Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN treats it as the go-to overview of Flock's problems, and cites it in nearly every Flock thread.
What it is
Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec athrowaway3z · 2025-09 · on “Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety”
[this video] Benn Jordan did a great video on this. People on here regularly bash the EU's GDPR, but blocking this kind of corporate-driven police state is a heavy point in its favor.
Strong rec dmschulman · 2026-05 · on “The FBI Wants 'Near Real-Time' Access to US License Plate Readers”
Funny you should mention this. Benn Jordan, on the heels of his Flock camera research, reverse engineered a non-flock ALRP unit and built his own system using some off the shelf parts, a tablet, and 3D printer. He did it mostly as an experiment but also due to the fact that Flock's algorithm for image detection is astoundingly bad and has a high incident of reading plates incorrectly. There are a handful of open-source models for license plate detection, I forget exactly which model outperformed the rest, but it was an excellent watch and help me really understand just how inefficient these commercial systems are and how easy they can be to defeat: [this video]
Recommends Barbing · 2025-09 · on “Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety”
For a video overview of this stuff: “Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras”, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago] [this video]
Recommends strangattractor · 2025-10 · on “Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices”
Ok Before I am accused of misrepresenting things and in the interest of clarity. 1. I am in San Francisco. 2. Upon further research Flock does not appear to be used by SFPD for ticketing. They have another camera system for that. That does not mean that Flock could not be used for speeding tickets or a host of other things like running red lights, littering etc. Microprocessors and CMOS cameras can do amazing things. Regardless of what company is doing the surveillance the debate remains the same. 1. Pervasive surveillance has the potential to be used inappropriately by authorities. Discussion is needed. 2. The data collected by a company such as Flock but not necessarily Flock could be used
Recommends gorgonical · 2026-04 · on “US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology”
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] [LINK] [LINK] [this video] I recommend them.
Recommends ocrow · 2026-05 · on “Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras”
It's rational to oppose Flock cameras in particular, while admitting that secure publicly accountable camera use for police purposes may have a legitimate place. YouTuber Benn Jordan did a pretty decent break down of how Flock is not that. [this video]
Cites Rhea_Karty · 2025-09 · on “PlateShapez – Tool for generating adversarially perturbed license plate overlays”
Background: from this video ( [this video] ) Floxk AI is a startup that apparently runs highly suspicious police data collection services. As a fun bonus, it sells this data to private bidders and retains no liability for any mess-ups. Apparently, it uses a Bluetooth system to relay some of this information. And seems to generally have awful security... Any thoughts? Or further projects on this?
Cites walterbell · 2025-11 · on “Dissecting Flock Safety: The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare [video]”
"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), [LINK] Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M views), [this video] "Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)" (30 comments), [LINK]