A federal judge ruled that a sheriff’s deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by searching a month’s worth of a woman’s location history through automated license plate reader databases without a warrant.
On Oct. 1, U.S. District Judge Sara Hill, in the Northern District of Oklahoma, granted a motion to suppress in the case of Melisa Kyle, who was charged after a 2026 traffic stop. Tulsa County Deputy Freddie Alaniz had used two license plate reader systems, Flock and VehicleManager, to pull Kyle’s historical vehicle locations, according to the ruling.
Flock Safety has become a name synonymous with tracking and surveillance, creating technology allowing cameras to photograph passing vehicles and feed that data into a searchable national network used by thousands of law enforcement agencies. The issue, combined with others like AI and data centers, have galvanized swaths of the American public in certain opposition.
The decision is a trial court order and not binding precedent. A single district judge’s opinion governs the case before it but does not bind other judges, even in the same district, though it can be persuasive elsewhere.
Hill noted that neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have decided whether using the technology counts as a search. Most courts considering the question, including three other Oklahoma federal courts, have reached the opposite conclusion.
50 Sightings in One Month
Alaniz was watching traffic from the side of a highway near Tulsa when he saw Kyle’s Mazda SUV with a California license plate and began following it “for no apparent reason other than” the plate, Hill wrote, according to court documents.
He ran a query on the Flock system, logging the reason as “traffic violation” and “investigation” even though, according to the ruling, “all Alaniz knew was that the vehicle had a California license plate.”
The search returned more than 50 sightings of the vehicle across multiple states over roughly a month. Alaniz then stopped Kyle for following another car too closely.
Hill found the stop itself was justified but that the deputy unlawfully prolonged it, detaining Kyle for a drug-dog sniff after he had returned her license and without reasonable suspicion of a crime.
The canine search turned up marijuana, leading to her arrest.
A Month of History Used
Hill said that pulling Kyle’s accumulated location history “intruded on [Kyle’s] reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements,” making it a search that required a warrant.
That conclusion rested on two Supreme Court decisions. One was Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 ruling on cellphone location data.
The other is Chatrie v. United States, decided June 29 of this year. Here, the justices found that obtaining a person’s digital location history amounts to a search, and Hill extended that reasoning to networked license-plate databases.
Photographing a license plate on a public road is not the constitutional problem, she wrote. The problem is the government’s ability to retrospectively reconstruct a month of a person’s movements from a networked database, which she called “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.”
She wrote that older precedent, including a 1983 case about a tracking “beeper,” should be reexamined as the technology advances. She pointed to the possibility of “law enforcement using a fleet of drones hovering over an entire city.”
Most Courts Have Sided With Police
Prosecutors argued that license-plate-reader data is in plain view on public roadways.
Therefore, Kyle had no reasonable expectation of privacy in it, and Oklahoma’s law governing the technology was irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment question.
But Judge Hill rejected both. By her own admission, she took a minority position.
Most courts that have examined license plate reader technology have found it is not a search, reasoning that people have no legitimate expectation of privacy in their movements on public streets.
Those decisions, Hill wrote, lean too heavily on older cases and don’t account for how the technology has changed.
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