This could have major impact on the Flock camera issue…
Police found 91 pounds of meth in Melisa Kyle’s vehicle. Nobody has to squint very hard to understand why law enforcement wanted the drugs off the highway.
The harder question is how police got there.
A Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy saw Kyle driving a Mazda SUV with California plates in Oklahoma. He later searched automated license-plate-reader databases, including Flock Safety’s network, and pulled up more than 50 records showing where the vehicle had been during roughly a month of travel. He used her travel history as part of the basis for searching the SUV.
Police found the meth.
U.S. District Judge Sara Hill still ruled the warrantless database search violated the Fourth Amendment, and suppressed the evidence that followed it. She described the technology as a form of “indiscriminate mass surveillance.”
Full article, HERE from PJ Media.
There is more detail in the article, but this does come down to a 4th Amendment issue, especially in view of the ‘warrantless’ searches and the BS rationales used by officers for their searches.
Hopefully, this will cause a lot of the crap to stop, because without a warrant, I ‘think’ any information used becomes inadmissible, e.g. fruit of the poisonous tree…
- The Tree: The initial illegal action by police, such as an unlawful search, bad arrest, or forced confession.
- The Fruit: Any extra proof found because of that first illegal act.
- The Rule: If the main proof is tainted, the extra proof is also tainted and cannot be used in court.
- The Goal: It builds on the Exclusionary Rule to stop police from breaking constitutional laws to gather evidence.
I don’t know what will happen, but this decision at least shows some judges are becoming aware or more aware of the things being done by the street officers…
Yes, everything you do in public IS subject to surveillance, but using that as a basis for probable cause without a warrant does seem to be, or should be prohibited…
I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know for sure…
Fuck Flock…………………..
That’s all that’s needed
How is warrantless searching of databases different than going door-to-door looking for witnesses and/or asking for Ring doorbell video?
Maybe because in those examples a crime was known to have been committed and they were gathering evidence?
won’t help much. there are many decisions against these sorts of things, like seizure of cash and such but the cops keep right on doing it. the judge just says don’t do that and they walk right back out there and do it. i was one for a bit in the ’80’s. back then we were terrified of the 4th. now not so much, or at all. serve and protect became jackboot janisaries.
The “necessary and proper” clause in the Konsteetooshun means the Gubbermint can do what it wants to anyone anytime. The clowns in black gowns will bless it.
Listen to and read the works of Mr Michael Gaddy for exhaustive detail from source documents: https://michaelgaddy.substack.com/
Inadmissible or covered up just like cell phone Stingray stations, Gorgon Stare aerostats over cities, back doors in social media, etc. Great high-fallutin’ ideas but over the line surveillance whose ideas are sold to politicians and police without oversight.
It has always been and will always will be people looking for an edge who test limits. We as individuals should always be willing to push back. Hundreds go free so one innocent doesn’t go to prision?
Two years ago I was pulled over for not signalling soon enough exiting an Interstate. Immediately the questions started and immeidately I invoked my rights. I had nothing to hide, have noting against the police, but a belief that a right not exercised is a right soon lost and I feel obligated to defend our rights.
Warrantless vs. probable cause. If an officer has probable cause, and finds problems, then no warrant is needed (but some will try to get one to protect themselves).
Now, what is probable cause? That’s the rub. Car using three lanes of a two lane road, and full of fog? Clear probable cause. WSF’s “failure to signal properly?” That’s not so clear.
[IANAL, nor do I teach ConLaw, just US Government.]
Yes…the evidence was ruled inadmissible and the judge ruled that the use of such cameras violated the 4th Amendment…but NOTHING will happen to the cop(s) who ACTUALLY violated law and Rights. Therefore they will continue to do so…with impunity. That is the real problem…cops who think the Bill Of Rights is irrelevant and that they are above the law.
To expand on inadmissible, it just means the cops will engage in Parallel Construction so the inadmissible actions are committed by one cop or agency, and the arrest is performed by another cop, ‘who had probable cause’ and was told to arrest ‘that person’.
Right now Flock is engaged in wholesale database recording of vehicles and faces building a pattern of travel behaviour. (I’ve read on Slashdot where they are rolling out face recognition so you’ll be identified even if you are in a different vehicle/different mode of travel). But how long will it take before these database recordings are fed to an AI to see if your behaviour pattern is “Illegal” according to the people in power. (This story is an example of this, except it was a cop instead of an AI doing this). This will become Parallel Construction on steroids.
Minority Report anyone?
I don’t think the legal finding is gonna be very definitive.
Look, we pretty much already know that a bunch of judges are inventing law and facts whole cloth.
We also pretty much already know that a bunch of judges are basically CCP shills, taking dictation on clearly novel and unconstitutional legal findings.
Sotomeyer’s “Seal Team Six” could simply be ignorance and stupidity, or it could be CCP dictation. She miscategorized that, ST6 are under the UCMJ, the relevant category for Jan. 6 is unorganized militia which is not covered by the UCMJ. You could in principle attempt to do a January 6 prosecution under the UCMJ, alleging that the veterans made it no longer a pure unorganized militia.
No January sixth persecution so far has yet been so consistent with the actual US law and precedent.
(We didn’t want to specify that everything Lincoln did was fine, and can be freely done by future presidents. There are two problems with convicting Trump. One is that the evidence is questionable, and maybe no crime was committed by him. (Pelosi and congressional Democrats maybe knowingly committed a crime, and if they are accurate on certain points it could disqualify them from being seated in congress. They are probably not accurate about that.) The second is Lincoln. The Democrats would need to convince a bunch of Trump voters, that Trump could be removed for giving orders, and that those orders are not legitimate sorts of orders, in similar circumstances to when some of Lincoln’s orders were legitimate.
The only legal theory under the constitution that could allow the legislative and judicial branches to constrain the executive that way seemingly would also allow the judiciary to arbitrarily void the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. IE, tyrant Lincoln theory, where we seemingly need to not read the constitution in contrast with the Articles of Confederation. The Presidency under the constitution was explicitly intended for the cases of civil war.)
It is fundamentally unlikely that Brazil, South Korea, and the US independently had judges making those decisions, and South Korea’s judicially preferred regime is clearly simping for the PRC.
More widely, there are a lot of ‘sudden’, ‘spontaneous’ discussion points that are clearly CCP.
The necessary caveat to any finding on that by me is that I pegged Covid and BLM as being CCP operations back in 2020. Actually, they seem to have had federal LEOs as the most direct set of hands on the social media companies.
Flock talking points do not have to be CCP for the ambiguities to make the judicial decision suspect.
Also, I have long disagreed with EFF, etc., and the rest of the libertarians on what electronic collection is actually restricted under the principles in the constitution.
The judges are probably going to need to rejustify decades of case law, to show that their most recent findings were not simply an improper collusion between law school graduates. Capital punishment in general, the ban on capital punishment for minors, racial preferences, ‘criminal justice reform’, election law, everything since 1950 or maybe 1960.
We are five years and almost nine months out from the January 12, 2021 letter from law schools, three quarters of them. That delay on retracting the signature, and on publishing a letter explaining the error, makes sixty or so years of industry wide malfeasance potentially plausible.
BLM in 2020 was an arson conspiracy, and a lot of the legal cover provided makes sense as being arranged by the law schools, these people really believe in critical theory and do /not/ think that peace exists.
The formal legal system lost a lot of persuasive strength, persuasive strength it needed, because law faculty were too ignorant and unthinking (at best) to understand that they were doing the opposite of protecting the profession of law.
We now are not having any sort of decisive victories in court, because the population does not have a unified buy in on what court decisions mean.
Maybe it is as simple as it just being the communists that are the problem.
There are people who are nominal allies, who have JDs or other degrees from problem universities and problem law schools. It is not expedient for me to be full time raving about how this makes them suspect. Or, it is at least a little suspect not to have publicly broken with those institutions over the letter, especially the JDs.
That does not mean that I am excluding the possibility that the JDs make them suspect.
At one time there were about 200 ABA accredited law schools. At one time there were about 150 ABA accredited law schools with signatures endorsing that letter.
There are judges with JDs from schools that have signed that letter.
I do not think that there have been judges who have organized to sign a letter rejecting improper collusion, and affirming the constitutional restraints on what the judiciary can legitimately order into legal existence.
I am going to continue assuming that the judges are perhaps contaminated by default, and perhaps engaged in actual criminal conspiracy industry wide, on behalf of other criminal conspiracies, such as those practicing arson or trafficking drugs.
We literally had a deaf woman judge say that she had not seen evidence for why the DoD cannot exclude specific parties from contracts, Re: anthropic.
Unless this specific judge was a Trump voter, and a Trump appointee from this term, and if from a bad school has disavowed that school, it is maybe fair to regard the finding with the same general suspicion.
Related: Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in Florida
In late September 2026, 23-year-old Liz Lindseay Isaacs testified before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee about her harrowing experience after a Flock camera misidentified her Dodge Durango, linking her to a fatal hit-and-run miles away from where she actually was… “The cell door was shut, and it was not opened for approximately 86 hours”. She spent a total of 13 days locked up — including the terrifying stint in solitary confinement — before prosecutors finally realized the AI had completely botched the vehicle identification and dropped the charges.
Link
The cops and prosecutors should be in jail for the same amount of time she was in.