Federal fairness calls Flock 'indiscriminate bulk surveillance'

12:33 PM PDT · October 3, 2026

A national fairness ruled this week that a Tulsa, Oklahoma sheriff’s delegate violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment entitlements whenever using Flock Safety to hunt for her licence dish without a warrant. 

As reported by 404 Media, this ruling does not create a binding precedent, but it is among the archetypal times that a national fairness has ruled that a Flock hunt is unconstitutional.

In this case, Judge Sara Hill stated the delegate should have obtained a justify before searching the Flock repository for the woman’s licence plate, as he had “no apparent reason” for the hunt “other than the fact that [the woman’s vehicle] had a California licence plate.”

The delegate afterward used the woman’s journey former in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, anywhere he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth. But Judge Hill wrote that all evidence obtained following the Flock hunt “must be suppressed as the create of a poisonous tree.”

Judge Hill additionally took broader aim at warrantless searches of the Flock database, penning that tracking people’s location — equal whenever they’re in community places — becomes “constitutionally problematic whenever law implementation can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts complete an extended duration of period and afterward use that data for any intent whenever convenient.”

“This is a category of indiscriminate bulk surveillance,” Hill wrote. “It is not targeted on a sole individual, as in [Carpenter v. United States, a Supreme Court case focused on how authorities agencies admission location data from division phones]. It is a tool that collects data concerning all vehicles that continue by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the data to law implementation on demand.”

Hill joins a expanding chorus of Flock critics from throughout the governmental spectrum. Numerous local and province governments, including Florida and Texas, have stated they volition halt using the technology. And on Friday, Senator Bernie Sanders — a Democrat from Vermont — introduced the Block Flock Act, which would bar national agencies from using automated licence dish readers specified as Flock.

Flock CEO Garretty Langley — who we’ll be interviewing on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt — has called for a “compromise” between privacy and safety and offered an apology to women who have been stalked by law implementation officers using the Flock system. And alongside all those cancellations, Flock has additionally reportedly offered voluntary employee buyouts as a way to shrink its workforce.