Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People
404 Media Joseph Cox
Hackers tore down a Flock camera and copied its files, exposing how it tracks cars and people. The device logs far more than plates, and its data can reach thousands of police agencies.
Based on reporting by 404 Media, Joseph Cox — read the original for the full story.
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Hackers have pried open a Flock camera in a way the company probably did not expect: by taking the thing off a roadway, copying its storage, and handing the files to reporters. The result is the clearest look yet at how Flock Safety’s cameras work on the inside, and it cuts against the company’s public talk about on-device encryption.
The recovered material was only partly readable. Much of the most sensitive storage stayed locked up, but the hackers say they recovered an encryption key from the device itself and used it to unlock videos of thousands of vehicle detections. 404 Media and WIRED then went through the files together, with the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets also receiving the material.
What they found goes beyond license plates. The software on the camera explicitly detects people, vehicles, plates, and bicycles. It takes bursts of still images as something moves into view, often dozens for a single car, then trims and sends the useful frames back to Flock over cellular service. The camera’s logs covered about 21 days across several stretches, during which it photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454.
The camera’s own files also show how noisy this system is. The models sometimes mistook bumper stickers, dealership frames, and even an American flag patch on a motorcycle saddlebag for a plate. WIRED also tested the extracted models on short clips from the device and found they detected people in 11 of 27,321 clips, all of them riders on motorcycles. Flock says its cameras do not do face recognition, and the reporting found no evidence that they do.
That matters because this is only one end of a much larger machine. Earlier reporting by 404 Media showed local police using Flock’s national network for ICE-related lookups and for searches tied to an abortion case in Texas. WIRED also found that records from one city’s cameras were available to more than 2,000 agencies. So when Flock calls these cameras a local tool, that’s only half the story. The other half is a searchable national surveillance net with a lot more reach than most communities seem to realize.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Flock keeps selling this as mundane public-safety gear, but the recovered software makes it look like a surveillance product with a camera attached. The bigger scandal isn’t that activists tore one down; it’s that a system this invasive can spread so widely before people notice what it sees. That’s the usual trick with these tools: call it traffic management until somebody reads the code.
Read more about this at: 404 Media
