Person
Co-founder of Flock Safety, a company that makes license-plate-reading cameras used by police and neighborhoods across the U.S.
Flock Safety told buyers in 2019 that its license plate cameras were manufactured in the United States. Import records now show growing camera and radar shipments from a Thai supplier. WIRED could not establish where the cameras are assembled today.
Reality
A hacking group took a camera down from above a roadway and found the key to its media store sitting in plaintext on the same flash, in hardware whose business case is being cheap enough to leave unattended.
Reality
Boston ran about 45 Flock cameras for 156 days under a no-cost pilot. The city's surveillance report blames a Flock vendor error for three days of out-of-network access to plate data it had contracted to keep local.
Reality
Alpharetta's entire sharing policy is one radius setting that auto-approves agencies within 500 miles, and the lieutenant who runs it could not say when it was switched on. That gap points to a logging problem sitting underneath the policy question.
Reality
One officer logged more than 700 unauthorized searches on his estranged wife's car. The feature that made that possible is the one a16z and Tiger paid about 16 times revenue for.
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WIRED found 14 prompts in Flock Safety's unreleased investigation tool that need no plate, name, or description. The predicate for the search becomes the buyer's problem.
Reality