# Benn Jordan, Musician, Scientist, and YouTuber on Flock Safety Cameras, Privacy & Surveillance
# Cybercrime Magazine — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUbkQ7xiXus

I literally can't leave my neighborhood
without being logged by a Flock safety
camera. I'm Ben Jordan. I've been a
musician all my life and I am now a
scientist [music] and also a YouTuber.
Naturally, living in Atlanta, which is
the most surveilled city in the United
States, [music] I was just seeing a lot
of these black cameras everywhere. And
so, I started looking into them. Every
single time that I had another question,
the answer led to another question and
usually a result that made me nervous
about the level of surveillance that was
happening. Almost a year before I
published anything about this, John
Gaines, [music] or GainSec, who's an
incredible ethical hacker, he contacted
Flock in early 2025 and told them about
some of the vulnerabilities that they
had. He said, "Okay, I'll give you 90
days and then I'm going to put this on
the National Vulnerability Database."
And he did that. From my understanding,
from what what I was hearing, they just
didn't have a very robust security team
at the time. They didn't even have a
CISO. [music] And then, finally, from my
understanding, the cameras that you see
the most, those like long black [music]
cameras, the Falcons, those are running
Android 8 on an old board. [music] They
can't just be updated to patch a lot of
these security vulnerabilities. And
we're talking about tens of [music]
thousands of these things. So, it it's
not something that could be done in 90
days and it's not something that could
be done cheaply. It's actually really,
really expensive [music] to do and it
takes a lot of manpower. And to be fair
to Flock, it's very challenging to fix
these things. But, in my opinion, the
right [music] thing to do, if they had
to be a little bit more transparent,
they would just tell their clients who
are using these cameras [music] exactly
what's going on and and slowly roll out
the upgrades.
My dream scenario would be some form of
government to set up a process to
certify vendors and to inspect [music]
them, give them a yearly inspection, a
licensing fee to pay for these things.
And I think what they would ultimately
find out is that it's very, very
difficult to have a solid security
posture when you have a third-party
company that [music] is taking images
and and categorizing them with AI and
then sharing them [music]
with tens of thousands of agencies
around the country openly. At the very
least, there should be a certification
system to become a security vendor in
any [music] place in the United States.
Just the same way where you would need
to get a license to cut someone's hair
or serve a hamburger. We have safety
mechanisms for all these [music] things.
We just don't have it for this
particular industry. What I want people
to to understand, it's the connection of
agencies [music] through a third-party
system that's storing everything on
their private data centers. That's
really where it creates the issue. And
you have to ask yourself, when you're
scanning every single [music] plate and
you're able to categorize that
information over time and catalog it
over time, at that point, you are being
[music] followed by police 24 hours a
day. I struggle to get people to care
about that right now, just [music]
because it's not really affecting their
lives. But, my mission is to try and get
people to care about this stuff before
they have to care about it, if that
makes any sense.
For more from Ben [music] Jordan, visit
his YouTube channel at
youtube.com/atbenjordan.
For more of our media, visit our website
[music] at cybercrimemagazine.com.