F**k Flock: One Hacker vs. 120,000 Cameras
The short version: A musician-turned-researcher shows Flock's 'unhackable' ALPR network was wide open, proving this surveillance fight cuts across the political spectrum.
Our Take
Credit where it's due: Benn Jordan did the work Flock Safety's PR team hoped nobody would bother doing. According to his conversation with Rick on The Lincoln Project's channel, Jordan found unmarked cameras near his home in Atlanta — a city that's become ground zero for ALPR saturation — and traced them to feeds that were reportedly sitting passwordless on the open internet. If that holds up, it's not a hypothetical privacy concern anymore. It's a company that promised law enforcement-grade security failing at the most basic level of security, full stop.
What we appreciate about this video is the framing: this isn't a red-team-vs-blue-team culture war fight. Gun owners worried about tracking, civil libertarians worried about retention loopholes, and anyone who's ever driven past one of these cameras without consenting to it should be equally alarmed. A tool like the one described here — cross-referencing location data with criminal records and open-source intel — is exactly the kind of mission creep we've been warning about since Flock's cameras started popping up on street corners with zero public debate.
Local elections are increasingly where this gets decided, one city council vote at a time, which means the people watching this video are exactly the people who need to know what's parked at the end of their block. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and if you're ready to push back, our take-action page has the tools to start that fight locally.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Lincoln Project, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.