A Judge Called Flock's Network 'Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance.' A Florida County Can't Find 11 of Its Cameras.

A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled on October 1 that a warrantless search of Flock Safety's license plate database violated the Fourth Amendment, calling the network "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance." Three days earlier, officials in St. Lucie County, Florida, found 14 Flock cameras bolted to utility poles that neither the sheriff's office nor Flock could fully account for.

The search a judge called mass surveillance

The case is United States v. Kyle, filed in the Northern District of Oklahoma. Tulsa County sheriff's deputy and DEA task force officer Freddie Alaniz spotted a Mazda SUV with California plates on Interstate 44 in May and began following it without a traffic violation to justify the stop. He queried Flock's database for the vehicle, found more than 50 recorded sightings spanning roughly a month, and used that travel history to build a reason to pull the driver over for an unsignaled lane change.

The driver was Melisa Kyle, 46, of Crane, Missouri. Alaniz questioned her about where she had been while reviewing the Flock printout, then searched her SUV. Officers recovered about 91 pounds of methamphetamine, marijuana, and $7,000 in cash.

“This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. The Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great.”

Hill took the bench in January 2024 after serving as attorney general of the Cherokee Nation, becoming the first Native American woman on the federal bench in Oklahoma. Her ruling in Kyle's case is one of the first times a federal judge has found a Flock search itself, not just how an officer used the results, unconstitutional.

Hill ruled the Flock search was not supported by probable cause and was conducted without a warrant, and she suppressed the evidence the stop produced. Her opinion cited United States v. Knotts, the 1983 Supreme Court case that allowed police to track a vehicle's movements on public roads, and distinguished it from Flock's always-on camera network, which stores months of location history on any plate that passes a reader rather than tracking one car for one trip. She also noted a Fifth Circuit ruling from March, United States v. Porter, as evidence that federal courts have not settled where continuous camera surveillance crosses a constitutional line Knotts never anticipated.

404 Media, which first reported the ruling, said Flock disputed the decision and expects to appeal, arguing it conflicts with what the company called the "overwhelming weight of authority" from other courts that have allowed ALPR searches without a warrant. The ruling does not bind judges outside Hill's district, and 404 Media's reporting put the number of warrantless Flock searches nationwide at more than 100,000 a month, a volume this single case does nothing to slow.

The company doesn't have a reliable count of its own hardware either

St. Lucie County, Florida, contracted Flock for 52 cameras. A review this fall turned up 66 on county poles, according to TechSpot's reporting. The sheriff's office claimed three of the extra 14 as its own without explaining why they were never on the books. Eleven remain unclaimed by any of the county's three law enforcement agencies.

• County officials wrapped the 11 unclaimed cameras in plastic and posted removal notices with a deadline between October 16 and 20.
• One of the unclaimed cameras disappeared from its pole before crews arrived to take it down.
• TechSpot's reporting notes Flock has installed cameras in other states without permits on behalf of clients it has not named.

TechSpot also reported that hundreds of U.S. communities have canceled Flock contracts over privacy concerns, and that officers in multiple departments have been caught running ALPR searches to track people they knew personally rather than investigate a case.

Flock sells departments on a searchable, auditable record of where cars have been. A federal judge just found that record was built on a search method the Constitution does not allow. A Florida county, separately, could not say how many of the cameras producing that record were even supposed to be there. Flock is now defending both claims at once, and neither defense has anything to do with how good the technology is at reading a license plate.