There are more than 100,000 Flock Safety cameras bolted to poles across the United States right now, and there’s a good chance one of them has already read your license plate today. It didn’t need your permission. It didn’t need a warrant. It just needed you to drive past.
That’s the whole business model — and until three weeks ago, it was also the whole legal argument for why none of this counted as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.
How the dragnet works
Flock’s cameras aren’t traffic cameras. They don’t care if you’re speeding. Each one photographs every plate that passes, tags it with a timestamp, location, and vehicle description, and dumps it into a searchable database that police departments — and, as it turns out, a lot of people who aren’t police departments — can query later. One camera snapping one photo of one car isn’t much. A hundred thousand cameras logging everyone’s car, everywhere, all the time, is a different animal: a rolling record of who went where, when, and how often.
That distinction — one photo versus the whole pattern of your life — is exactly what a federal judge in Virginia was wrestling with in January.
The Norfolk case
In October 2024, Norfolk residents Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington sued their city with backing from the Institute for Justice, after learning Flock’s cameras had photographed their vehicles 475 and 325 times, respectively, over just four months. Their argument: a city that photographs your car every time you leave your driveway has effectively put you under surveillance without ever asking a judge for permission.
In January 2026, Chief Judge Mark S. Davis of the Eastern District of Virginia sided with the city — for now. He found the plaintiffs hadn’t shown Norfolk’s network was capable of tracking the whole of a person’s movements, and that snapshots at discrete locations, standing alone, don’t add up to a search. But he didn’t slam the door. Davis wrote that “as the number and capabilities of ALPR cameras expand, the constitutional balancing could conceivably tip the other way.” Schmidt and Arrington are appealing to the Fourth Circuit, where the ACLU has already filed an amicus brief arguing that a system logging every vehicle movement across a metro area can reveal where someone sleeps, worships, sees a doctor, or attends a political rally — the kind of intimate mosaic the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect.
Flock itself tried to jump into the Norfolk case last year to help defend it. A judge said no — the company’s motion was “untimely” and would “throw this case off the rails.”
Then the Supreme Court weighed in
On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States, a case about a geofence warrant used to pull Google location data on everyone near a Virginia bank robbery. In a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Kagan, the Court held that people retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their location history even when a third-party company is the one holding it — rejecting the government’s argument that turning on location services waives your Fourth Amendment rights. Pulling that data, the Court said, is a search.
Chatrie isn’t an ALPR case. But it leans hard on the same “mosaic theory” logic Norfolk’s plaintiffs are relying on — the idea, traced back to Carpenter v. United States (2018), that individually mundane data points (one photo, one location ping) can add up to something constitutionally protected once you aggregate enough of them. Every court now weighing a Flock lawsuit has a fresh Supreme Court opinion telling them that aggregated location data is exactly the kind of thing the Fourth Amendment was written to reach.
Meanwhile, the bigger scandal might not be the cameras — it’s who’s looking at them
While the courts sort out the constitutional question, a separate mess has been driving cities to rip Flock’s cameras out entirely: audit logs showing federal agencies — ICE, CBP, FBI, ATF — querying local police departments’ Flock networks, seemingly without those departments’ authorization. A class action filed in San Francisco in February 2026 alleges out-of-state and federal agencies queried SFPD’s network more than 1.6 million times in seven months, with some local officers apparently running searches on federal agencies’ behalf and logging “ICE” or “immigration” as the reason.
The fallout has been fast. More than 80 cities have canceled or paused their Flock contracts as of mid-2026. Denver pulled all 110 of its cameras when its contract lapsed in March, replacing them with a vendor offering tighter data controls. Dayton, Ohio, couldn’t get out of its contract in time — so it physically covered the camera lenses. Colorado and Washington have both passed laws in 2026 requiring a warrant before local ALPR data can be handed to federal agencies.
Where this leaves you
Right now, whether a camera network like Flock’s counts as a Fourth Amendment “search” depends on where you live, which judge you draw, and how big the network gets. Nothing about that is settled — the Norfolk appeal is pending, Chatrie just handed civil-liberties lawyers a fresh precedent to build on, and state legislatures are moving faster than Congress on the data-sharing question. What’s not in dispute is the scale: this is a live surveillance network, built without a warrant requirement, currently being queried by more agencies than most city councils realized when they signed the contract.
We’ll keep tracking this one — the Fourth Circuit appeal, and any state legislation that lands, will get their own follow-ups.
Sources:
- Institute for Justice — Norfolk case press releases
- Courthouse News — Judge holds Norfolk’s license plate reader use constitutional
- EFF — Victory! Supreme Court Says Constitution Protects People’s Location Data
- SCOTUSblog — Chatrie v. United States
- Tech Times — Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel
- NPR — Why some cities are canceling Flock license plate reader contracts
- ACLU — Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras