Episode 28: Flock Cameras & Privacy, Hacking Water Systems & How to Pick a Good Bourbon
The short version: A cybersecurity podcast's bourbon-and-hacking crew turns its attention to Flock, and the fact that infosec folks are alarmed should tell you something.
Our Take
When a podcast that normally spends its airtime on hacking water treatment plants and ranking bourbon decides Flock Safety cameras deserve a full segment, that's worth noting. The Distilled Security crew isn't a privacy advocacy group with an axe to grind — they're security professionals, and when people who think about attack surfaces and centralized data stores for a living start raising eyebrows at a nationwide license plate reader network, it's a signal the rest of us should pay attention to.
That's really the core problem with Flock's model: it's not just that cameras are watching your plate, it's that the data gets pooled into a searchable, cross-jurisdictional database that plenty of agencies can query with minimal oversight. Security researchers tend to ask the right follow-up questions — who can access this, how is it secured, what happens when it leaks or gets abused — and those are exactly the questions local city councils rarely ask before signing a Flock contract.
Credit to the Distilled Security team for putting ALPR surveillance in front of an audience that might not otherwise think about it between segments on industrial control systems and whiskey picks. If this episode has you wondering whether these cameras are already posted up in your town, check our map, and if you want to push back on a local deployment, our take-action guide is a solid place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Distilled Security Podcast, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.