Matthew Tokson
Role at the time: Professor of law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, in his own Bluesky post
Response to this claim
A Tulsa County deputy's warrantless query of the Flock and VehicleManager plate-reader databases for the historical locations of a Mazda with a California plate, which returned more than 50 records across several states over about a month, was a search under the Fourth Amendment that was not supported by probable cause and violated Melisa Kyle's Fourth Amendment rights.
“A federal district judge just declared that Flock camera systems violate the Fourth Amendment! Applying Chatrie, the court concludes that extensive camera networks engage in unlawful "indiscriminate mass surveillance." A major ruling.”
A post by Matthew Tokson, a University of Utah law professor who writes on the Fourth Amendment and new technologies, reacting to the opinion and linking to it.
Why we used this label
The reference point is the proposition that the warrantless query was a search that violated the Fourth Amendment. Tokson endorses the court's conclusion and calls it "A major ruling", so we used Condemned. His summary is broader than the holding, which concerns one query of one vehicle's records, and we record his position on the ruling and not the breadth of his wording. The closest competing label is Mixed or conditional, which loses because he states no condition or reservation.