Hacker Collective Leaks Data From Flock Safety Surveillance Camera

The hacker collective stegan0gram removed a Flock Safety surveillance camera from a roadway, cracked its encryption, and shared the internal data with journalists and the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets. The group's reverse engineering revealed that the device runs on Android and captured 50,200 vehicles and 1.6 million images over a 21-day period. The data included high-detail imagery, such as an American flag patch on a motorcyclist's bag.

Analysis of the software showed that the camera explicitly detects people and assigns confidence scores to their locations in the frame, a capability the reports claim is rarely mentioned in public descriptions. While Flock Safety maintains that its devices do not perform facial recognition and use on-device encryption, the hackers recovered an encryption key from an unencrypted partition.

Flock Safety responded by stating that the unauthorized removal and tampering of its hardware is illegal. The company noted it received no reports through its public Vulnerability Disclosure Policy and claimed it lacked sufficient detail to assess the hackers' claims. The incident follows growing opposition to the technology, with over 50 municipalities canceling contracts and U.S. Representative Thomas Massie introducing the Flock-Off Act to restrict federal funding for such surveillance.