The lower instance federal courts are making their rulings regarding license plate readers (LPRs) – and they are so far coming in contradictory.
The latest is from a federal judge in Oklahoma who has no doubt that the technology is “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” that is approaching a “dragnet type law enforcement practice” – and that the system is “constitutionally problematic” because it lets the police “indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.”
US District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma made this and other points in her ruling in United States v. Kyle, where she said that a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy violated the Fourth Amendment when he searched LPR systems without a warrant.
The case started with the traffic stop of a Mazda SUV with a California license plate that passed the deputy’s camera as he was parked by the highway. The judge said the deputy followed the car “for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate.”
The vehicle was driven by Melisa Kyle, and the stop was justified as the deputy said she had changed lanes without signaling and was following another car too closely. But before he pulled her over, the deputy ran the plate through two LPR databases, Flock and VehicleManager.
The judge said this gave him access to “more than 50 individual records of Kyle’s whereabouts across the country for an entire month,” and that he had access to at least 30 days of the vehicle’s location information in many states.
The deputy used this information to help justify searching her car.
That search produced about 91 pounds of methamphetamine, and Kyle, 46, of Crane, Missouri, is now charged with possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute. But the judge has ruled that the evidence was obtained illegally and suppressed it.
The ruling said the search “was not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant in violation of Kyle’s Fourth Amendment rights.” The judge also suppressed “all evidence obtained after Alaniz initiated the ALPR search.”
The judge accepted that the technology has “remarkable benefits” but also asked, “why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time? The government cannot go snooping through our personal lives and business without an adequate basis to do so.”
In her ruling, Judge Hill also said that people “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on a public roadway” – but that the LPR technology “becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.”
The ruling is in contrast to one made in March by the Fifth Circuit, which found that police use of plate reader data was not a Fourth Amendment search where the system produced periodic sightings of a car on public roads. And in California, a federal court has ruled that police can search for and look at eight photographs of a car taken by license plate readers, and that does not constitute a Fourth Amendment search.
In the Kyle case, eight photos may be one thing, but a month’s worth of someone’s movements is a different story. And that story is one of mass surveillance.
The difference is the database – and it keeps growing.
