Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

So to the surprise of no-one, it can and does take and send photos of pedestrians and faces, just like Flock assured us it doesn’t. Sure the camera itself does not run facial recognition, but those images are still being sent back home which means they ARE processing them.

Also the amount of errors and instability they describe is fucking hilarious. Thse cameras are built like shit.

Modern heroes. Keep up the good work!

‘hackers’, freedom fighters…i see no difference

[…] about every two minutes, code checked that the camera was still running and logged the message, “Who’s a good boy?!” More than 12,000 of those messages appear in the recovered logs.

Oof. Although also:

When the camera did restart, another service left a final message in the logs: “A reboot was requested! ¡Adios Amigos!”

I was surprised by that for a moment, then realized that I somehow conflated ICE and Flock in my brain, being surprised to see Spanish like that (I suspect ICE would not have that in their software). But of course, my conflation was unfounded.

This is coming from the guy who said you are a terrorist for “spreading lies” that they are recording everything.

Odd that the people incharge of hunting down and tracking “criminals” would want to add you to that list too.

Also money comes from Israel and they employ people from unit 8200.

The tests also showed how broadly the camera’s plate detector could interpret what it saw. In some cases, it mistook bumper stickers, dealership frames, and other graphics for license plates and cropped them out as if they were plates. In one video of a passing motorcycle, the detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider’s saddlebag as if it were a plate.

This stood out to me. Call me cynical, but I don’t think this is a mistake. I think they’re calling all of these “misidentified” license plates a “license plate” to simply establish plausible deniability for collecting this data. It would be pretty trivial for their backend system to interpret the images server side and build an identification profile for each vehicle. This way, even if you remove your plate, your vehicle can be identified.

I wonder how quickly they could build a profile on every vehicle in the US simply by having cameras up in every major city? When we defeat flock/axon, what’s stopping the next surveillance company from buying that data and using it?