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1/6 A federal judge in Oklahoma threw out Flock license-plate-reader evidence, ruling a warrantless search of a month of a driver's movements unconstitutional — citing June's Supreme Court Chatrie decision. First of its kind:

therecord.mediaOklahoma judge’s Flock ruling shows the power of Supreme Court’s digital evidence decisionHow a recent Supreme Court decision on geofencing influenced a federal judge to toss a sheriff's Flock camera evidence in a drug trafficking case.

8/10/26, 3:34 pm3 reposts14 likes

NACDL

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2/6 The stop: a Tulsa County deputy pulled over Melisa Kyle mainly for a California plate, then used Flock's national network to pull 50 sightings of her car across a month. Judge Sara Hill called it "indiscriminate mass surveillance," a warrantless search — and suppressed the evidence.

NACDL

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3/6 Why it's a big deal: for years, courts let police run plate-reader searches without a warrant, reasoning public roads carry no privacy. Hill broke from that — one of the first federal rulings that searching historic ALPR data can violate the Fourth Amendment, built directly on Chatrie.

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4/6 Sidney Thaxter, senior litigator at NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center, on why it matters: "ALPR networks run against us all even if we have not committed a crime and allow police to retroactively track our whereabouts with the press of a few buttons."

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5/6 Thaxter: the ruling "correctly recognized that Chatrie holds that our location history is constitutionally protected and a warrant is required to track our physical movements." The parallels between cellphone and plate-reader records, he said, "practically leap off the page."