It’s not every day you see a video that starts with chickens and ends with a genuine national security concern, but then, these are strange times. The story starts with YouTuber, musician, and increasingly influential amateur cybersecurity researcher Benn Jordan’s attempt to get a robot dog from Chinese firm Unitree—also responsible for the questionable Gundam and the kung-fu deathbots—to guard his chicken coop. The robot proves an abject failure at doing this, and at anything else remotely useful. What it does turn out to be good at, according to Jordan, is sending data back to China. While the robot’s general uselessness is amusing, the really interesting part of the video comes once Jordan starts to look into the robot’s information security features—or, more specifically, the alleged lack thereof. This section of the video starts strong with the revelation that Jordan was able to obtain root access to the dog—yes, that’s a phrase I just typed—by adding Curl commands to the end of his wifi password. This allows full access to the dog, which, as Jordan says, involves “not only controlling their movement, but also recording, downloading, and livestreaming audio and video information from the robot’s surroundings without an authenticated connection through the app.” (At this point, it’s probably worth noting that police departments across the country are merrily spending tax revenue on these robots like it’s Monopoly money.)