People are buying used police body cameras on eBay and other sites and discovering unencrypted footage of officers searching homes

• People are buying used cameras on eBay and extracting unencrypted video footage filmed while being worn by military police.
• A customer used a dated US Air Force forensics tool to hack a device and discover video of officers in people's homes and conducting traffic stops.
• Another user on Twitter said the process is "stupid easy" to pull data from used devices bought online.

People are buying used cameras on eBay and discovering police footage still stored inside.

As the Arizona Mirror reported last week, a customer purchased a body camera and was able to extract unencrypted video footage of military police officers at the US Army's Fort Huachuca in Arizona. According to the outlet, the customer is a security researcher and used a military-issued forensics tool from the early 2000s to hack the device and reach the data.

The researcher goes by KF, or @d0tslash, on Twitter and posted screenshots of what he found on the camera's SD card. The footage appears to show officers in people's homes, filling out paperwork, and conducting traffic stops.

The researcher told Vice in a Wednesday report that the data had "zero encryption."

The body cam was an Axon Body 1 from 2013, according to the AZ Mirror, but the footage itself is not dated. According to Twitter user @d0tslash, the Axon cameras were being sold in bulk sets on the ecommerce platform, but it's not clear how they came to be listed on eBay. Axon told the outlet in a statement that it's working to "better emphasize proper disposal procedures for our customers."

eBay did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, but the company had directed the Mirror to its policy that outlines how used cameras can be sold on the site as long as sellers clear data from the device. The policy also points out that most of the devices that were previously used for surveillance are not allowed in the online marketplace.

According to Vice, others are conducting similar operations, buying cameras online and pulling data from SD cards. One Twitter user said "it was surprisingly easy to recover videos," like "stupid easy." Another suggested crowdfunding to "buy literally all of them and dump them to an open cloud storage bucket... FOIA through the secondhand market."

Twitter user @d0tslash posted last week that he only listened to some of the audio uncovered on the camera he bought. He also offered to send the body cam's SD card back to Fort Huachuca.

Axon is the largest supplier of police body cameras in the US, per the Washington Post. The company used to be called Taser and provided stun guns to law enforcement agencies before pivoting to surveillance tech in 2017.

As Vice notes, a drive for police reform and transparency was spurred with the birth of the Black Lives Matter Movement and has become even stronger amid the growing protests against police brutality. Body cameras have been touted as a possible solution to that call-to-action in recent years, but evidence shows that the devices don't necessarily deter officers from using excessive force.