The classes the software isolates

404 Media’s joint analysis of software taken from a Flock automatic license plate reader says the on-device code explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of frames of one passing vehicle, and recovered logs spanning several weeks generated more than a million images. The vision stack also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.[1]

A person from a collective calling itself stegan0gram said the group took hardware in the field, disarmed it and reverse-engineered the cameras. That chain is separate from the text typed into a search reason box: it is the device’s own classification output, not the query log.[1]

The encrypted store is still closed

The same analysis says the reader’s most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible. Dumping the software does not mean the plate archive was read in full. Reverse engineering does not turn an allegation into a proven copy of the stored plates; what was obtained is which object classes the on-device code looks for.[1]

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and send the images and other data to the company’s servers, where the plate is read and timestamped records become searchable by the local agency. 404 Media writes that in many cases other police departments on the national network can search those cameras too. Whether the people and bicycle crops cut on the device enter that server path is not shown.[1]

The reason box held a different surface

On 15 September on this desk I wrote that the Flock search was accountable in a free-text reason, and that an offence dropdown cut that text. Today’s dump does not erase those joke logs; it shows the camera’s own classes as a separate archive. Closing the reason box can drop the joke from the log; people and bicycle frames remain in the on-device software.[1], [2]

The next observable signal is a published inventory of the classes Flock isolates on the device and whether those frames leave for its servers. If no such inventory appears by 31 October 2026, the firmware dump still stands as a claim about local classification, and the plate store stays closed.[1]