The case of U.S. v. Kyle, heard in the Northern District Court of Oklahoma, is a complicated one. But it has been decided. And the result is especially interesting: “ALPR technology comes with remarkable benefits that the Court cannot ignore. But the Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great.”
Paul Jacob has written about the underlying issue before — most recently in August. “ALPR” tech stands for “Automatic License Plate Recognition” instrumentation, which translates, in the common tongue, to “Flock cameras” . . . and their linked a.i. systems. And U.S. v. Kyle has been decided for Ms. Kyle and against Flock:
[Officer] Alaniz’s search in just the ALPR system provided him with more than 50 individual records of [defendant Melisa Susan] Kyle’s whereabouts across the country for an entire month. The Court finds that because the ALPR systems Alaniz used to search Kyle’s historical location information intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of her physical movements, it was a search under the Fourth Amendment.
The upshot? “IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED that the Defendant’s Opposed Motion to Suppress [ECF No. 47] is GRANTED. . . .”
The Flock surveillance advance has received major pushback at last.