Flock's real attack surface was never the camera

In December 2025, Benn Jordan found at least 70 Flock cameras sitting on the open internet with no password, reachable through a commercial search engine. Anyone who ran the right query could watch live footage: children in parks, couples mid-argument, people who had no idea a camera was pointed at them. Many of the exposed units were Condor cameras, which track people rather than vehicles.

Those are the camera-level flaws, and they are bad. In a November exposé, Jordan and researcher John Gaines showed that with physical access to an outdoor unit they could press a button, connect over Wi-Fi, attach basic Android debugging tools, and get root. They installed malware. They found exposed USB ports that would accept a malicious drive. Jordan, a musician and YouTuber with no formal security background, has turned up this class of bug more than once. Flock’s answer has been to call researchers “activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.” Flock can patch firmware and close ports. The abuse documented in the reporting came through a part of the system that works exactly as designed, the search.

How the system is actually built

Each Flock unit is a small computer running a modified Android build. It streams footage to a central database, where AI catalogs everything for natural-language search. A user with access types “green sedan with American flag bumper sticker” or “pickup truck with paint scratches on left side and dirt bike in truck bed,” and the system returns matches. There are now over 100,000 ALPRs installed across the United States, most of them Flock’s.

A department can restrict its network to the area it contracted for, but many join a nationwide pool instead. The ACLU of Massachusetts pointed out that police in Texas can search Massachusetts footage. Flock has no direct federal contract, yet ICE and other Homeland Security agencies get access through data-sharing arrangements with local departments. In Denver, the ACLU of Colorado obtained logs showing local police had run more than 1,400 searches on ICE’s behalf by August.

The query interface is the abuse path

The search box is the real attack surface because abusing it needs no exploit. A warrant is rarely required and there is no paperwork. 404 Media documented dozens of cases in which officers used Flock to track ex-girlfriends, current partners, and others. In most of them, the stalking surfaced only when the victim looked up their own plate in a tool like HaveIBeenFlocked and found it had been searched hundreds of times.

Flock told 404 Media that “15 incidents of abuse” had come to light because of “the transparency and accountability features” built into its platform, and that its Audit Assistance tool “proactively flags unintended use.” The known cases are the ones where an officer was caught and disciplined, so the real number is whatever got through unnoticed.

The vendor side is not clean either. 404 Media reported that Flock employees watched children swimming and in gymnastics classes at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, and showed those feeds to police departments as part of a sales demo. Flock described the employees as “well-intentioned” people who “accessed a camera network with the city’s explicit permission, as part of their job.”

The AI adds its own failures

Beyond deliberate abuse, the matching itself is wrong often enough to matter. Colorado drivers have been pulled over and treated as suspects after a Flock ALPR read a zero as the letter O, or the reverse. One driver told 9News he considers his safety at risk because officers get an alert every time a camera sees his car, and police said they could not take him off the hotlist. In Denver, financial advisor Chrisanna Elser received a summons for stealing a package; she cleared herself only because her Rivian’s own cameras proved she never stopped on the street in question. The charges were dropped.

If you run one of these

The firmware is the easy part to fix. The decisions that produced the documented harm are architectural. Joining the national pool puts your footage within reach of departments far outside your jurisdiction. With warrants rarely required and no paperwork, a search leaves little for an outside party to check against. The hotlist is a write path with real consequences: police told one driver they were unable to remove him from it.

If you operate a system like this, scope the network to the area you contracted for rather than the national pool. Gate searches behind a justification that an outside party can audit, and treat the query log as the sensitive asset it is. Build a removal path for false matches before you need one.

Denver cancelled its Flock contract after a packed October town hall, then handed it to Axon, which already supplies the city’s body cameras. If you want to know whether any of these cameras are near you, DeFlock, an open-source map, tracks where ALPRs have gone up.