A federal judge ruled this week that a Tulsa, Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights when using Flock Safety to search for her license plate without a warrant. 

As reported by 404 Media, this ruling does not create a binding precedent, but it is one of the first times that a federal judge has ruled that a Flock search is unconstitutional.

In this case, Judge Sara Hill said the deputy should have obtained a warrant before searching the Flock database for the woman’s license plate, as he had “no apparent reason” for the search “other than the fact that [the woman’s vehicle] had a California license plate.”

The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth. But Judge Hill wrote that all evidence obtained after the Flock search “must be suppressed as the fruit of a poisonous tree.”

Judge Hill also took broader aim at warrantless searches of the Flock database, writing that tracking people’s location — even when they’re in public places — becomes “constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient.”

“This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance,” Hill wrote. “It is not targeted on a single individual, as in [Carpenter v. United States, a Supreme Court case focused on how government agencies access location data from cell phones]. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.”

Hill joins a growing chorus of Flock critics from across the political spectrum. Numerous local and state governments, including Florida and Texas, have said they will stop using the technology. And on Friday, Senator Bernie Sanders — a Democrat from Vermont — introduced the Block Flock Act, which would bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers such 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 enforcement officers using the Flock system. And with all those cancellations, Flock has also reportedly offered voluntary employee buyouts as a way to shrink its workforce.

A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Ogun State, Segun Showunmi, has urged non-indigenes and hunters in the state to exercise patience and vote for liberation in the 2027 presidential election.

Showunmi, who is the Convener of The Alternative Movement, said the 2027 election should be seen as an election of liberation where all votes must go to President Bola Tinubu.

He spoke on Saturday in Abeokuta during a meeting with members of non-indigene associations and hunters’ groups drawn from across the state.

The PDP chieftain told the groups, comprising Igbo, Igede, Tiv, Calabar and Edo communities, that their patience and political maturity would pave the way for an Igbo presidency in the future.

“Our people have been very fair to the Igbos. The only thing remaining is that Presidency, but nobody can get Presidency by fighting every time. Just calm down. Very, very soon, we will carry an Igbo man and put him in that Villa.”

He said if the South-West, South-South, South-East and North-Central give Tinubu overwhelming votes, it would send a strong message that no region is more important than the other.

“The only way to do that is to use the 2027 election to make a strong statement that nobody is more important than another person in this country,” he said.

He described non-indigenes as the “Ogun Tribe” and said they remain central to the commerce and development of the state, promising to always stand by them whenever they are maltreated.

Showunmi urged them to mobilise massively across Ogun Central, Ogun East and Ogun West and deliver bloc votes for Tinubu.

According to him, Ogun State must deliver close to 2.5 million votes for Tinubu to demonstrate the political strength of the South-West, stressing that winning alone is not enough, but the margin of victory must be loud enough to prove that zoning must be respected by all regions.