing, and called it one of the first federal rulings to find a Flock search unconstitutional.

What Happened

The case began with a Tulsa sheriff's deputy who looked up a woman's car in Flock's database. According to the ruling, the deputy had no apparent reason to do so other than the vehicle's California license plates. The lookup returned her travel history, which the deputy then used to justify searching the car.

That search turned up about 91 pounds of methamphetamine. U.S. District Judge Sara Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma held that the Flock lookup itself was a search under the Fourth Amendment that required a warrant. Because it was unlawful, she ordered all evidence obtained after it suppressed as the "fruit of a poisonous tree."

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Hill grounded her reasoning in Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 Supreme Court decision that requires police to get a warrant for historical cellphone location records. She wrote that warrantless tracking becomes constitutionally problematic when police can passively and indiscriminately record a person's movements over a long period.

She went further than Carpenter in one respect. That case dealt with location data about a specific person, while Flock, she wrote, collects information on every vehicle that passes any camera in its network, all the time. She described the system as a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.

TechCrunch's account does not say when the ruling was signed.

Why It Matters

Flock runs one of the largest networks of automated license plate reader cameras in the U.S., used by thousands of police departments. Officers can typically query the network to see where a plate has been photographed, often without a warrant. Hill's ruling treats that query, not just a later physical search, as the constitutional event.

A district court decision is not binding precedent on other courts, including other judges in the same district. Still, it gives defense lawyers a federal opinion to cite when they move to suppress evidence that began with a plate-reader lookup, and it offers a detailed argument for why Carpenter's logic reaches camera networks.

Political Backdrop

The ruling lands as pressure on Flock is building on several fronts. TechCrunch noted that Florida and Texas have said they will stop using Flock. As The Primary Wire reported Friday, lawmakers from both parties introduced bills this week to rein in plate-reader networks, including Sen. Josh Hawley's Stop Flock Abuse Act and the Ban Flock Act from Sen. Bernie Sanders, which would bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley has called for a compromise between privacy and safety, apologized to victims of stalking by law enforcement users of the system and approved voluntary buyouts for employees, according to TechCrunch.

What to Watch

The government could appeal the suppression order to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where a ruling would carry precedential weight across six states. Defense attorneys elsewhere are likely to test the same argument in their own cases, and the decision may feature in congressional debate over the competing Flock bills.