A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled on 1 October that a sheriff's deputy's search of automated licence-plate reader records, including Flock's, was a search under the Fourth Amendment. It was made without a warrant or probable cause [1].
Judge Sara E. Hill granted the driver's motion to suppress the evidence from the stop that followed [1].
"This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance," she wrote of the camera networks. "It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times" [1].
What it covers
The deputy followed the driver's car because it had a California plate, the court found, and searched its history in the Flock and VehicleManager systems. The search returned "more than 50 individual records" of its whereabouts over a month, across several states [1].
The judge relied on two Supreme Court rulings: Carpenter, on phone location records, and Chatrie, on geofence warrants, decided this year. Both hold that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy "in the whole of their physical movements" [1].
She also found the deputy unlawfully extended the traffic stop, a second, separate reason to suppress the evidence [1].
What it does not tell you
Whether it will hold. "It appears that nearly every court examining the issue to date has determined that ALPR technology use is not a search," the judge wrote. She cited three other federal courts in Oklahoma [1].
Whether the government will appeal. Neither the Tenth Circuit nor the Supreme Court has decided the question, the judge noted [1].
How long the systems keep data, or who keeps it. "It is not clear from the record," the opinion says [1].
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