Tag: warrantless surveillance

Federal Judge Rules Warrantless Flock Search Unconstitutional After Deputy Pulls Month of Driver’s Travel History — Calls System ‘Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance’

A federal judge in Oklahoma just threw out a drug case after ruling that police violated the Fourth Amendment when they used Flock Safety’s automated license-plate cameras to pull a driver’s travel history for roughly a month, without a warrant, and without probable cause.

U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma ruled that Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy Freddie Alaniz conducted an “Unconstitutional Warrantless Search” when he queried Flock and other automated license plate reader systems on a Mazda SUV simply because it had a California plate.

According to 404 Media, the search returned more than 50 records of the driver’s whereabouts across the country. Hill suppressed the Flock records and everything that came out of the later search of the vehicle.

The defendant is Melisa Kyle, 46, of Crane, Missouri, charged with possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute.

According to Law Commentary, the case began in May when Alaniz, who also served as a DEA task force officer, was parked along Interstate 44, saw the California plate, pulled onto the highway, and started following the SUV.

He later stopped Kyle for changing lanes without a signal, then used the Flock history to question her about her travel and to justify searching the car.

Authorities said they found about 91 pounds of methamphetamine packed in luggage, marijuana, and roughly $7,000 in cash. Hill ruled the constitutional violation happened earlier, when the deputy reached into the historical location database.

Keep reading

Border Agents Are Randomly Seizing Phones of US Citizens Who Support Palestine

Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.

Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.

“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.

He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.

Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.

Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.

She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.

Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.

“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”

The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.

Keep reading

The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

The Border Search Exception Meets Your Phone

The Fourth Amendment requires that government searches of persons or property be reasonable, which usually means obtaining a warrant based on probable cause from a judge.

But a warrantless search can still be reasonable if it falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, including the exception that allows officers to search your belongings at the border. The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports, given the government’s interests in controlling who and what may enter the country.

Historically, courts have categorized border searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects as “routine” and thus reasonable even if conducted without any suspicion that the traveler has engaged in wrongdoing; courts have also held that more invasive “nonroutine” searches, such as certain body searches and searches that damage property, require reasonable suspicion.

But a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.

The Supreme Court addressed cell phone privacy in Riley v. California (2014), holding that the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement did not apply to cell phones, thereby generally requiring a warrant for phone searches, at least at the interior of the country. The court recognized the unprecedented privacy interests people have in their cell phones and how even brief manual searches can reveal the “sum of an individual’s private life,” including our political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexuality, and more. Accordingly, the Supreme Court held that because electronic device searches bear “little resemblance” to searches of bags or physical containers, they should be evaluated differently.

Following Riley, the Fourth Circuit considered two border device search cases involving forensic searches, in which border officers used external software to extract and analyze a device’s data.

In U.S. v. Kolsuz (2018), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic search of a cell phone at the border “must be considered a nonroutine border search, requiring some measure of individualized suspicion” of a transnational offense, but the court declined to decide whether the standard is only reasonable suspicion or instead a probable cause warrant.

Then in U.S. v. Aigbekaen (2019), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic device search at the border in support of a purely domestic law enforcement investigation requires a warrant. The court also reiterated the general Kolsuz rule for a forensic border-related device search: the “Government must have individualized suspicion of an offense that bears some nexus to the border search exception’s purposes of protecting national security, collecting duties, blocking the entry of unwanted persons, or disrupting efforts to export or import contraband.”

In Belmonte Cardozo, manual searches were finally before the court.

Keep reading

Government Spy Hubs Are Surveilling Anti-Flock Camera Activists

Government spy hubs across America are surveilling activists seeking to remove Flock surveillance cameras from their cities and towns according to documents obtained by Deeper States. These intelligence products show dozens of state fusion centers and their counterparts in the FBI and DHS circulating memos warning that peaceful protesters organizing to stop AI powered surveillance cameras in their backyard are a national security threat.

Alongside the grassroots movement to stop data centers in communities across the country, Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader systems have stirred similar outpourings of civic outrage. At town halls and city council meetings, citizens from all walks of life have demanded local legislators ban flock cameras from being used in their localities. These efforts have found success with over 100 cities canceling their Flock contracts.

Anti-surveillance sentiment has coalesced with the activist organization DeFlock, which maps the tens of thousands of flock cameras pockmarking the country and offers resources to activists who oppose the widespread adaptation of automated license plate readers.

According to Deflock’s mission statement, “ALPRs [automated license plate readers] are a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties. These systems continuously record your movements without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. Your driving history is rarely confined to the town or city where the cameras are installed. It’s typically shared with thousands of other agencies nationwide (secretly). Once the data is out of your community, you have no control over how it’s used or what rules apply”.

The organization also points to intentional misuse of Flock systems for stalking and the potential for misidentification of suspects leading to false arrests as further cause for concern. Last year, flock CEO Garett Langley described Deflock activists as a “terroristic organization”, a description he was forced to walk back this week after widespread outrage at the resurfaced comments.

“My comments were a mistake and I apologize,” Langley told Forbes. “There are groups today that have real valid criticisms of the business, and I think what’s changed for us is, as we’ve listened to them and heard them out, what we’re trying to do is find this balance. We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy.”

Despite Langley’s retreat, intelligence agencies are approaching Deflock’s constitutionally protected speech and organizing with the same tools and language they apply to terrorism. One report obtained by Deeper States and generated by the Wisconsin State Wide Intelligence Center shows intelligence components surveilling organizers of Deflock “days of action” in Alaska and Wisconsin.

Keep reading

No Fourth Amendment In American Airports?

Do you, as an American citizen, have to hand over your cell phone — along with the access code to open it — upon a (warrantless) demand by a border agent at the airport?

There’s a case grinding through the courts about that right now because one man, a Mr. Sam Tunick, refused.  

Not only did he refuse but he had an app on his phone that triggered its erasure once you keyed in a particular code to open it.  That was the code he gave CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) when they demanded his code to open it.  And then his phone was, indeed, erased right there on the spot, in the hands of the CBP agent.

That’s when CBP got really p***ed off.

According to the reporting on his case, this man was not a criminal.  He was not under suspicion or surveillance for anything, so far as we know. He is not related to Spencer Tunick, an artist who famously creates mass nude photo shoots in public places. He was, in point of fact, a left-wing activist with environmental interests, but, again, without any contact with or prior interest from law enforcement that we know of.

He was just a guy.  Coming home from an international trip (the Dominican Republic.).

You may well be thinking, “A left-wing activist with an erasure code?  Sounds suspicious!”

Let me pause to explain why I don’t think so.

A “right-winger” I know just traveled internationally recently and she traveled with a burner phone to avoid exactly this kind of search in another country.  It was England specifically.  

In England there is no Fourth Amendment and they can search your phone when you land.  They also have no First Amendment and they have terrible censorship laws now.  You can be arrested and jailed for social media posts.  Even some perfectly benign ones, like “Islam is incompatible with Liberty” — that kind of thing.

The Dominican Republic also has no Fourth Amendment and if they simply suspect you have contraband or are engaged in some other illegal activity (so a very wide berth), they have every right to inspect your phone.  Maybe this young man just didn’t want the hassle. Maybe this app was this “left-winger’s” choice instead of a burner, and in the heat of the moment, decided to deploy it once facing our own CPB here in the U.S.

In short, I don’t find it suspicious at all knowing the legal overreach climate we are living in now.  And we certainly can’t be searching American citizens and seizing their devices based on politics alone.  I hope we can all agree on that.

Back to the case:

One attorney, Mike Fox of the Cato Institute characterized Mr. Tunick’s situation this way: “This is new, uncharted territory.”

The Supreme Court has never ruled on your Fourth Amendment rights as they specifically relate to your cell phone at American airports/border crossings.  They have ruled on whether or not your phone is searchable in the interior of the United States and the answer is “no” — not without a warrant.

But somehow an American in an American airport on American soil has to surrender his rights to an American customs agent?  What is this sorcery?

Let’s review the Fourth Amendment, in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court has ruled on Fourth Amendment exceptions at border crossings, but not cell phones in particular.  That’s why you have to go through customs and scanners and open your luggage, etc.  We’ve all been doing it forever without a thought.

But your phone ought to be a separate matter entirely, containing as it does, your digital “papers and effects.”  According to the available reporting, there was no “probable cause” to search Mr. Tunick. CPB wasn’t looking for anything specific, which is what a warrant would demand.  They just wanted to go out on a scenic drive, seeing what they could see on his phone.

Hell. No.

Keep reading

The War on Drugs Has Come to the Maternity Ward

At first glance, a new mother taking part in a drug screening seems reasonable. For the sake of the mother and child, a doctor performs a clinical test to rule out any complications or signs of risks to the newborn.

But the story quickly takes a dark turn. If there’s a positive test result, it doesn’t stay between the doctor and the patient. In 24 states and Washington, D.C., a positive test alone is enough to initiate a child welfare report, according to a report by the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association. Depending on the state, that test could land the mother on a child abuse registry. Worse still, the mother may be notified the test has occurred only after the fact.

This seems to run afoul of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ferguson v. City of Charleston (2001), where the Court found it unconstitutional to drug test pregnant women without consent solely for “law enforcement purposes.” 

However, Enrima Ukoha, an obstetrician-gynecologist and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, tells Reason this practice—known as “test and report”—is “common” and “often happens in non-consensual ways.” In fact, over six years, The Marshall Project found “at least 70,000 cases in 21 states” where parents were referred to law enforcement after a positive test for drug or alcohol use.

Ukoha says a lot of medical professionals are influenced by “stereotypes and stigma” associated with people who use substances in pregnancy, leading them to make “false assumptions about their ability to parent.”

The practice developed as part of the response to the opioid crisis roiling the nation. Each year, nearly 10 percent of births in the U.S. are affected by drug or alcohol use. 

To deal with the issue, Congress amended the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 in ways that made it easier for these nonconsensual tests to occur. The 1974 law ties federal grant funding to state-level development of “plans of safe care” for infants “born and identified as being affected by substance abuse or withdrawal symptoms.” It also requires healthcare providers involved in the “delivery or care” of affected infants to “notify the child protective services system”; however, it also states that nothing in the law should be read as requiring “prosecution for any illegal action.”

In 2016, Congress passed an amendment changing the requirement to include infants affected by all substance abuse by striking the word illegal from its substance abuse clause. In 2018, lawmakers passed another amendment that put money behind the idea, authorizing grants to assist state agencies with “developing, updating, implementing, and monitoring” their plans of safe care. And in 2019, the law was again amended to provide “civil and criminal liability” to anyone who makes a “good-faith report of child abuse or neglect.”

There is no federal definition for child abuse or neglect. Left to their own devices, each state has adopted different standards for reporting and treatment. Ukoha says the process “varies across providers, institutions, and states,” but the result is that “individuals are tested in pregnancy without their knowledge or consent.” 

Apart from potentially being separated from their newborns, mothers risk placement on child abuse registries—which would prevent them from holding certain jobs or participating in school activities—or incarceration. In the case of Idaho mom Nicole Hamann, one positive test for THC got her 10 years on the state’s child protection registry, according to a joint report by CBS News and The Marshall Project. 

But moms can find themselves facing criminal charges even when the substances are legal. In South Carolina, Ayanna Harris-Rashid was arrested and faced a 10-year felony sentence after testing positive for THC. Harris-Rashid admitted to using CBD, which is legal in the state and can contain trace amounts of THC, to “relieve cramping and nausea.” Her charges were dropped a year after her arrest. 

Keep reading

Police Are Deploying 60 MPH Autonomous Drones to Read Your License Plate from the Sky

If you thought Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) were deeply invasive when they were just mounted to neighborhood stop signs and hidden inside speed trailers, you might want to look up.

The company that built a massive, interconnected surveillance net across American roadways has officially taken its technology airborne. As highlighted in a viral X post by Josh Walkos, Flock is rolling out “Flock Alpha”—a highly advanced, autonomous police drone designed to track vehicles and suspects from the sky.

Walkos perfectly captured the escalating nature of the tech in his post: “Remember when everyone was told Flock was ‘just reading license plates’? Anyway, here’s Flock Alpha, the autonomous drone.”

The “Drone as a First Responder” Play

Flock isn’t just selling a standard quadcopter; they are aggressively pushing a concept known as “Drone as First Responder” (DFR). Following a strategic partnership with aviation software company Aerodome, Flock integrated its existing street-level surveillance web directly into an autonomous aerial platform.

The specs on the Flock Alpha are undeniably impressive—and for privacy advocates, entirely terrifying.

When a 911 call, a gunshot audio sensor, or a street-level ALPR camera triggers an alert, an officer can deploy the Alpha drone directly from their smartphone. The drone launches itself from a weatherproof docking station and can reach the scene at speeds up to 60 MPH. According to Flock’s promotional materials, the drone arrives first on the scene 78% of the time, long before patrol cars can navigate traffic.

Keep reading

“Don’t Flock Me”: Massie Readies Bill To Yank Federal Cash From Cities And Police Departments Running Flock Cameras

On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced he’ll soon sponsor “a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments” that deploy Flock-style cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens. He attached a Gadsden flag parody: a coiled rattlesnake wrapped around an automated license plate reader on a pole, over the words “don’t flock me.”

Rather than regulating or litigating the cameras, Massie’s bill would cut off federal funding to every city and police department that installs them. Flock’s business model runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities, so a funding-withholding bill aims directly at its customer base.

Third Strike In A Week

Massie’s bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days.

On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers – Flock is named explicitly – along with biometric tracking tech covering fingerprints, iris, voice, and gait. Any data a federal agency obtained would have to be deleted within 30 days and would be inadmissible in court. Burchett’s pitch: “We gotta ban these dadgum things.”

Earlier this month, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) tried to attach an amendment restricting the readers in committee. It failed, and Perry responded that the fight wasn’t over: “STOP THE FLOCK.”

In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans, ban warrantless facial recognition in public spaces, block the government from buying its way around the Fourth Amendment via third-party data brokers, and make individual federal employees personally suable for violations. Boebert’s framing: the government is building a “digital footprint of your entire life” without a warrant or probable cause.

Keep reading

Georgia Cops Keep Getting Arrested And Fired For Illegally Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People, But Surely Those 17 Bad Apples Aren’t Representative Of The Entire Bunch

“Another Georgia cop accused of misusing Flock data in growing trend,” the USA Today headline reads. If you remember now-former Braselton police chief Michael Steffman’s arrest on stalking charges last year, it would be understandable if you assumed CBS News meant a second Georgia officer had been arrested for misusing Flock’s license plate data to stalk their victims. There couldn’t be that many bad cops getting arrested in one state, right? Well, that depends on whether your definition of “not that many” because USA Today reports that at least 17 Georgia cops have been accused of Flock-stalking in just the last couple of months. 

Former Sergeant Kabiru Salawu lost the job he’d held with the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office since 2009, after he was arrested over allegations that he engaged in “unauthorized use of the agency’s Flock Safety technology.” Salawu currently faces a felony charge for violating his oath of office, but in Georgia, misuse of license plate data is charged as a misdemeanor. For now, the sheriff’s office hasn’t released any information on how it caught Salawu, nor have they explained what he’s accused of using Flock’s system to do.

According to CBS News, Salawu’s arrest brings the total number of law enforcement officers accused of abusing their access to the private surveillance system that tracks everyone everywhere all the time, even if you don’t drive a car or have a license plate visible, to 10 “in recent weeks.” Not months or years. Weeks. As internal audits continue, don’t be surprised to see those numbers rise in the coming weeks, either. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, and if internal audits turned up enough evidence to charge 17 officers over the last several months, it stands to reason that ongoing investigations will turn up evidence of even more abuses within the Georgia law enforcement community.

Keep reading

Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed

While Flock claims its system tracks vehicles, not people, the documented record of police chiefs stalking ex-partners through Flock shows otherwise. When the most experienced, highest-ranking officers in law enforcement, the people most responsible for enforcing the rules, demonstrate ongoing abuses, the answer is the same courts have given for each generation of powerful tracking technology: require a warrant first.

The police chief of Holiday Hills, Illinois, and a part-time officer at Prairie Grove Police Department, was arrested June 18, 2026, and charged with two counts of official misconduct, a Class 3 felony.

Prosecutors alleged he used Prairie Grove’s Flock license plate reader system and the Illinois State Police LEADS database to track six people he knew personally.

Three of those people were women the chief had been in romantic relationships with, according to prosecutors at his arraignment. He also tracked an ex-boyfriend of one of those women, running that man’s plate 140 times over several months, a figure the protective order petition put at 178, with 86 of those searches conducted while off duty.

Keep reading