A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a sheriff’s deputy violated the Fourth Amendment when he searched a Flock license plate reader database without a warrant, describing the camera network as “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and suppressing the evidence in a drug trafficking case.
U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma granted the defendant’s motion to suppress in United States v. Kyle in a 38-page opinion and order dated October 1, 2026. She concluded that all evidence obtained after the deputy began the plate search “must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree.”
What the court found
According to the opinion, a Tulsa County deputy sheriff parked beside a highway saw a Mazda SUV with a California license plate. The court found that he followed the vehicle “for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate” and ran the plate through Flock, an automated license plate reader (ALPR) system. Such systems log the date, time and location each time a networked camera captures a plate.
The opinion says the deputy had access to at least 30 days of vehicle location data in many states, though not California. He then stopped the car over suspected traffic violations, including failing to signal lane changes and following another vehicle too closely. Hill found the stop itself was justified, but ruled that the deputy lacked reasonable suspicion to extend it and, separately, that the plate search was an unconstitutional warrantless search. That search produced more than 50 records of the driver’s whereabouts across the country over a month, the court said.
404 Media, which first reported the ruling, said 91 pounds of methamphetamine were found in the vehicle.
The judge acknowledged that several other federal courts in Oklahoma had reached the opposite conclusion, relying on the Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in United States v. Knotts, which held that a person driving on public roads has no reasonable expectation of privacy in those movements. Hill wrote that technology requires courts “to take a more nuanced approach than following Knotts in a vacuum,” citing the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling on cell-site location records and its decision this year in Chatrie v. United States on location history data.
“This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance. It is not targeted on a single individual, as in Carpenter. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.” — Judge Sara E. Hill
Hill added that the technology “comes with remarkable benefits that the Court cannot ignore. But the Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great.”
Flock’s response
Flock was not a party to the case. A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that the ruling “goes against the overwhelming weight of authority in similar cases across the country” and that the company expects it “will be appealed and ultimately overturned.” The spokesperson said the decision “does not set controlling precedent” and does not affect law enforcement agencies’ continued use of the technology.
Why it matters
The opinion describes ALPR systems as gathering location data for use by law enforcement across the country. Flock has more than 120,000 cameras, making it the largest U.S. ALPR vendor, according to Senator Bernie Sanders, and the company says its network processes more than 20 billion vehicle reads a month, TechCrunch reported. 404 Media said audit logs it viewed show more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month. The Oklahoma decision does not bind other courts, but TechCrunch described it as one of the first times a federal judge has found a Flock search unconstitutional.
The ruling arrives as the company faces scrutiny from lawmakers and state governments. On October 2, Sanders introduced the Ban Flock Act, co-sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Jeff Merkley. The bill would bar federal agencies from using ALPRs or accessing data from readers run by local police and private companies, with exceptions such as toll collection; TechCrunch said it faces long odds. TechCrunch also reported that Florida and Texas have moved to block Flock cameras over privacy concerns, and that Flock cut its default data retention period from 30 days to seven in August.
What to watch
Flock has said it expects an appeal, although the sources do not indicate whether prosecutors have filed one. 404 Media reported that several other cases around the country are weighing the legality of warrantless ALPR searches, so further rulings could either follow Hill’s reasoning or reject it.
The caveats
The decision is a single trial-court ruling tied to the facts of one traffic stop. The account of the stop comes from the court’s findings, and the quantity of drugs found comes from 404 Media’s reporting rather than the opinion itself.
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