Source: TechCrunch
A federal judge has ruled that using Flock—the automated license plate reader network now deployed by thousands of police departments—constitutes unconstitutional mass surveillance when applied to search for specific individuals. This is the first significant legal pushback against Flock's business model of aggregating and selling access to billions of plate reads, and it creates real liability for law enforcement agencies that use the platform without individualized suspicion or warrants. The ruling doesn't ban the technology but narrows its use cases and suggests courts will increasingly scrutinize how police conduct dragnet database searches. This could fragment the nationwide surveillance infrastructure Flock has spent years building.