A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a sheriff's deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by searching license plate reader databases without a warrant.
The deputy was parked by the highway when a Mazda SUV with California plates drove past. Judge Sara Hill said he followed it "for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate." Before he pulled the driver over, he ran the plate through Flock and VehicleManager.
That search gave him more than 50 records of her movements across the country over a single month. He then used them to help justify searching her car, which turned up about 91 pounds of methamphetamine.
Hill suppressed all of it. She called the technology "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance" and a "dragnet type law enforcement practice." She also wrote that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public road, but that plate readers become "constitutionally problematic" when police can "indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time."
Other courts disagree. The Fifth Circuit ruled in March that periodic sightings of a car were not a search. A California federal court ruled that looking at eight photos of a car was not a search either.
https://reclaimthenet.org/license-plate-readers-mass-surveillance-ruling
reclaimthenet / Reclaim The Net
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2026-10-07 19:45:26 UTC
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"content": "A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a sheriff's deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by searching license plate reader databases without a warrant.\n\nThe deputy was parked by the highway when a Mazda SUV with California plates drove past. Judge Sara Hill said he followed it \"for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate.\" Before he pulled the driver over, he ran the plate through Flock and VehicleManager.\n\nThat search gave him more than 50 records of her movements across the country over a single month. He then used them to help justify searching her car, which turned up about 91 pounds of methamphetamine.\n\nHill suppressed all of it. She called the technology \"a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance\" and a \"dragnet type law enforcement practice.\" She also wrote that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public road, but that plate readers become \"constitutionally problematic\" when police can \"indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.\"\n\nOther courts disagree. The Fifth Circuit ruled in March that periodic sightings of a car were not a search. A California federal court ruled that looking at eight photos of a car was not a search either.\n\nhttps://reclaimthenet.org/license-plate-readers-mass-surveillance-ruling",
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