Hackers physically removed a Flock Safety camera mounted above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of its stored data and recovered an encryption key held on the device, unlocking video of thousands of vehicle detections — including, per WIRED's and 404 Media's joint analysis, 1.6 million images from a single camera and detections of people as well as cars. The material was shared with 404 Media and the transparency organisation Distributed Denial of Secrets, which passed it to WIRED; the hackers say they are publishing details of how they obtained the camera's software so others can repeat it. The disclosure directly contradicts Flock's public position that its cameras are protected by on-device encryption, and it lands amid scrutiny of the company's contracts — Boston has just replaced Flock with a different licence-plate reader vendor. No vendor statement on the copies' authenticity had been published at the time of writing.

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