Hacker Witness testifies that he Accessed Flock Cameras—and Could Zoom In on Phone Screens

Our Take

Credit to Mrs Dave the Lawyer for surfacing this hearing clip, because testimony like Benn Jordan's is exactly the kind of thing that gets buried in C-SPAN archives while the rest of us never hear about it. A cybersecurity researcher telling a Senate committee he found dozens of exposed Flock camera controls — and that the resolution was good enough to read what's on someone's phone screen — isn't a hypothetical privacy concern anymore. It's a documented failure.

This is the part of the ALPR debate that gets lost in Flock's marketing about solving crime: the infrastructure itself is only as trustworthy as the security protecting it, and it keeps failing that test. These aren't just cameras logging plates in a database somewhere. If a researcher can casually access live feeds across the country and zoom in on private screens, that's a surveillance network with a gaping hole in it, sitting on poles in your town right now, pointed at your driveway and your daily commute.

We've said it before: you don't need to trust Flock's promises when you can go look at where these cameras actually are. Check our map to see what's watching your neighborhood, and if you want to push back on it locally, our take-action page has steps for raising this with your city council before the next headline is about your town's feed being exposed.