Benn Jordan
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2025–2026
43:45 · 3.3M views · Nov 16, 2025
Benn Jordan details security vulnerabilities in Flock Safety license-plate-reading cameras and how easily they can be compromised. It includes citations from security researchers and discussion of police surveillance.
HN recommends it, and Jordan's wider Flock series, as a well-documented look at the poor security of these surveillance cameras.
6 comments from Hacker News
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating. As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that. This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen. Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here: this video
Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments: [LINK] this video [LINK] [LINK] I recommend them.
This is an excellent video documenting some Flock camera vulnerabilities by Benn Jordan, a security hobbyist/researcher: this video . It's a bit long, but worth it.
I would also recommend Benn Jordan's YT channel, he has a couple of videos covering flock cameras. His latest one is: this video edit: grammar
Sure, around 33:00 here: this video The other video is [LINK] but I don't recall which one goes more into it. It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example). It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...