Flock Camera Hacked

Our Take

Creator 2leapforward is walking through the 404 Media and WIRED reporting on hackers who physically disassembled a Flock automated license plate reader, and the story deserves the attention it's getting. For years, Flock has sold cities and police departments on the idea that these cameras are secure, professionally managed nodes in a nationwide surveillance network. Turns out a camera bolted to a pole in a public right-of-way is, unsurprisingly, physically accessible to anyone with a ladder and some curiosity.

This matters because the entire pitch for mass ALPR deployment rests on trust: trust that the hardware is tamper-proof, trust that the data pipeline is locked down, trust that only authorized agencies can query the system. Every time that trust gets tested in public — by researchers, journalists, or random hackers — it cracks a little more. A camera that can be physically compromised isn't just a privacy problem for the person who gets flagged by bad data; it's a chain-of-custody problem for every police department relying on this stuff in court.

We'd rather see fewer of these cameras on poles in the first place than hope every unit is hardened against tampering. Check our camera map to see what's watching your routes, and hit take action if you want to push back on a local deployment.