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War Driving for Flock Cameras

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DeFlockILM — Wilmington & New Hanover CountyWilmington · New Hanover County
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For Nerds · Field Work

War Driving: Map Every Camera That’s Mapping You

The cameras watch you — and broadcast their own location while they do it. War driving turns that chatter into a 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 →

What war driving is

The name is a leftover from the 1983 movie WarGames, where a kid’s computer auto-dials every phone number in a city hunting for modems — “war dialing.” When Wi-Fi went mainstream around 2001, hobbyists adapted the idea: drive around with a laptop and a GPS, and log every wireless network you pass. That’s war driving. The crowdsourced database it feeds, WiGLE, has been collecting GPS-tagged networks since 2002 and now holds over a billion of them. Nobody breaks into anything — you’re just writing down what the radios around you are already shouting into the air.

The twist: the surveillance cameras shout too

Here’s the part that’s almost poetic. A Flock camera is a little solar-powered computer with a cellular modem — and, it turns out, a chatty wireless radio. To manage themselves, the cameras emit telltale Wi-Fi probe requests (a wildcard probe, blasted across every channel as the radio hops) and Bluetooth Low Energy advertisements, all from hardware with recognizable manufacturer MAC-address prefixes. Researchers found that this exact behavior — the channel-hopping wildcard probe plus the MAC fingerprint — makes a Flock unit uniquely identifiable from the road. (Hackaday covered the technique.) The camera built to log every passing car announces itself to anyone listening.

How to do it — with a $15 board

You don’t need a laptop bristling with antennas. A single ESP32 microcontroller — a Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3, or a prebuilt “Oui-Spy” — has the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios built in. Flash it with one of the open-source Flock-detection firmwares and it listens for the camera’s signature, adds a GPS fix, de-duplicates by MAC so you don’t log the same camera twice, and builds a map as you drive your normal routes. The leading projects are free on GitHub:

If you want the full build, we wrote it up in Build (or Buy) a Flock Detector. War driving is simply what you do with it: instead of hunting one camera, you map the whole grid, one drive at a time.

Put it on the public map

Logging cameras for yourself is satisfying. Sharing them is the point. The DeFlock map is a global, crowdsourced map of ALPR cameras — and it takes submissions. Every camera you war-drive and upload makes the public count a little more honest. Here’s how we map the cameras watching New Hanover County. Officials redact the locations; the crowdsourced map is the public’s answer.

Is this legal? Yes — with one bright line.

War driving in the United States has been treated as lawful for two decades, for a simple reason: you are passively receiving signals that devices broadcast publicly. WiGLE has logged a billion networks this way. Recording that a radio exists at a location — its identifier and its GPS coordinates — is not “access.” The bright line is the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: do not try to connect to, log into, or pull data from the cameras. You’re mapping their presence, not touching their contents. And unlike the plate-cover gadgets we tested, nothing here defaces your plate or obstructs anything — you’re just listening. (General information, not legal advice.)

The camera built to log every car broadcasts its own location to anyone listening. War driving just writes it down.

Why it matters

A surveillance network the public can’t see is a surveillance network the public can’t question. When agencies won’t publish where their cameras are — and our county redacts even who searches them — war driving is how citizens audit the grid themselves. It’s the same ethos as the rest of this series: cheap hardware plus open-source software, turned into a way to make invisible surveillance visible.

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

This article is general technical and educational information, not legal advice. Passively logging publicly broadcast wireless signals is generally lawful in the U.S.; attempting to access, connect to, or intercept data from any device is not, and may violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Laws vary — consult a licensed attorney about your own situation. Last updated June 29, 2026.

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