A cybersecurity researcher says he broke into Flock Safety's nationwide camera network four times and pulled the location of every camera in the country — bad news for Flock, and worse for anyone who assumed the system was secure.

• Flock sells its devices as license plate readers, but they also log people, vehicles, animals and clothing, and can be searched by description across the whole country.
• There are over 280,000 of these cameras, plus free plug-in boxes that turn ordinary store and school cameras into part of the same network.
• The researcher, Joshua Michael, says he found a password key sitting in plain view in Flock's code 53 times, giving access to data from 5,000 police departments, and that the company barely answered his emails.
• He also says he quietly copied every camera location in December and Flock never noticed, even while its CEO kept saying publicly the company had never been hacked.
• The bigger worry is national security: he mapped commutes around 22 military sites and found almost nobody can drive to work unseen, which lets an outsider tell when special forces units vanish.

Outlook: He plans to publish the full research and expects to be arrested for it, which would put the law on hacking and the policing of these camera networks under real pressure.