Hackers pulled a Flock camera down and found the key to its footage

A group of hackers who call themselves stegan0gram took a Flock Safety licence-plate camera off the pole above a roadway, disarmed the hardware and reverse-engineered the software inside it. Rather than break into Flock's cloud, they wanted to know what a single camera actually keeps. What they recovered went to 404 Media and WIRED, which published the findings together on 16 September.

What was on the device

Two storage partitions sat unencrypted inside the Android-based camera. One of them, labelled media, held an encryption key that unlocked a second partition full of recordings. Out of that came 27,321 video clips at 1024 by 768, each a second or two long and carrying no audio, along with bursts of higher-resolution still images.

Twenty-one days of one street

The logs were the more revealing find. Across roughly 21 days that single camera produced about 1.6 million images covering around 50,200 vehicles. A typical car generated about 28 frames, and some generated more than 100. The software also spotted people, and testing on the recovered clips turned up 11 videos containing them, all of them riders on motorcycles.

Reading plates happens somewhere else

The heavy lifting, turning plate characters into text and describing colour, make and model, runs on Flock's servers rather than on the pole. The camera still carries edge intelligence of its own, cropping people, vehicles, bicycles and plate-shaped objects to send up alongside the full frames, and the stock Android build in the device includes facial-detection code that 404 Media reported the camera does not use.

That detail matters because of what Flock has said publicly: that reaching a camera's contents takes physical access, and that images sit on the device only briefly before being forwarded to the cloud. The material recovered from this one device suggests a memory of the street that lasts considerably longer than that.

The backlash is not going away

The cameras have had a rough year. Police officers have been arrested for using the network to track people they knew, a mistyped plate once sent armed officers towards a car reviewer's vehicle, and dozens of councils and police departments have ended their contracts. Some people have resorted to pulling the cameras down themselves, a response the group behind this work has now made easier by publishing its method, and one that privacy campaigners have warned against.

Alongside the teardown, WIRED reported on 17 September that Flock's American-made marketing has quietly become vaguer, with US import records pointing to components arriving from Primax Electronics in Thailand. Where the hardware is assembled is now considerably harder to pin down than the company's earlier language suggested.

Our opinion

Flock's defence has always rested on a narrow claim: yes, the network is powerful, but nothing lingers on the camera and reaching it takes a screwdriver and a ladder. Both halves of that are now in question, which matters because licence-plate readers are being bought on precisely that reassurance. The uncomfortable part for every council that signed a contract is that the privacy promise and the technical reality were never audited by anyone independent. It took a stolen camera on a kitchen table to produce the audit, and cities should not have to depend on hobbyist reverse engineers to find out what their own street furniture remembers.