A federal judge ruled this week that a Tulsa, Oklahoma, sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights by using Flock Safety to search her license plate without a warrant.
As reported by 404 MediaThis ruling does not create binding precedent, but it is one of the first times a federal judge has ruled that a search for Flock is unconstitutional.
In this case, Judge Sara Hill said the officer should have obtained a warrant before searching Flock’s database for the woman’s license plate, since he had “no apparent reason” for the search “other than the fact that [the woman’s vehicle] It had a California license plate.”
The agent then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of methamphetamine. But Judge Hill wrote that all evidence obtained after the search for Flock “must be suppressed like fruit from a poisonous tree.”
Judge Hill also took aim more broadly at warrantless searches of the Flock database, writing that tracking people’s locations (even when they are in public places) becomes “constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog their whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose when convenient.”
“This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance,” Hill wrote. “It is not directed at a single individual, as in [Carpenter v. United States, a Supreme Court case focused on how government agencies access location data from cell phones]. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass through any camera connected to the network at all times and delivers the information to the authorities when they request it.”
Hill joins a growing chorus of Flock critics from across the political spectrum. Numerous local and state governments, including Florida and TexasThey have said they will stop using the technology. And on Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democrat from Vermont, introduced the Block Flock Lawwhich would prevent federal agencies from using automated license plate readers like Flock.
Garretty Langley, CEO of Flock, who we will interview on stage TechCrunch Disruption – has called for a “compromise” between privacy and security and offered an apology to women who have been harassed by law enforcement officers using the Flock system. And with all those cancellations, so does Flock allegedly offered voluntary buyouts to employees as a way to reduce its workforce.
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