Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people.
Across the country, multiple people have been arrested for allegedly tampering with or otherwise sabotaging Flock’s cameras.
In Alpharetta, Georgia, for example, WIRED found that records from the city’s Flock cameras were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports, and, inexplicably, the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration.
404 Media also said that a cop in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
4 sentences from our version of the report,
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How
Summarized version
In response, some towns have announced they are going to stop using Flock’s cameras altogether, and in one case, a police department even made a fake, 3D-printed Flock camera case to bait potential vandals. 404 Media also said a cop in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
Headline check
Headline as published: Hackers reveal how Flock cameras really track cars and people
The one thing this headline claims is in the report.
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The article, shortened and in plain language
Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to get the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.
The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED.
Across the country, multiple people have been arrested for allegedly tampering with or otherwise sabotaging Flock’s cameras. In response, some towns have announced that they are going to stop using Flock’s cameras altogether, and in one case, a police department even made a fake, 3D-printed Flock camera case to bait potential vandals.
In Alpharetta, Georgia, for example, WIRED found that records from the city’s Flock cameras were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports, and, inexplicably, the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration.
404 Media said that local cops were performing lookups in the national network on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including in areas that banned working with immigration authorities or transferring license plate data out of state. 404 Media also said that a cop in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
The hackers said they were able to access the Android system on the camera and found two partitions—sections of its hard drive.
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