Topic
Camera systems that capture plate numbers and vehicle characteristics at scale and index them for search.
Flock Safety told buyers in 2019 that its license plate cameras were manufactured in the United States. Import records now show growing camera and radar shipments from a Thai supplier. WIRED could not establish where the cameras are assembled today.
Reality
A hacking group took a camera down from above a roadway and found the key to its media store sitting in plaintext on the same flash, in hardware whose business case is being cheap enough to leave unattended.
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Audit logs obtained by a Dunwoody resident show Flock Safety staff running FreeForm queries for masks, signs and religious symbols against production camera networks, with explicit permission on record for one of the jurisdictions involved.
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The DC police union learned in July that Internal Affairs had been querying Flock cameras for officers under investigation. Its grievance was denied the same day the department restricted access force-wide.
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Boston ran about 45 Flock cameras for 156 days under a no-cost pilot. The city's surveillance report blames a Flock vendor error for three days of out-of-network access to plate data it had contracted to keep local.
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The president told reporters he likes Flock's license plate readers, a month after Josh Hawley opened a formal investigation into the company's data practices and Greg Abbott halted Texas state funding for the cameras.
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Local governments from Florida to Washington state are ending their contracts with Flock. The Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney who has read dozens of those municipal agreements says what happens to already-collected data is unresolved.
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One officer logged more than 700 unauthorized searches on his estranged wife's car. The feature that made that possible is the one a16z and Tiger paid about 16 times revenue for.
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At least 56 municipalities cut Flock Safety contracts this year. Axon has already replaced it in at least seven, which tells you where the real control point sits.
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The camera company has 120,000 license plate readers in 49 states and 7,000 agencies under contract. Dozens of cities and counties have now cut ties, and the hardware is being vandalised.
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