Wilmington is under warrantless AI surveillance — every drive past a camera is logged, kept, and searchable. It’s time to act.

Wilmington · New Hanover County ☰

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For Nerds · DIY

Build (or Buy) a Flock Detector

The cameras built to catalog you won’t stop broadcasting their own location. Learn to listen — then add what you find to the public map.

Correction — July 2026. We built and field-tested this passive RF method. Our setup found zero of four-plus Flock cameras we confirmed by eye. Flock has since turned Bluetooth off, so current cameras mainly give themselves away through faint Wi-Fi probe requests that only newer, purpose-built firmware targets — and even then detection from a moving car is unreliable. For mapping cameras, public records and visual identification with the DeFlock app remain the dependable methods. Read our full field test →

Here’s the satisfying irony at the heart of DeFlock: the cameras built to catalog you are themselves easy to catalog — because they won’t stop talking. Every Flock unit chatters over Bluetooth (to its battery) and Wi-Fi (for setup and maintenance), broadcasting signals with recognizable fingerprints. Learn to listen, and a $15 gadget will beep every time you roll past one.

How the detection works

A Flock device emits Wi-Fi probe requests and beacon frames and Bluetooth advertisements that follow predictable patterns — including hardware MAC-address prefixes (OUIs) tied to its components. A passive radio that watches the 2.4 GHz band can match those patterns and flag a likely camera nearby. You’re not transmitting anything or interfering with the device — you’re just listening to what it already shouts into the air. (Hackaday.)

Build it: the “Flock You” project (~$15)

The open-source “Flock You” firmware runs on an ESP32 microcontroller. Flash it onto a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 dev board — about $10–15 — and it becomes a passive scanner that buzzes when it detects a Flock signature. Several community forks exist for different boards and displays, and there’s pre-built “Oui-Spy” hardware from the project’s author if you’d rather not solder.

No hardware? Use your phone

You don’t strictly need a gadget. There’s a “Flock You” Android app that does similar Bluetooth/Wi-Fi sniffing from a phone, and the popular ESP32 Marauder firmware includes a “Flock Sniff” mode if you already own one. Any of these turns a casual drive into a mapping run.

The most important step: put it on the map

Detecting a camera is only half of it. The payoff is reporting it. Once you’ve confirmed a camera with your own eyes (use our field guide to spotting them), add its location to the DeFlock map — the volunteer-run global map that aggregates ALPR locations and feeds them into OpenStreetMap. Agencies redact where their cameras are; this crowdsourced map is the public’s only honest count. Every pin you drop makes the surveillance network a little more visible — which is the whole point.

They map us in secret. We map them in the open. Only one of those is a public service.

Stay on the legal side

Passively listening for signals a device broadcasts in public, and mapping public infrastructure, is lawful. Transmitting to jam, spoof, or interfere with a camera is not — radio jamming is a federal crime. Detect and document; never disrupt.

New Hanover County’s Commissioners hold the lever that ends Flock here. They need to hear from you.

Sign the Petition Email Commissioners

Your move

You’re not a suspect. So stop being tracked like one.

It takes one minute. Add your name, then tell your county commissioners to cancel the Flock contract.

Sign the Petition Email Your Leaders

Build (or Buy) a Flock Camera Detector