SCOTUS Ruling Could Be Bad News for Flock — But Won’t Stop Mass Surveillance
July 11, 2026
By Mike Ludwig
This article was originally published by Truthout
Organizers across the country are using every tool in their arsenal against Flock surveillance cameras.
Civil rights attorneys say a recent Supreme Court ruling in a landmark digital privacy case could put “wind in the sails” of local organizers challenging police deployment of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). However, those organizers in cities large and small still face both a powerful industry and police departments determined to outfit their forces with the latest tech. It will take more than a single Supreme Court ruling to unravel the rapidly growing system of AI-powered mass surveillance.
The Supreme Court ruled on June 29 that so-called “geofence” requests issued by police departments to Big Tech companies for data from cellphones located within a certain geographical boundary at a specific time are considered a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. In other words, cops are supposed to get a warrant from a judge before demanding that a cellphone company hand over the location data attached to all of its users who happened to be present near the scene of an alleged crime.
While the Supreme Court did not mention ALPRs in their decision, experts say the ruling could have major implications for police searches of data gathered by cameras from surveillance companies like Flock on the street. ALPRs can identify a vehicle’s location at a specific date and time as well as make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points, according to DeFlock.org.
“The court is really focusing on the mass surveillance aspect of these technologies,” said Michael Soyfer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, in a call with reporters on July 8 in relation to the recent ruling.
The Supreme Court case, Chatrie v. United States, stems from a 2019 robbery at a credit union and the use of smartphone data to track down a suspect. Police asked Google for location data potentially going back months or years from all the cellphones in a specific area in and around the credit union, creating the digital “geofence.” By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court to consider whether the geofence request complied with the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals from “unreasonable” searches and seizures by the government.
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan argued that “[a]n individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cellphone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information — even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.”
Soyfer reiterated Kagan’s point, stating that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy about their movements and daily routines, which can be tracked by police searching ALPR databases with powerful AI tools. Under Chatrie, defense attorneys can now argue that such searches violate the Fourth Amendment without a warrant from a judge.
“A tiny fraction of all the billions of data points these cameras capture across the country are relevant to any criminal investigation, and all of that data is held in a police database that lots of people can access,” Soyfer said. “It’s about police being able to go back in time and reconstruct someone’s movements despite not having any reason to suspect them when the data was collected.”
Stalking Cops and a Wave of Scandals
The ruling comes amid a wave of controversy and scandals involving ALPR cameras sold to local governments by the company Flock Safety and its competitors — including aggressive wrongful arrests, and multiple cases of cops using the cameras to stalk romantic partners. Across the country, people are packing into city council meetings to pepper leaders with questions about privacy or demand that ALPR cameras be taken down altogether.
Shelby Leighton, a public interest attorney who organized against Flock cameras in her neighborhood of South Portland, Maine, said the Supreme Court ruling confirms what activists on the ground have been saying for months. However, the slow-moving legal system cannot keep up with rapid advances in technology, and courts often intervene only after police collect personal data without a warrant.
“When you are tracking everywhere someone goes, that is a ‘search’ under the Fourth Amendment, and if police are accessing that data without a warrant, that violates people’s constitutional rights,” Leighton said in an interview. “But the decision also highlights the limitations of a legal approach to this problem.”
While Chatrie involved cellphone data, Soyfer said the ruling will shape litigation over ALPRs, which scan every passing car for identifying information and allow police to track people’s movements without a warrant. The Institute for Justice has filed lawsuits challenging ALPRs on behalf of residents of Norfolk, Virginia; and San Jose, California. More than 113,000 ALPRs operate nationwide in hundreds of cities; most are made by Flock Safety, though competitors such as Axon and Motorola Solutions also make license plate readers. At least 82 jurisdictions have canceled ALPR contracts or taken the cameras down.
ALPR cameras feed massive, AI-powered databases that can be accessed by multiple law enforcement agencies with little oversight. As Truthout has reported, federal immigration police have used Flock data to arrest undocumented people despite assurances that ALPRs would not be used for President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Flock cameras reportedly collect more than 20 billion data points per month under contracts with roughly 5,000 police departments nationwide. With only about 240 million licensed drivers in the United States, that’s “a lot of data points per person, per month,” Soyfer said.
The Supreme Court’s focus on surveillance comes as Flock Safety and the police and politicians promoting ALPRs come under mounting scrutiny. On July 2, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a damning report documenting how Flock Safety “has lied about its operations, signaling a need for reputable governments to avoid working” with the company.
The report points to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where dozens of residents have expressed concern at recent city council meetings about installing Flock Safety cameras around town. Responding to questions during a council meeting on April 21, Flock’s chief information officer said the company’s system did not create a “pattern” or “heat map” of an individual’s movement by the tracking of their vehicles. The city council approved a contract with Flock the same day.
The next morning, the people of Oshkosh “learned that Flock had lied,” according to the ACLU. Indeed, Flock cameras can create such “heat maps” capable of tracking individuals without a warrant. The city council reconvened later that day and voted to revoke the contract with Flock. ACLU Senior Policy Counsel Chad Marlow and Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley broke down the fallout:
Flock later admitted that its ALPR system does indeed produce a “heat map” that shows where “point-in-time images have been captured of a vehicle” for up to an entire month. However, the company chose to respond to the revocation of its contract by attacking the City of Oshkosh and its city council, complaining that Flock had “not [been] afforded the opportunity” to explain its lie after being caught. Flock also sought to trivialize its factually inaccurate statement by categorizing it as “one small misconception” and referring to the dispute over the system’s heat map tracking feature as “a minor nuance.”
In a statement to local media in Oshkosh, Flock Safety pushed back on the idea that its system can be used to track people, saying “it does not create a pattern of life.” Josh Thomas, a spokesperson for Flock Safety, told Truthout the ACLU report contains “misconceptions” and “simple errors.”
“Moreover, misuse of any law enforcement tool is unacceptable,” Thomas said in an email. “The [wrongful arrest] cases you cite are exactly why Flock builds our technology to include immutable, transparent audit trails, so rare cases of potential abuse can be detected, investigated, and addressed.”
Thomas said every search conducted in the Flock system is “recorded in an immutable audit log” that includes the reason for the search, the user who performed the search, and the search parameters. However, Soyfer said there are often very few limits on who can get an account to access the data and what they can search for.
“We see across the country that many of these databases are searched sometimes thousands of times a day by officers who will give the most vague, non-specific reason for searching, typing in ‘criminal justice’ or ‘investigation’ … and that has predictably led to a lot of abuse,” Soyfer said.
In many cities, data collected by Flock cameras or competing ALPRs is deleted after 30 days, but critics say that is plenty of time to build a profile of an individual’s daily routine without a warrant. An investigation by the Institute for Justice found ALPRs located at sensitive locations, including an abortion clinic, a halfway house, an immigration attorney’s office, a church, a gun range, and a mosque, among other locations.
In the past, police have used ALPRs for immigration enforcement and to track a woman who was forced to flee the state of Texas to seek abortion care. Records show police followed the woman across multiple states after an ex-partner filed a report with police, who initiated a “death investigation” and considered charging the women with a crime.
Facing embarrassing headlines, the local sheriff denied that ALPRs were being used to enforce Texas’s draconian abortion ban, and Flock Safety initially called the story “misleading” and “clickbait.” That sheriff has since been charged with lying to a grand jury and was indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“The audit processes these ALPR companies put in place are simply not being used. They are rarely, if ever, looked at after the fact,” said Institute for Justice attorney Rob Frommer. “A lot of states then double down and say those [searches] are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or public information laws, so nobody can go back and look at what these officers were up to.”
The blowup in Oshkosh was not an isolated incident. According to Marlow and Stanley, it reflects “a pattern of Flock regularly misleading or even lying about its business practices, safety record, commitment to privacy, and efforts to protect vulnerable populations.”
“And as was the case in Oshkosh, Flock’s lies are not just directed at the general public; they often specifically target Flock’s potential government customers,” they wrote.
Local Organizing to Cancel Flock
Leighton said Flock’s record of dishonesty provides an opportunity for activists opposed to ALPRs. In her hometown of South Portland, Leighton said the city council received a presentation on Flock tools from local police and were horrified to learn that the system could track an individual across hundreds of locations. On June 11, the South Portland City Council voted to cancel its contract with Flock, effective immediately.
“Flock is going around lying to police departments and cities, and so, to the extent organizers can draw attention to that, I think it can be a really powerful tool, because cities and police departments don’t like being lied to either,” Leighton said.
Frommer said the Supreme Court decision in Chatrie does not give activists the power to take down ALPRs, but it does provide a powerful set of talking points for confronting city leaders and police chiefs who are eager to install high-tech surveillance systems.
“You can say that it runs against everybody, and it would allow the police to look up when I went to my doctor, or my church, or when I went to the gun range; that seems to be the kind of thing that is really concerning from a privacy perspective,” Frommer said.
However, Leighton said organizers cannot count on court rulings to protect the public from mass surveillance — and especially not from the hard right majority on the Supreme Court. Like the location data in Chatrie, legal challenges to ALPRs will likely involve cases where police already searched Flock databases without a warrant.
“So, organizers have a very important role to play in making sure this data is not collected in the first place,” Leighton said. “The way to prevent people’s Fourth Amendment rights from being violated is to organize.”
