A federal appeals court is deciding whether police in Texas should need a judge's approval before searching the Flock license plate camera network to reconstruct where a vehicle has been, The Texas Tribune reported Monday.
The question comes from a Dallas-Fort Worth case. Police used Flock data to tie a man to five armed robberies in several suburbs in 2024 by mapping his travels past the system's vehicle-scanning cameras. He was convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison after U.S. District Judge Terry Means refused to throw out the camera evidence.
His lawyers are now asking the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to set the verdict aside.
The two arguments
At oral arguments in New Orleans on Oct. 5, defense lawyer Matthew Wright said the system lets police pull up a person's movements almost instantly in a way no one has been able to before.
The defense brief argued that because driving is close to unavoidable in North Texas, the cameras are harder to escape than cellphone location tracking, which the U.S. Supreme Court has said is protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Department lawyer Michael Weisbuch countered that Flock captures are episodic, individual photos taken on public roads, where drivers have no legal expectation of privacy. Prosecutors also argued in writing that other evidence, including ordinary surveillance video and phone data, was just as useful, and that the defendant may lack standing because he was a passenger in his sister's car.
Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod asked how many cameras it would take for scattered snapshots to become constant surveillance. Weisbuch said that line is better left to lawmakers.
