Flock Safety Camera Encryption Key Recovered by Hackers

Our Take

If the claims in this video hold up, they puncture one of Flock Safety's favorite talking points: that data captured by its ALPR cameras is locked down tight by on-device encryption. The Daily Shear Podcast walks through how a hacker collective it refers to as SteganZeroGram allegedly extracted the encryption key using nothing more exotic than physical access and some patience — a ladder and a laptop, as the video puts it. We haven't independently verified the technical details, and we'd urge viewers to treat specifics with appropriate caution until more researchers weigh in, but the underlying concern is one we've raised before: hardware bolted to a pole in public space is never as tamper-proof as a sales deck suggests.

This matters because the entire case for networks like Flock rests on a promise of controlled access — license plate scans, location histories, and vehicle data are supposed to stay locked inside a chain of custody that only police and the company can touch. If a determined outsider can pop a camera open and walk away with the keys, that promise collapses, and so does the argument that this is a tightly governed system rather than a sprawling, loosely secured surveillance net. It also raises uncomfortable questions about who else might already have quietly done the same thing, without posting a video about it.

Credit to The Daily Shear Podcast for digging into the hardware side of this fight, which gets far less attention than the policy debates. If you want to see how close one of these cameras might be to your own driveway, check our camera map, and if this kind of vulnerability bothers you as much as it bothers us, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back locally.