Episode Details

Hackers ripped a Flock license plate camera off a pole, copied everything inside it, and found out it isn’t just watching your car. It’s built to spot you. Joseph Cox and Dhruv Mehrotra at 404 Media and WIRED went through the code, and this is the first real look inside the cameras going up over roads all across the country.

Here’s how it works. When anything moves, the camera fires off a burst of photos, about twenty eight for a normal car and more than a hundred for some. One camera, over about three weeks of logs, shot roughly 50,000 vehicles and 1.6 million images. And the software doesn’t only hunt license plates. It detects people, records where they are in the frame, and how sure it is that they’re human. Flock says it doesn’t do facial recognition, and the reporters didn’t find any switched on. So relax. It just knows you’re a person, where you were, and what you drive.

It’s also bad at its one job. It mistook bumper stickers and dealership frames for license plates, and in one clip it cropped out an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag as if it were a plate. The most patriotic thing on that road got processed like a suspect.

Flock has described these cameras as protected by on-device encryption. The hackers found an encryption key stored on the camera itself and used it to unlock thousands of videos. That’s locking your front door and taping the key to it. Flock’s response was that removing its camera is illegal and that “Flock takes security seriously,” which is exactly what you say right after someone proves you don’t.

My favorite part is the check-in. Every two minutes, a bit of code confirmed the camera was still alive by logging the message “Who’s a good boy?!” It logged that more than twelve thousand times. When it restarted, it signed off with “A reboot was requested! ¡Adios Amigos!” Somebody built a surveillance network and gave it the personality of a golden retriever with a badge.

Now here’s why this matters to you. In many towns, police departments all over the country can search those cameras. WIRED found cameras in Alpharetta, Georgia, open to more than 2,000 agencies, including an inspector general’s office at the federal General Services Administration, for reasons nobody can explain. 404 Media already caught local cops running searches for ICE, including in places that banned it, and a Texas cop searching Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion.

By August, at least 54 cities had already canceled or rejected Flock this year. Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, wants to cut off federal money for these cameras with a bill he actually named the Flock-Off Act. And three days before this hack came out, the President of the United States said, “I like them.”

Go follow Joseph Cox and Dhruv Mehrotra, because nobody else is reading this camera’s diary. Every two minutes, somebody checks on the camera to make sure it’s a good boy. Nobody is checking who’s searching it.

Sources:

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

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/09/14/trump-expresses-support-flock-license-plate-surveillance-technology/

https://burlison.house.gov/media/press-releases/reps-massie-burlison-introduce-legislation-defund-surveillance-state-cameras

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