A lawmaker writes the Flock ban; a judge enforces it case by case while it waits in committee.

…(cont) Two weeks after that, on September 16th, Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that the Department of Homeland Security could no longer send warning notices to a New York man whose offense was sending a critical email to ICE — a third First Amendment finding in three weeks, this one aimed not at a company or a campus but at an ordinary citizen's inbox.

Then, on Friday, October 3rd, Judge Sara E. Hill, an Oklahoma federal judge, added a fourth amendment to the government's growing docket of violations: the Fourth. A Tulsa County sheriff's deputy, she ruled, had no business pulling weeks of a driver's travel history out of Flock Safety's camera network without a warrant. She warned the practice risks building a nationwide "dragnet," the word regulators reach for when the net is built for everyone, not just a suspect.

None of the four needed a jury, a hearing, or a committee markup, because the fix for at least one of them — the camera network itself — was already sitting written on paper since September 3rd, in a bill restricting exactly the technology Judge Hill just flagged.

The bill does not need discovery or testimony. It needs a committee chair to schedule a vote. Instead the work keeps getting done the slow way, one deputy, one plaintiff, one docket number at a time, while the tool built to do it for everyone sits a floor below, collecting dust.