This reporting was done in collaboration with 404media. Here's the discussion for 404's article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726577

Distributed Denial of Secrets has published the partition images: https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera

do the articles have significantly different information/coverage to warrant two submissions?

I can't read the Wired article because I'm only allowed three excerpts and 15 ads a day at Wired.com

I poked around in the boot partition. The kernel is ancient!

Linux version 3.18.71-perf-gaf770dc

3.18.71-perf-gaf770dc is a Qualcomm Android vendor kernel from roughly late 2017. The 3.18 branch went fully EOL in 2019, so nothing after that was ever backported to it.

2017 was also the year Flock was funded and founded and went through the YConbinator cohort.

But you would have thought that by 2021 when Andreessen Horowitz funded them or at least by 2025 [1] when both further funded them, someone would have actually done some minor due diligence. Coincidentally too, 2025 was when the flock surveillance matrix went up all over the country almost immediately.

We constantly hear that the magic of tech funding lies in the people, not even the product/service. These types of things always seem to uncover that that is effectively just a lie to cover up the ulterior motives of setting up a tyrannical surveillance matrix all around you … to protect the children, of course.

[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...

so when do we get it flipped to a nationwide bird migration tracking system?

as someone pointed out: let's make that "flock" name accurate

also make it identify bird song, I am sure there are microphones on there

I think I should start posting a reminder in Flock threads that Axon is a Flock competitor, is also engaged in mass surveillance, and is possibly even worse, but there’s rarely any mention of it. Journalists need to do some digging there. This shouldn’t just be a Flock story, or Flock will just get bought up or something and everyone will move on.

(The above should not be read as supporting Flock or discouraging further investigation.)

The camera’s logs also show the camera struggling with storage. Its logs recorded more than 27,000 “no space left on device” errors while trying to save full-resolution images, along with tens of thousands of related errors, crashes, and reboots. At the same time, about every two minutes, code checked that the camera was still running and logged the message, “Who’s a good boy?!” More than 12,000 of those messages appear in the recovered logs.

Lol

"Axon is Flock but worse" will be the next big fight as police departments are pulling a fast one and saying "we got rid of Flock" by switching to Axon.

While highly unprofessional, the "Who's a good boy?!" status message makes me like them a tiny bit more

While Axon's system should be under the microscope too I don't think they have the nation wide cloud that Flock is doing and requires specific agreements to share data. Maybe that is getting abused to form a national database but I imagine it was designed so say a county sheriff department and local city PDs could share resources. I don't think most people are that concerned about things like that (though they should be), it is the nation wide surveillance that creeps people out. That and the stalking of course and both systems can be used for that.

Also, a reminder that ALPR abuse predates Flock. Flock has just made it more visible. About a decade ago I personally heard a cop let it slip that he had plate-stalked someone for the crime of saying mean things about his department on Twitter. The difference today is that more departments have access to these kinds of tools.

Fixed ALPRs aren't the only privacy problem, either. Many tow trucks have roving ALPRs that feed into big databases. The notion is that it helps them repossess cars that might be garaged at home. That data, however, is for sale to third parties.

So… all that data is literally there for any unauthorized person to walk up and take it.

It’s not even suitably encrypted on device?

Zero trust in anything Flock says.

It is bad.

But think the real danger in Flock is the aggregate data, tracking between camaras. So if someone hacks a single camara, they probably don't get much, unless it is pointed right at someone, which is bad. Aren't they selling these as should be pointing at traffic? If they are pointing right at people, like at playgrounds, then they are being installed illegally to begin with ?

A network connected device that can be hacked is a small step away from being the first foothold into its server. The fact that on-device security is this atrocious suggests that their server is not any better quality, which means hacking it would probably not take much effort.

Is this an older model? I could see them turning off or using weak encryption on media if the hardware couldn't keep up with the amount of data they were writing.

That would be an extremely bad trade.

Why? Does Flock really care about encryption? It checks off a box for their sales team, even if it's done poorly.

Because data should be secure. Full stop.

I'm in the process of optimizing a bootolader for my various SoC/SBCs and even the cheapest, oldest least powerful SoC from 15 years ago can manage AES-CBC via crypto accelerator at 50 MiB/s. There's no excuse.

You can achieve 50MiB/s if that's all that you're doing. I've worked with some DSPs (TI's DaVinci line) where some operations would abort if DDR was overwhelmed.

For example, passing a frame of video (YUV) into the peripheral which can resize the overall image, would fail if the system was busy with other DMA transfers. You could attempt to resize again, but there were no guarantee that it would complete successfully. Your options are to reduce overall DDR utilization or drop frames. In an application like Flock's, dropping frames is likely something they need to avoid.

The system in question is doing similar tasks, and I don't think that what I'm suggesting is out of the question.

They can choose the SoC that would be able to fill the requirements. Eg. almost all Rockchip SoCs have NoC with configurable QoS on master ports (even the cheapest IP camera targetted SoCs that cost like 2-3$), or some other interconnect mechanism that can make it so that SDRAM controller gets tasks in some user selected priority order (eg. you deprioritize CPU in favor of camera interface and other things). This is not a new tech. It already existed when Flock was founded.

And in any case. Passing compressed video streams or pictures through HW encryption engine will not saturate 1.5+ GiB/s or whatever even the lousiest 16-bit DDR3 at 400MHz would give you, not even close. It would be like a fraction of a percent of total bandwidth.

Yep. Clown show.

The hackers said they were able to access the Android system on the camera, and found two partitions—sections of its hard-drive, essentially. A few of these were unencrypted, the hackers said, including one called “vendor” and another called “media.” The latter contained an encryption key that unlocked another part, which contained much of the media—think, the videos and stills—the camera took.

In early 2025, security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines reverse engineered a Flock license-plate reader and documented flaws that could be used to gain root-level access. After Gaines disclosed his findings, the company acknowledged the findings but downplayed their severity, writing that the flaws required physical access to the device and that even someone who gained access to a camera “would still not be able to gain access to footage” because images remained on the device only briefly after being transmitted to the cloud.

Source: https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software...

TDIL my homebuilt Plex media server is more strongly encrypted than a Flock Camera

so is my all-passwords.txt file on my desktop

My passwords are in an encrypted block in a text file that can be unencrypted inline in an Emacs session with a keystroke sequence that looks like a cat just chased a mouse across the keyboard, and that's before entering the decryption password. To access it, an attacker would first have to learn Emacs. Pretty sure that's a post-quantum level of security.

Obligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/

How could anyone possibly physically access a device that is just sitting out in public?

all that data is literally there for any unauthorized person to walk up and take it.

All that data about ... license plates if you're willing to steal/damage private property. Seems like it would be a lot easier to setup your own ALPR.

I always assumed Flock's security posture was like most other companies. It's nice to see confirmation.

I think I should add a "X'); DROP TABLE Cameras;--" bumper sticker to my car now.

Couldn't resist: https://github.com/EvanAnderson/whimsy/blob/main/Drop_Table_...

My working assumption based on what I hear out of Flock is that they have a public feature set (mass license plate surveillance for LEO) and a covert feature set (even more mass surveillance, beyond license plates and privacy agreements, for intelligence communities).

The man who would choose security over freedom deserves neither.

        -  Thomas Jefferson

Why did we not get the cool dystopia ala Gibson's Chiba City?

I remember walking over a hill into a rave in the Utah desert that we'd set up and thinking that it actually was the cyberpunk dystopia that I had been hoping for.

That kind of stuff is around but maybe not evenly distributed or legible to large demographics.

Unfortunately, so is the rest of the vicious horrorshow, equally illegible and equally uneven in distribution.

Title is missing "(YC S17)" after "Flock".

Correct. YC gotta wear their creations with pride.

They won’t have that sort of moment of self reflection until someone does something like use Flock infrastructure to stalk and assassinate the CEO of another YC company and then it will only be brief and fleeting before they double down on supporting this kind of egregious behaviour.

Some people are just wired that way.

Flock is a scourge on democracy. Flock is YC. But looks like they did YC nearly ten years ago. Who knows what their pitch deck looked like? If they pivoted since then to their current sinister incarnation? I don’t see any evidence that YC is still actively supporting them.

Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable proposition than funding Flock for their current use case of allowing police to stalk their ex girlfriends or mistresses.

It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that.

10 years ago is no excuse.

If I had to guess now it works it would be:

1. Take pictures

2. Send to a big server that all cops nationwide can log into whenever they want to stalk their exes

Did I miss something

The system they log into is called DAVID(Driver and Automobile Information Database) which logs activity. If an officer access that information for unlawful purposes, they can be prosecuted. You probably wont believe it, but the reason you hear about cops stalking their ex's is because they got caught doing so.

According to our analysis, the camera’s logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454.

Has there been any report about which state this camera was recovered in? New Hampshire has a strict 3 minute rule for non-hit plate data before the captured images and records must be deleted [1].

[1] (N.H. Rev. Stat. § 261:75-b) requires ALPR systems to delete non-hit plate data within 3 minutes

That same NH law perhaps more importantly limits ALPR use to law enforcement officers.

A friend in China built a Flock overlay network that sends live video and audio from ~100 cameras near me to an AWS server for processing and search.

"We liberated hardware"

Ya know, I'm not on Flock's side here.. but be real, this is theft. You should be able to own that if you're going to do something like this.

That's also the biggest plot-hole in the first Star Wars movie. Princess Leia is supposed to be this righteous noble of the moral resistance and yet she STEALS the Death Star plans!

I don't get the impression that anyone writing about this thinks it's legal. I think the argument would be that it's justified.

This is pure laziness aka “reduced time to market” on the part of Flock.

It takes time and effort to think through proper secure boot architecture and to implement key management in a way that doesn’t kill developer productivity.

Their product managers, though, should have realized that setting these up in unsecured public spaces means that their threat model really does include local physical access to everything.

Using off the shelf hardware and software stacks all but guarantees attackers have tools at their fingertips to exploit said physical access.

Given all the recent exploits hitting the kernel, there’s a good chance that there exists an exploitable over-the-air vulnerability present in their WiFi/bluetooth stack, too.

The question is, why should they care at all? Will this hurt their business?

Any breach of security on a system like this is a big flashing red-alert to me.

If it could lead an attacker to get ANY of their data... Persons, places, events, etc is pretty damning stuff to be exfiltrated.

Stalking/Domestic Violence, blackmail, timed robberies, you name it... That data shouldn't really be in anyone's hands in my opinion, but in anyone's hands (good guys / bad guys) it's pretty powerful.

Apparently police are accessing the network via their personal devices. I highly doubt their security practices online are any better than this. I wouldn't be surprised either to see things that chinese manufacturers do such as intentional back doors.

Overall this goes from disappointing to fairly repugnant.

Allegedly you can buy credentials on the darkweb to perform national searches. Might explain why some of the logged reasons for recent searches were “LMAO”

I really hate how Product Managers somehow get to take the reins of engineering teams instead of having to sell them product ideas.

It's madness, they often lack the technical skills and "optimise away" requirements surfaced by eng teams they don't comprehend or just don't like having to deal with.

I wonder if a stingray could be used to force a software update in a flock camera. If so maybe it could brick all the flock cameras it can connect to.

If you want to know what a "Vulnerability Disclosure Policy" (VDP) would look like if its main purpose is to claim we have VDP and create an appearance of responsible security posture, but not really to learn about vulnerabilities - read Flock's VDP.

They sincerely welcome your vulnerability disclosures, except in cases where you have to "interact" with the device/service or download its data. Other than that TINY carveout, everything is okay.

Oh, if the vuln about configuration and hardening "preferences" like SSL/TSL - Sorry, not interested.

And also, infrastructure vulnerabilities like DNS config - no no, try harder.

I know what you're thinking..ha ha...but we are good guys. You can still report vulnerabilities in the above categories, but the onus is on you to convince us that we should care about them. It is only fair.

https://www.flocksafety.com/legal/vulnerability-disclosure-p...

Curious how/why all this negative attention is focused directly on the Flock brand (current example notwithstanding)?

Seems like if I were a competitor of Flock I'd be pretty happy right now and all this negative press is making them artificially cheap to buyout right now.

Motorola/Vigilant, Rekor, Leonardo/ELSAG, and Axon are huge companies making mint off the same thing and no once in 20 years have I seen this level of attention... not on the overarching issue of surveillance-state-ing, but of one particular company.

The article says that Flock says "their cameras don't do facial recognition" The cameras don't, but they don't say the system doesn't. They don't say facial recognition isn't a click away through another integration.

I would absolutely assume that any system that sends your image to LE is part of a facial recognition system in practice. We know now that the cameras do recognize people and intentionally transmits images of them, for later identification.

All these cameras do is pre-select the images that are worthy uploading. Everything else happens at Flock.

That's why they don't give anything about the camera's security.

The images are all from a public place, so no privacy expectations and what's theworst that could happen? Someone uploads their cat images or the pr0n collection?

Ai figures that one out rather quickly.