Hackers Obtained A Flock Camera And Found 1.6 Million Images

Our Take

Credit where it's due: OhDangReally's teardown is the kind of hands-on accountability journalism this beat desperately needs. Pulling a Flock unit off a pole and actually opening it up turned marketing language into something testable — and "encrypted and secure" apparently meant the key was sitting inside the box the whole time. One camera, 21 days, 50,000 vehicles, 1.6 million images. Scale that across the thousands of these things bolted to poles in your town and the math gets ugly fast.

The people-detection piece is the part that should stick with you. Flock has spent years telling cities and reporters this is about plates — a narrow, targeted tool for stolen cars and BOLOs. If the software is quietly profiling people too, that's a different product than the one sold to your city council, and it was never part of the public pitch. Combine that with everything else piling up this year — EFF's audit finding cops searching cameras for reasons like "LMAO," officers running plates on exes, thousands of outside agencies with pull access to a single city's data — and the pattern isn't a few bad actors. It's a system built without the guardrails to prevent this stuff, running on hardware that apparently can't even keep its own encryption key secret from whoever unscrews it.

If your town has these cameras, you deserve to know it, and your council deserves to hear from you before the next contract renewal. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to do it.