Hackers Crack Open a Flock Camera, Expose Mass Surveillance Secrets
Left says
- •Police departments are using Flock's vast camera network to investigate minor, vague offenses like loitering, curfew violations, and homelessness rather than just serious crimes, revealing mission creep beyond the company's public safety marketing.
- •The hack exposes a troubling gap between Flock's public claims of security and privacy protections and the reality that its systems explicitly track individual people, not just vehicles, raising concerns about surveillance overreach.
- •The rise of this surveillance infrastructure coincides with broader political efforts to criminalize dissent and organizing, making unaccountable camera networks a tool that could be weaponized against activists and marginalized communities.
- •Corporate claims that a technology 'eliminates crime' or exists solely to 'rescue children' deserve scrutiny when the same tools are quietly repurposed to police poverty and public presence.
Right says
- •The hackers acted outside the law by tearing down and tampering with private property, and Flock is right to note that unauthorized removal of its cameras is illegal regardless of the findings.
- •The exposed data shows real technical problems, including tens of thousands of storage errors, crashes, and misidentification of objects like bumper stickers and an American flag patch as license plates, undermining confidence in the system's reliability.
- •Revelations that the software explicitly detects and logs people, not just vehicles, validate long-standing conservative concerns about government and corporate overreach into everyday citizens' movements.
- •Growing public backlash, including local vandalism and Senate scrutiny led by Sen. Josh Hawley, shows bipartisan-style momentum for holding surveillance companies accountable through legitimate oversight rather than vigilante action.
Common Take
High Consensus- Flock's camera network has expanded rapidly, with more than 120,000–140,000 devices deployed across the country, most operated by Flock Safety.
- The hacked data confirms the cameras' software explicitly detects and logs people in addition to vehicles and license plates.
- Both sides acknowledge documented flaws in the system, including misidentifying objects like bumper stickers and flag patches as license plates.
- There is shared concern about the lack of transparency and accountability surrounding how this surveillance data is collected, stored, and used by law enforcement.
The Arguments
Left argues
Records show police are using Flock's massive camera network to investigate vague, low-level offenses like loitering, curfew violations, and homelessness, exposing a gap between the company's marketing about stopping violent crime and how the tool is actually deployed on the ground.
Right counters
The existence of a broad search category doesn't prove systemic abuse; departments choosing to log searches under 'loitering' may reflect record-keeping categories rather than officers actually harassing homeless people, and the same network still demonstrably helps solve serious crimes like child rape cases.
Right argues
Regardless of what the hack revealed, the hackers broke the law by physically tearing down and tampering with private property, and Flock is correct that unauthorized removal of its equipment is illegal — legitimate concerns about surveillance don't justify vigilante tampering.
Left counters
When a company deploys secretive surveillance infrastructure across public spaces with no meaningful public disclosure or consent process, civil disobedience that exposes hidden capabilities serves a public interest that outweighs a narrow property violation, especially since the hackers routed findings through legitimate journalists rather than exploiting them maliciously.
Right argues
The leaked data reveals serious technical unreliability — tens of thousands of storage errors, system crashes, and misidentification of bumper stickers and even an American flag patch as license plates — which should undermine public confidence in a system police increasingly treat as authoritative evidence.
Left counters
Technical glitches in image cropping are a separate and lesser issue than the deeper problem: even a perfectly functioning system that explicitly tracks individual people's movements at scale constitutes mass surveillance, regardless of its error rate.
Left argues
This surveillance infrastructure is expanding at the exact moment the political climate is turning toward criminalizing dissent and organizing, meaning an unaccountable, poorly-regulated camera network could easily be repurposed as a tool against activists and marginalized communities.
Right counters
This argument relies on speculation about future misuse rather than documented evidence of political targeting, and it risks using unrelated national politics to delegitimize a tool that most communities adopted for mundane public-safety reasons like vehicle theft and hit-and-runs.
Right argues
The revelation that Flock's software explicitly detects and logs people, not just vehicles, validates long-standing conservative warnings about surveillance overreach, and the bipartisan-flavored response — local vandalism, community backlash, and Sen. Hawley's Senate investigation — shows this concern transcends typical partisan lines.
Left counters
Hawley-style oversight hearings are a good start but have historically produced more spectacle than binding regulation, and without enforceable limits on data retention, sharing, and search categories, congressional grilling alone won't stop the mission creep already documented in police use of the system.
Challenge Questions
These questions target genuine internal contradictions — meant to provoke honest reflection.
Right asks Left
“If the strongest evidence of abuse is that a Flock search category exists for 'loitering' and was used by police in Illinois, how do you distinguish genuine mission creep from ordinary record-classification that simply reflects the range of things local police departments are already legally allowed to investigate?”
Left asks Right
“If you believe tearing down and reverse-engineering private property is illegal and wrong in principle, how do you reconcile that with using the hackers' illegally obtained data as the primary evidentiary basis for your own claims about the system's technical flaws and privacy risks?”
Outlier Report
Left Fringe
Outlets like The Intercept and The Nation frame this explicitly through anti-McCarthyism and anti-Trump political repression lenses (e.g., invoking NSPM-7), a framing likely embraced by only a vocal ~15-20% of the left focused on activist/organizing concerns rather than general privacy worries.
Right Fringe
Groups like DeFlock activists and vandalism-sympathetic voices on the right (some Blaze Media commenters, libertarian-leaning figures like sections of the 'Don't Tread on Me' surveillance-skeptic right) implicitly excuse or downplay the illegality of the hack; this is a minority ~10-15% of the right, since most conservatives, per Townhall and Washington Times framing, favor lawful oversight (Hawley-style) over vigilantism.
Noise Assessment
High — public discourse is dominated by activist hacker collectives (stegan0gram), niche investigative outlets, and politically motivated framing (Hawley hearings, Nation fundraising language) that amplify the story's political stakes far beyond likely public engagement, since most Americans have not heard of Flock cameras specifically despite general surveillance unease.
Sources (6)
<img src="https://www.theblaze.com/media-library/vandals-got-hold-of-a-flock-camera-instead-of-destroying-it-they-revealed-what-s-inside.png?id=67787786&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C0%2C1%2C0" /><br /><br /><p>Flock cameras are having a hard time identifying some objects and mistaking them for license plates.</p><p>But as the devices may be struggling to accomplish their most critical task, they seem to be identifying something else: people.</p><p class="pull-quote">'The detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider's saddlebag as if it were a plate.'</p><p>Hackers recently ripped down a Flock license-plate reader camera that sat above a road, opened it up, and copied the data inside before giving the information to tech outlets.</p><p>What the data allegedly revealed is that software running on the device "explicitly detects people" as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles.</p><p>A joint report from <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-flock-camera-data-shows-how-system-works/" target="_blank">Wired</a> and <a href="https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software-revealing-how-the-company-tracks-cars-and-people-2/" target="_blank">404 Media</a> explained that through several weeks' worth of logs, the Flock camera generated more than a million images.</p><p>Using a processor similar to that of a "midrange smartphone," around 20 built-in apps on the camera's processor handle a range of tasks like motion detection, taking pictures, uploading data, and receiving updates.</p><p>The outlets say that the device's code showed approximately 28-100 photos are taken when something moves into view, but the camera uses different exposures to capture the license and the expanded environment before scanning the image and cropping what it believes to be the pertinent information. The data is then sent to Flock through the local cell phone network.</p><p>The camera itself allegedly does not identify the plate number, vehicle, model, etc.; those tasks allegedly take place on Flock's servers.</p><p>At the same time, the current software allegedly "explicitly detects people" and records where they appear in the image and how confident it is that it is a person.</p><p><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/flock-doesnt-care-if-youre-innocent" target="_blank">Flock doesn’t care if you’re innocent</a></strong></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image image-crop-custom"> <img alt="" class="rm-shortcode" id="8fbed" src="https://www.theblaze.com/media-library/image.jpg?id=67787784&width=938&height=572&quality=50&coordinates=0%2C0%2C86%2C111" /> <small class="image-media media-photo-credit">Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images</small></p> <p>Wired's analysis said that the camera's logs had about 21 days of activity, during which it photographed more than 50,000 vehicles and generated 1.6 million images. This worked out to between 3,300 and 4,500 vehicles per day.</p><p>Problems arose with the camera's inability to process its huge storage requests on-device, with the logs reportedly showing a massive 27,000 instances of "no space left on device" errors that show up when trying to save full-resolution images.</p><p>Tens of thousands of other related errors were noted as well, which came with crashes and reboots.</p><p>Perhaps disturbingly, the device's code runs an operational check every two minutes to see if the camera is still running and logs the message "Who's a good boy?!"</p><p>This was seen more than 12,000 times.</p><p>Other issues were reported with mistaken identification with bumper stickers, dealership frames, and other graphics that were recorded as license plates and cropped out of images for saving.</p><p>"In one video of a passing motorcycle, the detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider's saddlebag as if it were a plate," Wired wrote.</p><p><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/tech/josh-hawley-flock-widen-invesitgation" target="_blank">Worse than Flock: Josh Hawley expands 'unprecedented national surveillance' investigation</a></strong></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"> <img alt="" class="rm-shortcode" id="dacce" src="https://www.theblaze.com/media-library/image.jpg?id=67787782&width=1245&height=700&quality=50&coordinates=0%2C53%2C0%2C54" /> <small class="image-media media-photo-credit">Jean-François FORT/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images</small></p> <p>As for the hackers/vandals/vigilantes, they answered as to why they didn't simply destroy the camera: "Why just destroy them when we can reverse-engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?"</p><p>The hacker collective, which calls itself stegan0gram, also said it "liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment."</p><p>Flock responded to the report by saying "the unauthorized removal and tampering of a Flock camera is illegal."</p><p>"Flock takes security seriously and maintains a public <a href="https://www.flocksafety.com/legal/vulnerability-disclosure-policy" target="_blank">Vulnerability Disclosure Policy</a> for security researchers to report potential vulnerabilities directly to us. We received no report through that process, and based on the limited information provided, we do not have enough detail to assess the claims being made. If the individuals identified legitimate vulnerabilities, we encourage them to submit their technical findings through our vulnerability reporting process so our security team can review them and take any appropriate action," the company added.</p><p>One hacker replied to this message by saying, "Being investigated is a legit concern and something we are trying to avoid. I'm sure our actions have attracted some attention as it is, but we are careful and try to keep a low profile."</p><p>Flock did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.</p><p>Wired and 404 Media also noted they found no evidence of facial-recognition capabilities in the Flock camera software beyond what is included in the Android operation system.</p><p>According to <a href="https://maps.deflock.org/?lat=39.8283&lng=-98.5795&zoom=4.00" target="_blank">DeFlock</a>, there are currently more than 140,000 license plate readers in the United States; 81% are run by Flock, 5% by Motorola.</p><p><em>Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. </em><em><a href="https://www.theblaze.com/newsletters/theblaze-articlelink" target="_self">Sign up here</a></em><em>!</em></p>
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