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We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds. 🫥

Benn Jordan4 HN recommenders · 2025–2026
3.3M views · commentary · news · Uploaded 2025-11-16

Benn Jordan details security vulnerabilities in Flock Safety license-plate-reading cameras and how easily they can be compromised. It includes citations from security researchers and discussion of police surveillance.

HN recommends it, and Jordan's wider Flock series, as a well-documented look at the poor security of these surveillance cameras.

Security & hackingPrivacy, surveillance & cybercrime

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6 comments from Hacker News

@stanac2025 · in “Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched”

I would also recommend Benn Jordan's YT channel, he has a couple of videos covering flock cameras. His latest one is: [VIDEO] edit: grammar

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@ultrarunner2025 · in “Home Depot GitHub token exposed for a year, granted access to internal systems”

Maybe you're not familiar with Flock Safety, but my comment is not about locking up high value items. It's more about my location information being shipped to weird police circles by big box stores. [0] deflock.me [1] [VIDEO]

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@phyzome2025 · in “Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves”

Sure, around 33:00 here: [VIDEO] The other video is [LINK] but I don't recall which one goes more into it. It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example). It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...

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@text04042026 · in “Flock CEO calls Deflock a "terrorist organization" [video]”

This is an excellent video documenting some Flock camera vulnerabilities by Benn Jordan, a security hobbyist/researcher: [VIDEO] . It's a bit long, but worth it.

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@gorgonical2026 · in “US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology”

Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] I recommend them.

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@abalashov2026 · in “Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast”

These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating. As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that. This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen. Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here: [VIDEO]

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