Angry Norfolk residents lose lawsuit to stop Flock license plate scanners

Plaintiffs called Norfolk’s Flock camera network a “dragnet.”

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Tuesday that the City of Norfolk’s use of nearly 200 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from Flock is constitutional and can continue, dismissing the entire case just days before a bench trial was set to begin.

The case, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, was originally filed in October 2024 by two Virginians who claimed that their rights were violated when the Flock network of cameras captured their cars hundreds of times, calling the entire setup a “dragnet surveillance program.”

However, in a 51-page ruling, US District Court Judge Mark S. Davis disagreed, finding that the “…plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate that Defendants’ ALPR system is capable of tracking the whole of a person’s movements.”

Judge Davis acknowledged that while there may come a time when the use of ALPRs becomes too intrusive, “what is readily apparent to this Court is that, at least in Norfolk, Virginia, the answer is: not today.”

The Virginia plaintiffs were represented by attorneys from the Institute of Justice, a libertarian nonprofit public interest law firm that vowed to appeal the ruling.

Over the past decade, Flock Safety has grown to become the most sophisticated and largest ALPR vendor in America. The City of Norfolk—along with thousands of other law enforcement agencies across the country—contracts with the Atlanta-based startup, most recently valued at $7.5 billion, for ALPR services.

Flock cameras capture not just a simple license plate number—as the tech once did a decade ago—but now can easily capture make, model, and other visual details from each car; these can be searched using AI-powered natural language queries that can include phrases like “bike rack” or “tow truck.”

Recently, some jurisdictions, from Santa Cruz, California, to Charlottesville, Virginia, have ended their contracts with Flock over concerns that the technology is too invasive and may provide information to federal immigration authorities over the objections of local policymakers. Last year, two senators expressed grave privacy concerns and wrote in a letter to the company that “abuse of Flock cameras is inevitable.”

In his Thursday ruling, Judge Davis referenced the family tree of modern surveillance case-law, noting that a 1983 Supreme Court case (Knotts v. United States) found that there is no “reasonable expectation of privacy” when traveling on a public road.

That 1983 case, which centered on a radio transmitter that enabled law enforcement to follow the movements of alleged drug traffickers driving between Minnesota and Wisconsin, has provided the legal underpinning for the use of ALPR technology in the United States over the last few decades.

“Modern-day license plate reader systems, like Norfolk’s, are nothing like [the technology of the early 1980s],” Michael Soyfer, one of the Institute of Justice attorneys, told Ars by email. “They track the movements of virtually every driver within a city for weeks at a time. That can reveal a host of insights not captured in any single trip.”

For its part, Flock Safety celebrated the ruling and wrote on its website that its clients may continue to use the cameras.

“Here, the court emphasized that LPR technology, as deployed in Norfolk, is meaningfully different from systems that enable persistent, comprehensive tracking of individuals’ movements,” the company wrote.

“When used with appropriate limitations and safeguards, LPRs do not provide an intimate portrait of a person’s life and therefore do not trigger the constitutional concerns raised by continuous surveillance,” it added.

But some legal scholars disagree with both the judge’s and Flock’s conclusions.

Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of the forthcoming book Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, told Ars by email that the judge’s ruling here is “understandably conservative and dangerous.”

“The danger is that the same reasoning that there is no expectation of privacy in public would justify having ALPR cameras on every single street corner,” he continued.

“Further,” he said, “looking at the technology as a mere tool, rather than a system of surveillance, misses the mark on its erosion of privacy. Think how revealing ALPRs would be outside religious institutions, gun ranges, medical clinics, addiction treatment centers, or protests.”