Amid growing privacy concerns over Flock cameras, a Texas man has asked a federal appeals court to toss out his armed robbery conviction and 60-year prison sentence, arguing that the AI-powered camera system gives law enforcement more surveillance power than the Constitution allows.<\/p>\n
Police used Flock cameras to link Charles Brownlee to five armed robberies across several Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs in 2024 by compiling a \u201cpattern of life\u201d that traced his travels along North Texas roads monitored by Flock\u2019s vehicle-scanning devices.<\/p>\n
The data gathered is so extensive and invasive that police should be required to obtain a search warrant, approved by a judge, before rifling through Flock data, Brownlee\u2019s lawyers argue.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo mortal human has ever possessed\u201d such an ability to effortlessly and immediately reconstruct any person\u2019s movements, Brownlee lawyer Matthew Wright told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during oral arguments on Oct. 5.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure that the full capabilities of these systems have been either revealed or litigated,\u201d Wright told the three-judge panel in New Orleans.<\/p>\n
Flock\u2019s software logs every vehicle that passes any of the estimated 13,000 cameras in Texas, giving law enforcement access to a powerful tracking system. The devices are a hotly contested new tool that police praise as equivalent to DNA testing in its ability to revolutionize policing and improve public safety.<\/p>\n
Before his trial, Brownlee asked the federal judge to block prosecutors from using the Flock data as evidence, arguing his vehicle was unlawfully tracked without a search warrant. U.S. District Judge Terry Means declined, Brownlee was convicted and defense lawyers responded by asking the 5th Circuit Court to set aside his verdict.<\/p>\n
\u201cFlock\u2019s surveillance database indiscriminately collects a vast trove of locational data about Americans who drive or ride in cars,\u201d Brownlee\u2019s lawyers told the 5th Circuit Court in a legal brief. \u201cBy capturing, storing, retrieving, and indexing this data, Flock gives police the power to find almost anyone and reconstruct their movements.\u201d<\/p>\n
License plate reading cameras have been available for decades, but what sets Flock apart is the ability for officers to scan data compiled by other police departments to create software-driven maps of a vehicle\u2019s movements.<\/p>\n
The Fourth Amendment protects against unlawful search and seizure, often by requiring law enforcement to have some level of probable cause that a crime has been or will be committed, as well as a search warrant approved by a judge. Data from the Flock system can be accessed with the push of a few buttons, and currently there is no legal requirement to first obtain a search warrant.<\/p>\n
Police perform a search, triggering Fourth Amendment protections, when they violate a person\u2019s reasonable expectation of privacy, Brownlee\u2019s lawyers argued.<\/p>\n
The 5th Circuit Court earlier this year ruled that some use of automated license plate readers is not a Fourth Amendment violation.<\/p>\n
In that case, a Mississippi man was stopped after passing a Flock camera that alerted a nearby officer, who pulled him over and saw an illegally modified handgun in the vehicle. The appeals court ruled in March that the search was acceptable because it involved a single camera that was incapable of tracking the \u201cwhole of an individual\u2019s physical movements, much less for a very long period.\u201d<\/p>\n
The ruling, however, acknowledged that roadside camera systems give \u201cthe government to access an historical record for some time, and that type of retrospective data can allow police to travel back in time to retrace a person\u2019s whereabouts without needing to know in advance whether they want to follow a particular individual, or when.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brownlee\u2019s lawyer argued that the search used in Texas went much farther.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you have here (is) in the space of two and a half hours, they\u2019re able to find literally a needle in a haystack, but they didn\u2019t even know the needle they were looking for when they started looking,\u201d Wright said.<\/p>\n
In addition, living in Texas \u2014 especially in the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth area \u2014 frequently requires a vehicle, making Flock cameras \u201cmore inescapable than cell phone location tracking,\u201d a type of search the U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed is protected by the Fourth Amendment, Brownlee\u2019s lawyers told the appeals court in a legal brief.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile individuals can, theoretically, choose not to carry a cell phone, driving is effectively mandatory for most Americans to participate in modern life,\u201d the brief said.<\/p>\n
Justice Department attorney Michael Weisbuch argued that the March ruling justified the search for Brownlee\u2019s vehicle because Flock\u2019s data is \u201cepisodic,\u201d or based on photos taken from individual cameras. That means Flock photos and data are not actively tracking vehicles but are instead providing pieces of evidence gathered along public roads, where motorists have no legal expectation of privacy, he said.<\/p>\n
Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod asked Weisbuch how many Flock cameras would be needed to elevate episodic captures into a more constant mode of surveillance \u2014 especially, as she said, the cameras are \u201csoon to be\u201d on every street corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to figure out whether or not we\u2019re there (in the Brownlee case), and when is the tipping point,\u201d Elrod said.<\/p>\n
Weisbuch responded that Flock cameras are at the center of a \u201cmajor policy debate\u201d nationwide, and defining how many cameras constitutes constant surveillance is a question better suited for legislators.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe political process is a serious check on that (hypothetical) ever coming to fruition, and I think a better check than an erroneous extension of Fourth Amendment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Several Texas lawmakers, raising Fourth Amendment concerns, say they intend to file bills restricting or banning the use of Flock cameras and similar automated license plate readers in the 2027 legislative session. They include Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, who in late August promised legislation to reign in the currently unregulated use of the cameras.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy legislative actions on this issue will be founded in the Fourth Amendment,\u201d the Brenham Republican wrote in an op-ed shared through social media.<\/p>\n
U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a McKinney Republican, has also proposed legislation to require federal agencies to obtain warrants before accessing Flock camera data.<\/p>\n
In a legal brief to the 5th Circuit Court, federal prosecutors argued that Flock cameras were not the pervasive tool Brownlee described them to be. Other evidence \u2014 including traditional surveillance cameras and cell phone data \u2014 were equally useful in finding Brownlee, they said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrownlee can only make hyperbolic arguments about a future Panopticon,\u201d prosecutors wrote. \u201cPlainly, the (license plate reading) cameras in the DFW metroplex do not subject anyone to observation \u2018during every instant of time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
During oral arguments, Weisbuch also argued that Brownlee lacked the legal standing to challenge the Flock search because he neither owned nor drove the car tracked by police, but was a passenger.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the police did this database query, they didn\u2019t learn anything about Mr. Brownlee. It was his sister\u2019s car,\u201d Weisbuch said. \u201cThey had no reason to think that he, in particular, was in the car. And it seems like that should affect the analysis somewhat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 5th Circuit Court has no deadline to issue its ruling.<\/p>\n
In a similar case, U.S. District Judge Sara Hill in Oklahoma ruled Oct. 1 that use of Flock data violated the Fourth Amendment in a case involving a drug arrest \u2014 seemingly the first ruling of its kind.<\/p>\n
A Tulsa County sheriff\u2019s officer used camera images to track Melisa Kyle\u2019s travels between Missouri and California. The officer began following Kyle\u2019s car \u2014 and searched it on the Flock system \u2014 \u201cfor no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate,\u201d Hill wrote in her ruling.<\/p>\n
After reviewing the Flock records showing the interstate trip, Kyle was pulled over and police found 91 pounds of methamphetamine in her car. Hill suppressed the drug evidence, saying it stemmed from an unconstitutional Flock search. That ruling has not yet been appealed.<\/p>\n
__<\/p>\n
This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid growing privacy concerns over Flock cameras, a Texas man has asked a federal appeals court to toss…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5291,159610,3621,27,29,28,991],"class_list":["post-470919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-ap-a-wire","tag-audio_enabled","tag-technology","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-wires-bot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}