I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.
Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.
Archive: http://archive.today/IWMKe
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Tear em down
Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they’re still OK with this…
They’ll just make it illegal for just them. Like the Internet privacy
Or insider trading.
Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548
Without the ycombinator
That’s the first I’ve seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what’s the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?
Peter Thiel invested in Flock through Y Combinator
YCombinator is a VC fund trying to pretend like they’re hacker(tinkering) friendly community, when their business model is boosting their own companies/startups. And companies aren’t hitting those profits with people tinkering.
https://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/
In all, that doesn’t align with the hacker ethos. They’re just capitalizing on what it stands for with a lot of techbro hubris.
The first step of limiting their influence is using a different opensource frontend.
Ycombinator is the Thiel funded Altman led cancer VC that originated the surveillance capitalism
neonazitechbro situation we have today. It spearheaded the death of US democracy.Fuck “Hacker News”, the people that hang around there are in major ways responsible for the shitty state the internet -and the world- is in now.
How so? HN is literally the only forum I know of which doesn’t require email to regsiter an account and has a free, publicly accessible API.
Look at the people who hang around there.
This is the way.
Might as well use it to track ICE
Do a SCROTUM and find out of they’re still sending people to SECOT.
I feel like this is being done now but by the ‘adversaries’ that would love to keep the vulnerabilities a secret they can exploit later.
Often the case, yep.
Or point a very powerful laser at them
I do not consent.
Original is better
The original is better because no higher resolution version actually looks like the original. It’s so weird, it’s not hars at all to make a higher res one that’s almost identical to the original yet all the ones I’ve seen just look like shit. I’m gonna take some time tomorrow and make a high resolution version with the details correct.
The high res one looks better as a cutout instead of the full background, but the jpeg adds to the charm IMHO.
The high-res one also removes all the shadows, I assume the upscaling algorithm believed they were blur
I don’t think it’s an upscale. I think it’s an mspaint recreation. There’s no reason an AI upscale would turn the cheek circles into ellipses and move them away from the edge of the cheek. All the colors are also different, and the geometry differs in places too.
I swear to God if this is AI upscaled
Again? How insecure are these things? I am honestly wondering how easy it would be to get into one and shut down the entire system.
It’s obvious that these guys are fucking amateur hour Techbros, running this shitshow as they have. I don’t doubt they’re underpaying and undertraining the contractors they hire to install these things.
If anything, they might have written most of the infrastructure using LLMs. It’s easier for vibecode to forget about security because LLMs often forget context or hyperfixate on the wrong features.
Install a hardware-frying virus on it
I studied coding for a while (and it has been a while since I punched in code), but I never coded a virus. I am hesitant to ask an LLM to do it since I have no idea if it’ll work, and I also need to test it to see if it works first. Not sure if I have any sacrificial electronics to do that.
Overclock them and overheat their guts?
Benn Jordan did a recent video on his…explorations of Flock cameras. Essentially, they’re easily hackable and really should be an urgent matter of national security.
Dude, he just released another one where they accessed dozens of real, currently in use cameras. They didn’t even “hack” them, they just used a search engine to find publicly exposed cameras, opened their unsecured internal web panel, and could download and view any footage over the past 31 days, including from the new face tracking cameras that zoom in and pan on people’s unsuspecting faces as they walk by.
Truly wild.
Reading flock their own response about their security and recording it via one of their active and installed cameras was fucking great. I mean, it was nightmare shit, but at a certain point, you have to appreciate the irony.
My own mother (pensioner) sent me the video asking “is this real?” But could only follow the first minutes of it.
I lol’d at that part and had to explain the brilliance of it. Then she lol’d, too.
It’s nice to share in the shadows humor, as a family, while we feel our liberties erode.
Yeah he is working with 404 media
All that and they can’t catch real criminals, gotta harass “illegals” and law abiding citizens for speeding a little.
And stalk women!
This only serves to justify my secret low key paranoia that my like is like The Truman Show… I wish my parents were better about limiting some of the movies I was allowed to watch growing up… Arachnophobia was another lasting damage banger…
You can bet your ass foreign spy agencies are laughing their arses off about this as they track whatever targets they like
I was living in a 10th story penthouse apartment as a new building started beside us. The contractor put a webcam high up on the structure so people could watch construction live on a website. They left the control panel fully exposed so all you had to do was find the IP address of the camera and boom, you had full control. I would point it directly at my apartment’s window and wave, or my friends would do silly shit. Every morning the cam would be reset, but they never actually secured it. That’s when I realized how fucked we were, 20 years ago.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it got found by Shodan, which scans the entire internet, indexes it and is easily searchable.
There’s actually quite a few open webcams on the internet that shouldn’t be.
Benn Jordan did a great video on this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
He co-released a video with 404Media on this new dystopian finding today as well.
A city in the KC Metro just signed a contract with Flock for drone cameras. Fuck that Big Brother bullshit.
red light companies most likely use some form of AI/facial recognition.
red light cameras - at least in australia - are stock standard canon DSLRs… they take images, but not video
there are some newer ones that do things like photos of people using their phones stopped at lights etc, but generally speed/red light and “single purpose” cameras will just be doing stills, and wouldn’t be too useful for anything other than a single photo when the sensor triggers it
WA police just introduced cameras that recored the inside of a vehicle (including the backseat so yay to childrens privacy) and using AI deternine whether you are driving dangerously.
yeah they do certainly exist, but bog standard “red light cameras”… ie single purpose cameras are not that kind of problem… imo, as long as they’re deployed to combat actual issues they’re very much a beneficial tool
i think it’s important to differentiate these new kinds of cameras from the single purpose cameras so that arguments against them can be made independently
deleted by creator
I seem to recall an early 00s screed, perhaps by Bruce Schneier or someone of that ilk, suggesting a future in which yes we have surveillance in the public square, but since it’s public, everyone has full access to all the public-place cameras at any time. So you could use it to, say, see around the corner of an alley at night.
That was David Brin in The Transparent Society. He has continued to riff on the theme periodically since then.
Snip their wires, spray paint their lens, or put a hammer on the end of a tall stick. it should be easy to take these things out. Of course don’t do anything or have anything on you that would identify you were in the area at the time of these actions.
There is now enough adjacent cctv coverage to follow your approach and exit from the scene of the crime. The rush is that another Flock camera is used to identify, and then make an example out of you or me.
Air rifles are pretty cheap too if you can shoot straight.
I am wondering if a super soaker with very salty water would work. It should heavily obscure the lens when dried and if someone doesn’t clean it properly it will scratch it to hell.
Rain is a thing.
Cameras are typically angled down and have a little rain hood.
If the lens is getting wet, it’s an awfully shitty surveillance camera.
Did you miss the part about unencrypted admin creds being widely available on the internet?
That doesn’t make it a shitty camera, that makes it unsecured. Those are very different problems.
Water with flour and dye
Honestly? Good. These cameras should either be public or dismantled. I’d like to see them dismantled, but worst case scenario is the current one where they’re selectively used by law enforcement
iirc they weren’t even the first ones to discover this because there was already someone on the blackmarket selling data collected from exposed cameras and endpoints which included PII of entire police departments.
Is there a directory of these cameras? Or are they gonna make me do all the legwork?
These specifically or just Flock cams?
Here’s a start: DeFlock Me
I meant the unlocked interfaces. I’m familiar with deflock.me and have contributed to it. But thank you.
I feel like Flock Cameras would describe a random individuals walk home from work the same way Andy Samberg does in the music video “Like a Boss”.
Your walk home sounds a lot more interesting than mine.
Whoooooooosh
Wholly fuck!
