There’s a company out there that sells governments a way to break into security cameras. Once inside, its customers can watch the live feed as it happens. Worse, they can go back into recorded footage and change it, and the edited video shows no sign that anyone touched it. That company is called Toka, and a former Israeli prime minister helped start it. And according to Toka, its customers are the US government and its closest allies. They aren’t keeping any of this secret, either, because it’s spelled out right on their own website.
For two years now, folks have grumbled about Flock cameras reading plates at every intersection, and God knows they had good reason. Even so, a Flock camera only records where your car has been. Toka’s tools can reach into recordings like that and rewrite them, so next to Toka, Flock is the least of your problems.
The Same Investor Is Behind Flock Cameras Too
Flock Safety is the name you most probably already know, with cameras in thousands of American towns logging plates and vehicles.
Andreessen Horowitz led Flock’s $275 million funding round in March 2025, and that round valued the company at $7.5 billion. But the same firm also invested in Toka.
Toka was co-founded in 2018 by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former IDF cyber chief Yaron Rosen, and it keeps offices in Tel Aviv and Washington. The company sells only to governments.
On its homepage, it uses the term “frictionless surveillance,” which it describes as watching a target with almost no physical access or equipment.
That sounds harmless enough on the page. But what reporters found underneath is not.
Camera Footage Is No Longer Proof Of Anything
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran an investigation and found that Toka sells technology that lets clients find security cameras or webcams in a chosen area, break into them, and watch the live feed. So far, that is ordinary spyware, and plenty of companies sell something like it.
But the next part is different.
The same technology can reportedly alter footage that was already recorded, not just the live video, and it leaves no trace. So a recording from last month can be edited today, and the file still looks clean. Reporting described systems that let footage be downloaded, edited, and uploaded again with no sign that changes were made. A guard watching his monitor could be looking at a normal feed that was swapped out without him knowing.
Software can now change what a camera saw in ways the human eye will never catch, and that same kind of technology keeps creeping into the systems that run our power grid. That’s why we must learn how to survive when AI takes down the grid – this knowledge puts you ahead of a threat that plenty of Americans still treat like science fiction.
We treat video as evidence in this country. It clears people in court, and it convicts them too. So a tool that rewrites that record changes what everyone believes happened. And you could not argue your side, since the file itself would back up the lie.
Your Cameras Could Be Mapping Your House For Someone Else
Most of the coverage focuses on street cameras and government buildings. But the reach goes further than that. Toka’s tech can tap into web-connected cameras at intersections, parking lots, malls, hotels, airports, and even homes. It uses internet-connected sensors, including webcams and car media systems, to locate cameras inside a given area. On top of that, the company has shown interest in targeting devices through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
That lands closer to home than any plate reader. Plenty of preppers have a doorbell camera out front and another one over the driveway. Those cameras show your vehicles and your delivery schedule. They also show the hours nobody is home. An indoor camera gives away more, since it shows your floor plan and where you keep anything worth taking. A few days of that footage tells a stranger your routine better than your neighbors know it.
Worse, a camera that can be edited can be used against you. Imagine footage that shows your truck somewhere you never went. You would have a hard time arguing, because the file would carry no sign of tampering.
Of course, you can’t stop Toka from editing a file on some faraway server. But its tools find cameras by reading the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals around them, and you can turn that same trick around in your own home. Since any camera watching you has to send its signal somewhere, you’ll catch most of them once you learn the 6 ways to spot a camera that’s spying on you inside the house and even under the hood of your car.
This Software Hides Where Other Spyware Gets Caught
You may remember the noise around Pegasus, the phone spyware that turned up on journalists’ devices. Researchers caught Pegasus because it left marks behind, and Intellexa’s Predator worked the same way. Experts could examine a phone and find the fingerprints.
Toka’s software works differently, and technical documents reviewed by a hacker hired by Haaretz showed it leaves no digital traces on the devices it hacks. Those documents also indicate it does not show up on the list of users of the cameras it targets.
So there is nothing to find, and nothing to prove. The victim never learns anything happened.
That matters for how news travels now. A video crosses the country in an afternoon, and people believe what they see with their own eyes. So a manipulated clip of a riot or a shooting would do real damage before anyone checked it. And checking it might not even work, since the usual forensic tools hunt for traces that this tool does not leave.
Nobody Can Promise These Tools Stay In Friendly Hands
Toka has an answer for all of this. A spokesperson told Haaretz that its only clients are the US and its closest allies, and that it does not sell to private clients or individuals. The company also said it runs an annual review guided by international measures of corruption, rule of law, and civil liberties. Its activities are overseen by the Israeli Defense Ministry.
Take that at face value if you want. But history gives us a reason not to. The NSA built a hacking tool called EternalBlue, and in 2017 it leaked. Criminals used it to build the WannaCry ransomware, and hospitals across Britain went dark along with businesses in dozens of countries. So a government-only weapon stayed government-only right up until the day it did not.
Then again, even perfect security would only cover the tool itself. Approved client lists change with administrations, and an agency that can edit footage today will still be able to edit it under whoever comes next. In a grid-down stretch or a real crisis, when nobody is filing paperwork and oversight gets thin, those promises mean nothing.
Signs Your Camera System Has Been Taken Over
You will not get an alert when something like this happens, so the warning signs show up in small places instead. Go through this list once a month and you will catch most of what can be caught.
- A gap in the timestamps. Footage that jumps from 2:14 to 2:19 with no reason is the most common sign of a cut.
- Camera activity when you were asleep. Most systems keep a log of who logged in and when. An entry at 3 a.m. that nobody in your house can explain deserves a closer look.
- A camera that goes offline on its own. Short dropouts happen with bad Wi-Fi, but a camera that drops at the same hour every few days is worth asking about.
- File sizes that look wrong. A ten-minute clip that takes up far less space than your other ten-minute clips may have been re-encoded somewhere else.
- Settings you never changed. Resolution dropped, motion alerts switched off, or storage shortened from thirty days to two.
- A device on your router you cannot name. Log into the router now and then and read the list of what is connected, then block anything you do not recognize.
Then again, spotting a break-in after the fact only tells you the damage is already done. So the #1 trick to lock hackers out of your cameras is worth more than any monthly check, because it stops most of these warning signs before they ever show up.
Keep Your Recordings Somewhere Safe
Spotting a problem is only half the job, though, since the real protection comes from making your footage harder to reach in the first place. You do not need to rip out your cameras over this either, because a camera that records locally is still worth having.
- Record to local storage. An SD card or a hard drive in your house beats a cloud account, and a drive sitting in your closet cannot be reached from the street.
- Copy the important clips off. Anything involving a trespasser, an accident, or a dispute goes onto a USB stick that same week, and that copy is your proof if the original ever changes.
- Change the default password on every camera. Most of them ship with something like admin and 1234, and those defaults are published online for anyone to look up.
- Put the cameras on their own Wi-Fi network. Most routers let you run a guest network, so keep the cameras there and your phones and computers on the main one.
- Turn off remote viewing if you never use it. That feature opens a door into your system from anywhere in the world, and most folks check their cameras from the couch anyway.
- Point indoor cameras at doors, not at your supplies. A hallway shot covers the entry without showing a stranger your pantry shelves or your safe.
- Unplug what you are not using. An old tablet propped in a window or a baby monitor nobody needs is one more way in.
Then again, there are situations where none of these checks help you. For example, Porch pirates don’t care about your camera, and some of them have walked up masked, looked straight into the lens, taken what they came for and were never caught. A few didn’t stop at packages either, since what they carried off was personal paperwork, and a thief like that has no reason to delete the footage at all. So for that kind of visitor, the #1 trick to keep porch pirates away does the job your camera can’t. It comes down to cayenne pepper and a box, though you’ll want to learn how it’s set up before you try it on your own porch.
How to Feel Safe in a World Without Privacy
I’ve spent a long time digging into stories like this one, and my goal has always been to show folks the truth about the gadgets we bring into our homes. Every camera and smart device we buy makes life a little easier, but it also opens a window that someone else can look through. And as the Toka story shows, the people looking through it are sometimes the same ones who are supposed to protect your privacy.
I believe you have every right to know how easily that kind of power gets abused.
You may feel that none of this applies to you, because you’ve never done anything to catch a government’s eye. Even so, these cameras don’t pick and choose who they watch. They sweep up whole streets and neighborhoods, so a regular family can end up as collateral damage in somebody else’s case without ever knowing why. For that reason alone, it makes sense to learn how to protect yourself now, while things are still fairly calm.
And that calm may not last much longer. My biggest worry is that right now, three dangerous forces are coming together at the same time. If I am right, every household in the country could face burglaries, assaults and riots, and in the worst case, the destruction of a civil war.
If it ever comes to that, nobody will help you, and you’ll be living much like guerrilla fighters, the small bands of ordinary people who have held out against far stronger armies throughout history. Guerrilla fighters know how to stay unnoticed and how to defend a home with very little, yet most Americans rarely pick up those skills living day to day. You’ll get a much clearer picture once you understand their survival strategy and the guerrilla tactics that can help your family stop being vulnerable.
The video below walks you through what’s coming, so take a few minutes to watch it when you have the time:
With that knowledge on your side, you’ll be far better prepared to keep yourself and your family safe at home when trouble finally shows up.
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