Flock Safety's Cameras Were Hacked. The Encryption Was Already Broken.
The short version: A hacker collective pulled a Flock camera off a pole and cracked its encryption in an afternoon, exposing how little stands between your plate data and anyone determined enough to take it.
Our Take
Frankly Interesting lays out a scenario that should worry anyone who's been told these cameras are secure by design: a group called stegan0gram physically removed a Flock Safety unit from a highway and broke its encryption in the span of an afternoon. If true, that's not a sophisticated nation-state hack — it's a weekend project. And it guts the industry talking point that this surveillance infrastructure is locked down tight because it's "law enforcement grade."
This matters because Flock's whole pitch rests on trust: trust that the data is safe, trust that access is controlled, trust that the thousands of plate-reads collected on your street every day aren't just sitting there waiting for whoever's clever enough to grab them. A camera that can be yanked off a pole and cracked open undermines all of it. It's not just a privacy problem anymore — it's a security problem, and the people most exposed are ordinary drivers who never agreed to be in this database in the first place.
Credit to Frankly Interesting for digging into the technical side most coverage skips. If you want to see how many of these cameras are watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on your local council or police department, our take-action page has concrete steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Frankly Interesting, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.