Federal judge: warrantless Flock license plate search is illegal
Judge Sara Hill threw out evidence in an Oklahoma drug case because a deputy pulled weeks of a car's location history without probable cause. Flock expects the ruling to be overturned.
A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled on Oct. 1 that searching the history of a license plate in Flock, a network of cameras that reads plates, without a warrant is a "search" under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The opinion, from the federal court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, granted a motion to suppress evidence in *United States v. Melisa Susan Kyle*. Judge Sara E. Hill wrote it.
For drivers in the United States, including Mexican tourists and migrants, the ruling signals that mass tracking of license plates is now facing judicial scrutiny. Its reach is limited: it is a trial-court decision, sets no binding precedent and does not change how the cameras or police work today.
The document describes how Freddie Alaniz, a Tulsa County deputy, saw a Mazda with California plates, followed it for no other apparent reason and looked up the plate in Flock and in a second system, VehicleManager. He entered "traffic violation" and "investigation" as his reasons. The search gave him at least 30 days of the car's locations across several states, with more than 50 records.
He then stopped the vehicle for alleged traffic violations. 404 Media and TechCrunch report that officers found 91 pounds of methamphetamine, a figure that did not appear in the pages of the opinion this outlet reviewed. Hill concluded the search had neither probable cause nor a warrant and that all later evidence had to be excluded.
"This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance," Hill wrote about the technology, which she said collects data on every vehicle that passes any network-connected camera.
Hill relied on two U.S. Supreme Court precedents: *Carpenter v. United States*, on cellphone location history, and *Chatrie v. United States* (2026), on location data obtained with geofence warrants. In both, the Court accepted that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their movements. For Hill, a plate reader is different from following a single car: it records every vehicle and waits for someone to look one up.
Flock Safety, the company, told 404 Media it expects the ruling to be appealed and overturned. The record also does not make clear how long the cameras' data is kept or who holds it. At the time of writing there was no record of an appeal to the Tenth Circuit.
