MUSKEGO, Wis. — NOCAMS Muskego filed suit today in Waukesha County Circuit Court against the City of Muskego and eleven other Waukesha County governments, asking the court to rule that police must get a warrant before searching the Flock camera database that tracks where residents drive. Citizens Defending Liberty and Oconomowoc resident Donavan Haidinger joined the suit. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty represents the plaintiffs.
The case against Muskego runs on the city’s own records. Nine cameras sit on Muskego streets. In a single month, police agencies around the country searched the database behind them more than 900,000 times. The California Highway Patrol ran 45,537 of those searches. The FBI ran 21,057. None of them needed a warrant, and Muskego approved none of them.
The city was also giving its own data away. In about two weeks, one Muskego police account opened 27 new shares with outside departments, 25 of them in other states, and seven of those included camera video. No judge signed off on any of it.
Muskego’s Flock policy, General Order #349, sets no warrant requirement and no probable-cause standard before an officer runs a search. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States that pulling a person’s location history out of a database is a search, and police need a warrant to do it. The suit says Flock is the same kind of tracking, with a photo attached.
“Muskego runs nine cameras, and in one month agencies searched the data behind them more than 900,000 times, including the FBI and the California Highway Patrol,” said Pete Karas of NOCAMS Muskego. “No judge signed off on a single one of those warrantless searches. We’re asking a judge to make them get a warrant, same as they’d need to pull your phone records.”
They want a judge to shut off the warrantless searches for good.
“Warrantless access comes with no guardrails, and it gets abused. Wisconsin officers have already been criminally charged for using Flock to track people they knew, and last month a driver was stopped at gunpoint on I-94 after a Flock database error,” Karas said. “The warrant requirement exists to prevent exactly that.”
NOCAMS Muskego will lay out the lawsuit, and its plan to get Muskego’s cameras removed, at a public meeting Tuesday, September 15 at 6:00 p.m. at the Veterans Park Pavilion next to City Hall.
About NOCAMS Muskego: a Wisconsin nonprofit that works to end warrantless tracking in Muskego. Learn more at nocamsmuskego.org.
