Flock Exposed - Camera Dissection Exposed
For years, what actually happens inside a Flock camera was known only to Flock. Towns bought the cameras, signed the contracts, and took the company's word for how the devices worked and how securely they stored what they captured. That is no longer the case. Independent researchers, hacker collectives, and privacy organizations have physically opened these cameras, pulled the software off them, and published what they found. This page collects that work.
Vandals Turned Investigators
In September 2026, a hacker collective calling itself stegan0gram physically removed a Flock license-plate reader camera from its mount above a roadway, opened it up, and copied the data inside rather than destroying it, before giving the information to tech outlets.
Source: Blaze Media, "Vandals got hold of a Flock camera - instead of destroying it, they revealed what's inside"
One member of the group explained the reasoning as, "Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?" The group also said it is publishing details on how it obtained the software, hoping others with technical skills will replicate the approach.
Source: congress.net, "Hacker Collective Tears Down Flock Safety Camera, Exposes Surveillance Secrets"
The collective shared the recovered data with 404 Media and with the transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets, which in turn provided a copy to WIRED. The two outlets analyzed the files together and published their findings on September 16, 2026.
Source: Aardwolf Security, "Flock Camera Hack: Encryption Key Found on Device"
What the Data Showed
The recovered data revealed that software running on the device explicitly detects people, not just vehicles, license plates, and bicycles.
Source: Blaze Media, "Vandals got hold of a Flock camera - instead of destroying it, they revealed what's inside"
Over roughly a three-week period, the single camera logged about 50,200 vehicles and produced approximately 1.6 million images.
Source: NewsBreak (Lakeland Gazette), "Hackers Expose Flock Camera Data"
The device also stored 27,321 video clips, each one to two seconds long at 1,024 by 768 resolution with no audio. Logs from the same period recorded 11 separate detections of people, underscoring that the camera's on-device AI capability extends beyond vehicles.
Source: NewsBreak (Gadget Review), "Flock Camera Hack Exposed an Encryption Key in Plain Sight"
The same logs also showed the camera struggling with its supposed core function, misidentifying ordinary objects as license plates. In one recorded instance, the detector cropped an American flag patch on a motorcycle rider's saddlebag and treated it as a plate.
Source: Conservative Review, "Vandals got hold of a Flock camera - instead of destroying it, they revealed what's inside"
For scale, Flock cameras now operate in more than 6,000 communities across the United States, feeding a national network accessible to thousands of agencies. Until this breach, the internal mechanics of those devices were entirely opaque to the public.
Source: Gadget Review, "Hackers Cracked a Flock Camera. Here Is What Was Inside."
The Encryption Key Was Sitting in Plain Sight
Flock has publicly stated that its cameras use on-device encryption that protects footage even if someone gains physical access to a unit. This teardown put that claim directly to the test.
Source: Aardwolf Security, "Flock Camera Hack: Encryption Key Found on Device"
After breaching the camera's Android operating system, the hackers found that storage was split across several partitions and that two of them were not encrypted at all. One was labeled "vendor." The other was labeled "media." Inside the "media" partition sat an encryption key.
Source: Aardwolf Security, "Flock Camera Hack: Encryption Key Found on Device"
That key unlocked videos containing thousands of vehicle detections stored on the device.
Source: NewsNation, "Flock camera hack exposes how it tracks vehicles and people"
That finding directly contradicts Flock's public position that on-device encryption protects footage even with physical access, because the key needed to unlock that footage was recoverable from the unencrypted part of the device itself.
Source: Gadget Review / 404 Media, "Hackers Cracked a Flock Camera. Here Is What Was Inside."
Not everything on the device was exposed. Some of the camera's most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible even after the breach, according to WIRED and 404 Media's joint reporting.
Source: runtimewire.com, "Hackers pulled down a Flock camera and found the encryption key inside"
What Is Physically Inside the Box
The Center for Human Rights and Privacy performed its own dissection of a Flock Safety camera and published a component-by-component parts list. Identified inside were a NimbeLink Skywire LTE cellular modem, a PHD Energy lithium-ion rechargeable battery rated at 10.8 volts and 19 amp-hours, a Qualcomm-based SD624 audio kit system-on-module, a LITE-ON WiFi and Bluetooth module, a Taoglas active GPS patch antenna, and a five-megapixel 16-millimeter fixed action-camera lens.
Source: The Center for Human Rights and Privacy, "Dissection of Flock Safety Camera"
Independent documentation describes the Flock "Falcon" as running Android - specifically Android Things 8.1 on a Qualcomm OpenQ 624A module - paired with a lithium battery, a small solar panel, and a cellular modem for data transmission.
Source: DeFlockILM, "How a Flock Camera Actually Works"
A public reverse-engineering repository has since documented a newer generation of the hardware in detail, identifying the main circuit board as part number 401-00027-3, internally codenamed "Cassowary CCB," along with the LED board part number and the specific camera sensor module used, plus a full chip and FCC identification table.
Source: GitHub, kernelstub/FlockCamRE, "Reverse engineering and technical documentation of Flock Safety camera hardware, firmware, networking, and embedded systems"
A separate local advocacy group published its own technical teardown of the Flock Falcon Flex model deployed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, documenting the hardware architecture, the Android operating system, the device's boot modes, wand what the camera actually captures.
Source: EyesOffCR, "Flock Falcon Flex: Inside Cedar Rapids' ALPR Camera"
Years of Documented Security Failures
The September 2026 breach was not the first warning. 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 to the device.
Source: WIRED and 404 Media, joint reporting as cited by Bizpacreview, "Hackers tore down a Flock camera to see what was inside - they found 1.6 million images"
After Gaines disclosed his findings, Flock acknowledged them but downplayed their severity, arguing that an attacker would need physical access to a camera and that stored footage would remain out of reach regardless because it moved quickly to the cloud.
Source: WebProNews, "Flock Safety's Unsecured Surveillance Empire: Hard-Coded Secrets and Mass Data Hoarding Spark Fresh Outrage"
That early work grew into a formal body of research. Gaines' public release on the Flock ecosystem - covering the gunshot detection system, the license plate readers, and the compute modules - documents 51 separate findings, 22 of which have been assigned official CVE vulnerability identifiers.
Source: GitHub, GainSec/anti-crime-ecosystem-research
The individual findings were presented publicly at DEF CON 34 under the title "Bird Hunting Season," in parts covering a debug shell on Flock's Raven gunshot detection system, a root shell on the Falcon and Sparrow license plate readers, a root shell on Flock's Bravo compute box, and wireless remote code execution on the license plate cameras over WiFi.
Source: GainSec.com, "Bird Hunting Season at Def Con 34"
In January 2026, the same researcher reported finding 67 Flock Safety live pan-tilt-zoom camera and license plate reader feeds, along with debug web interfaces, accidentally exposed to the open internet without any authentication required.
Source: GainSec, public research listing
Separately, the surveillance industry publication IPVM reported that the advocacy group De-Flock found significant vulnerabilities in Flock Falcon cameras, including unlocked bootloaders, debug kernels, and unsecured WiFi in diagnostic mode - flaws that could allow firmware tampering, unauthorized video access, and network intrusion.
Source: IPVM, "Flock Falcon Vulnerabilities Examined (Public Report)"
A Pattern of Vandalism and Pushback
Across the United States, multiple people have already been arrested for allegedly tampering with or sabotaging Flock cameras in their communities, while other towns have responded to public backlash by announcing they will stop using Flock's cameras altogether. In one notable case, a police department built a fake, 3D-printed Flock camera housing designed to bait and catch potential vandals.
Source: congress.net, "Hacker Collective Tears Down Flock Safety Camera, Exposes Surveillance Secrets"
Why This Matters
A town council deciding whether to install these cameras is generally shown a sales presentation, not a security audit. The material on this page was not produced by Flock and was not volunteered to any customer - it was produced by outside researchers working without the company's cooperation, and in one case by people who pulled a camera off a pole. Every technical assurance a town receives about these devices is a claim, and the claims above have repeatedly not survived outside examination.
Questions to Ask Your Town
Has your town verified, independently of Flock's own marketing claims, how the footage from its cameras is actually encrypted and who could access it if a device were tampered with or stolen?
Does your town's contract with Flock require the company to disclose known security vulnerabilities to local officials, including the 22 findings that have been assigned official CVE identifiers?
Is your town aware that these cameras are documented to detect and log people, not just vehicles and license plates?
If a camera in your town were stolen off its pole tomorrow, who would be notified, and what would your town be told about the data on it?
Has anyone in your town government ever asked Flock, in writing, to respond to the published independent security research on its devices?
This page will be updated as more factual sources become available.