A federal judge ruled this week that a Tulsa, Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights when using Flock Safety to search for her license plate without a warrant. 

As reported by 404 Media, this ruling does not create a binding precedent, but it is one of the first times that a federal judge has ruled that a Flock search is unconstitutional.

In this case, Judge Sara Hill said the deputy should have obtained a warrant before searching the Flock database for the woman’s license plate, as he had “no apparent reason” for the search “other than the fact that [the woman’s vehicle] had a California license plate.”

The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth. But Judge Hill wrote that all evidence obtained after the Flock search “must be suppressed as the fruit of a poisonous tree.”

Judge Hill also took broader aim at warrantless searches of the Flock database, writing that tracking people’s location — even when they’re in public places — becomes “constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient.”

“This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance,” Hill wrote. “It is not targeted on a single individual, as in [Carpenter v. United States, a Supreme Court case focused on how government agencies access location data from cell phones]. It is a tool that collects information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times, and it serves up the information to law enforcement on demand.”

Hill joins a growing chorus of Flock critics from across the political spectrum. Numerous local and state governments, including Florida and Texas, have said they will stop using the technology. And on Friday, Senator Bernie Sanders — a Democrat from Vermont — introduced the Block Flock Act, which would bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers such as Flock.

Flock CEO Garretty Langley — who we’ll be interviewing on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt — has called for a “compromise” between privacy and safety and offered an apology to women who have been stalked by law enforcement officers using the Flock system. And with all those cancellations, Flock has also reportedly offered voluntary employee buyouts as a way to shrink its workforce.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers.

Garman’s statement is just one sentence in a longer blog post in which he tried to push back against widespread suspicion of data centers, and to make the case that they’re actually good for communities.

NDAs are a significant piece of the broader data center backlash. For example, environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said that the number one complaint she’s heard about data centers is transparency, with these projects following a common pattern: “projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.”

As a result of that backlash, New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and according to Garman, there are more than 100 data center moratoriums currently being considered across the United States.

“If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations,” Garman claimed. “As a country, we can’t afford to find ourselves in that position.”

Garman also attempted to puncture what he said are four big myths around data centers: that they consume too much water, that they increase electricity costs, that they emit an enormous amount of pollution, and that they don’t provide any benefits to their communities.

Pointing to an Amazon report about its own water usage, Garman said that “direct data center water consumption” only accounts for 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, “orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries.”

Nvidia recently said it’s eliminating “pretty much all water usage” inside a data center, but those claims — like Amazon’s — seem to ignore the broader water usage involved in electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists have also said they need to study data centers’ water and energy usage independently, since there are no federal or state requirements around how tech companies report this data. 

As for electricity rates, Garman said they’ve only gone up in some states with large numbers of data centers, while they’ve gone down or at least grown more slowly in others. And he argued, “In instances where energy rates are going up, it’s primarily because the grid is old and hasn’t been invested in and expanded before the demand arrived.”

On the other hand, an independent watchdog said recently data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America’s largest electrical grid.

When it comes to pollution — an issue that the NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI over — Garman complained that critics focus on the maximum amount of pollution allowed under data center permits. For example, a planned Amazon data center in Texas is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is more than any other power plant in the United States.

“The truth is data center generators almost never run,” Garman said. “They’re idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing).”

As for the community benefits, this is where Garman wrote, “We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.” Plus, he said, “Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. in which we have a meaningful data center presence.”

Will this be enough to quell community suspicion? Perhaps not — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the AI backlash is “fundamentally a crisis of trust,” where people assume governments and tech companies are always “cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Similarly, writer Jasmine Sun noted that when data center opponents are presented with the tech companies’ arguments, their response is usually, “I don’t believe them.”

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers.

Garman’s statement is just one sentence in a longer blog post in which he tried to push back against widespread suspicion of data centers, and to make the case that they’re actually good for communities.

NDAs are a significant piece of the broader data center backlash. For example, environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said that the number one complaint she’s heard about data centers is transparency, with these projects following a common pattern: “projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.”

As a result of that backlash, New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and according to Garman, there are more than 100 data center moratoriums currently being considered across the United States.

“If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations,” Garman claimed. “As a country, we can’t afford to find ourselves in that position.”

Garman also attempted to puncture what he said are four big myths around data centers: that they consume too much water, that they increase electricity costs, that they emit an enormous amount of pollution, and that they don’t provide any benefits to their communities.

Pointing to an Amazon report about its own water usage, Garman said that “direct data center water consumption” only accounts for 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, “orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries.”

Nvidia recently said it’s eliminating “pretty much all water usage” inside a data center, but those claims — like Amazon’s — seem to ignore the broader water usage involved in electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists have also said they need to study data centers’ water and energy usage independently, since there are no federal or state requirements around how tech companies report this data. 

As for electricity rates, Garman said they’ve only gone up in some states with large numbers of data centers, while they’ve gone down or at least grown more slowly in others. And he argued, “In instances where energy rates are going up, it’s primarily because the grid is old and hasn’t been invested in and expanded before the demand arrived.”

On the other hand, an independent watchdog said recently data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America’s largest electrical grid.

When it comes to pollution — an issue that the NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI over — Garman complained that critics focus on the maximum amount of pollution allowed under data center permits. For example, a planned Amazon data center in Texas is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is more than any other power plant in the United States.

“The truth is data center generators almost never run,” Garman said. “They’re idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing).”

As for the community benefits, this is where Garman wrote, “We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.” Plus, he said, “Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. in which we have a meaningful data center presence.”

Will this be enough to quell community suspicion? Perhaps not — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the AI backlash is “fundamentally a crisis of trust,” where people assume governments and tech companies are always “cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Similarly, writer Jasmine Sun noted that when data center opponents are presented with the tech companies’ arguments, their response is usually, “I don’t believe them.”