Federal Judge Calls Flock's License-Plate Network 'Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance'

A federal judge has delivered one of the first judicial rejections of the automated license-plate reader (ALPR) systems used by police departments across the United States, ruling that a warrantless search of Flock Safety's nationwide camera network violated the Fourth Amendment.

U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma issued the 38-page opinion on October 1 in United States v. Melisa Susan Kyle, ordering that every piece of evidence derived from the Flock search — including 91 pounds of methamphetamine and about $7,000 in cash found in the defendant's SUV — must be suppressed as the fruit of an unconstitutional search.

The ruling was first reported by 404 Media and later confirmed by TechCrunch.

The case began when a Tulsa County sheriff's deputy, Freddie Alaniz, spotted a Mazda SUV with a California license plate and queried it through Flock's nationwide network.

According to the order, the deputy had "no apparent reason" for the search beyond the out-of-state plate.

The query returned more than 50 individual records of Melisa Kyle's whereabouts across the country over roughly a month, which the deputy used to justify stopping the vehicle.

Judge Hill found that the search "was not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant," and that it intruded on Kyle's reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of her physical movements."

The court rejected the government's argument that drivers have no privacy interest in plates that are visible on public roads, grounding the decision in Supreme Court precedents including Carpenter v. United States and the 2026 Chatrie decision on geofence location data.

Hill's sharpest language was aimed at the technology itself.

She wrote that Flock's network "is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times," serving it up to law enforcement across the country on demand — "not targeted on a single individual," but a continuously updated location history for everyone.

"This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance," Hill wrote.

She noted that "more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month" take place, and that the network is "approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice."

Passive cataloging of whereabouts over extended periods, she held, becomes "constitutionally problematic" when police can "use that information for any purpose whenever convenient."

The ruling does not create binding precedent beyond the district, and it directly conflicts with the Fifth Circuit's 2026 Porter decision, which reached the opposite conclusion — a circuit split that could eventually draw the Supreme Court.

Within days of the ruling, Senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Ban Flock Act, which would restrict federal agencies' ALPR use and federal funding for local programs.

The decision lands amid a growing national push to pull Flock cameras from city streets.

Whether other courts follow Hill's constitutional roadmap remains to be seen — but for now, the order stands as the strongest judicial warning yet that dragnet-style plate tracking cannot survive the Fourth Amendment.