TL;DR
Flock calls its cameras encrypted at the device level, but someone simply took one apart and found the key sitting inside it.
Someone unbolted a roadside license-plate camera, copied nearly everything stored inside, and handed the files to journalists. This was not vandalism. It was an attempt to find out who is watching whom.
The encryption claim, undone by a key lying inside the box
Flock Safety makes the cameras, and has long said the data is protected by on-device encryption, so prying one open gets you nothing.
The hackers found two storage partitions on the machine. One, called media, held an encryption key that unlocked thousands of vehicle detections and a pile of video.
The software does not just look at cars. It explicitly detects people, and it sometimes crops bumper stickers or an American flag patch on a motorcyclist saddlebag as if they were plates.
One camera on the network, two thousand agencies able to search it
A camera photographs a plate, sends it to the cloud, and local police can search it. So can more than 2,000 other agencies nationwide, including airports and colleges.
404 Media previously found local officers running searches for immigration authorities, and a Texas officer using the national network to hunt for a woman who had self-administered an abortion.
The people who took the camera apart are betting on something else: rather than smash it, open it and see the secrets of those spying on us. A former officer warns that this only convinces police the tool is essential.
Strip away the jargon and it is a plain thing: a machine photographs you, and nobody can tell you how many people get to look.
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