A hacker collective calling itself stegan0gram physically yanked a Flock Safety camera down from above a roadway, cloned its internal storage, and shared the files with 404 Media and and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which passed the data to WIRED. The two outlets teamed up to dig through the data, and what they found paints a much clearer picture of what these license plate readers are actually doing behind the scenes.
Flock has always claimed its cameras are protected by solid on-device encryption. That claim didn’t hold up. The hackers found two unencrypted sections in the camera’s Android system, and one contained an encryption key that unlocked a stash of vehicle-detection videos and images. As one of the hackers put it, “Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?”
What does the camera actually see?
Here’s the part worth paying attention to. The software isn’t just reading plates; it’s built to detect people too, logging exactly where someone shows up in the frame and how confident it is about that detection. When WIRED ran the recovered detection models against test footage, they picked out a person in a simple selfie without much trouble.
Over roughly three weeks of recovered logs, this single camera photographed about 50,200 vehicles and generated close to 1.6 million images, with one day alone crossing 4,400 vehicles. The plate detector wasn’t always accurate either, at one point mistaking a motorcyclist’s American flag patch for a license plate.
Flock, unsurprisingly, isn’t thrilled. A spokesperson called the camera’s removal illegal and said the company never received a report through its official vulnerability channels.
This all lands at a time when Flock’s nationwide camera network is already facing scrutiny over how freely police departments can search plate data across state lines. Whether this hack changes public opinion or just pushes Flock to tighten security, one thing feels obvious. People are done quietly letting these cameras watch them.
