Flock Cameras with Benn Jordan

Our Take

When a security researcher who's spent his career finding holes in systems says a surveillance network makes him nervous, that's worth sitting up for. On BIG PICTURE, Benn Jordan lays out something we've been saying for a while: Flock Safety didn't just build a camera, it built a searchable, retained record of where you drive, when, and how often — now stitched across more than 80,000 locations nationwide. That's not a hypothetical dragnet. That's the actual architecture.

The nearly 80 vulnerabilities Jordan's team found — including hard-coded credentials — aren't a minor bug report. If a system meant to track suspects can be hijacked to track anyone, including cops, judges, exes, or journalists, the entire premise of "it's just for public safety" collapses. Pair that with the fact that police routinely access this data without a warrant, and you've got a direct collision with the Supreme Court's own reasoning in Carpenter v. United States, which recognized that location data deserves Fourth Amendment protection precisely because it's so revealing over time.

This is exactly the kind of technically grounded reporting that cuts through Flock's marketing about "community safety." Credit to Jordan and James Patrick for doing the homework most local city councils never do before signing a contract. If you want to see how close this network already is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action guide is a good place to start.