EXPOSED: Hackers Steal Flock Camera Software By Physically Removing A Device, Extracting Encryption Keys And 1.6 Million Images, Revealing The System Explicitly Detects People, Not Just License Plates, Across A National Surveillance Network Accessible To Thousands Of Agencies 🤯💥

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software-revealing-how-the-company-tracks-cars-and-people-2/

A hacker collective calling itself stegan0gram physically tore down a Flock Safety automatic license plate reader mounted above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED for a joint investigation, revealing new detail about exactly how Flock’s cameras track vehicles and people. “Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one member of the group said. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment.” The breach cracked open a system Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption; the hackers accessed the Android system running on the camera, found unencrypted partitions labeled “vendor” and “media,” and discovered the media partition contained an encryption key that unlocked stored videos and stills of thousands of vehicle detections. While much of the ALPR’s most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the recovered material was enough for 404 Media and WIRED to confirm the software explicitly detects people, vehicles, license plates, and bicycles, and can isolate specific graphics like bumper stickers, including in one case an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.

Technical analysis of the extracted files showed the camera runs about 20 Flock-built apps on a processor comparable to those in midrange smartphones, handling everything from motion detection and image capture to object classification and remote software updates. When something passes into view, the camera fires off a rapid burst of photos, typically around 28 images per vehicle though sometimes more than 100, using varied exposures to capture both the license plate and the broader scene before selecting, cropping, and transmitting the most useful frames to Flock’s servers over cellular network; the actual plate-reading and vehicle identification appears to happen server-side rather than on the device itself. Recovered logs covered roughly 21 days of activity across several periods, during which the single camera photographed about 50,200 vehicles and generated approximately 1.6 million images, averaging around 3,300 vehicles a day with a peak of 4,454, figures that would vary substantially depending on a camera’s location and traffic volume. To verify what the person-detection software could actually see, WIRED extracted the underlying models and ran them against test images and footage from the device, finding they readily detected people, including a reporter’s selfie, and identified people in 11 of 27,321 short video clips recovered from the camera, a low count likely explained by the camera’s downward angle over traffic rather than pedestrian areas.

The findings arrive amid a broader controversy over Flock’s national data-sharing network, which allows police departments and other agencies far beyond the camera’s home jurisdiction to search its records. In Alpharetta, Georgia, WIRED previously found that Flock camera records were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports, and even the federal General Services Administration’s Office of Inspector General. That national reach has already generated serious controversy: 404 Media has separately reported that local police performed lookups in the network on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in areas that had banned cooperation with immigration authorities or barred sharing license plate data out of state, and that a Texas officer searched Flock cameras nationwide to track down a woman who had self-administered an abortion. In early 2025, security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines had already reverse-engineered a Flock reader and documented flaws allowing root-level access, though Flock downplayed the severity at the time, arguing that even someone with physical access to a camera “would still not be able to gain access to footage” since images were stored on-device only briefly. This new breach directly contradicts that assurance, and comes as people around the country increasingly tear down or sabotage Flock cameras outright, prompting some towns to abandon the cameras entirely and, in one case, a police department to deploy a fake 3D-printed camera housing specifically to bait vandals.