Detecting Surveillance: ESP32 & Flock Safety #shorts

Our Take

Credit where it's due: STS Technologies LLC is tinkering with something genuinely useful — a low-cost ESP32 rig built to flag the presence of Flock Safety hardware. That's a meaningful shift. For years, the only people who knew where these cameras were watching from were the vendors and the police departments writing the checks. A $20 microcontroller that can sniff out a camera's signature hands a sliver of that information asymmetry back to the public.

We'd caution against treating any single gadget as a silver bullet. Detection tools are only as good as the signals they're tuned to catch, and Flock's hardware and firmware change over time. But the broader trend here matters: more hobbyists, more open-source projects, more people asking 'is there a camera on this pole?' is exactly the kind of grassroots pressure that keeps mass ALPR deployment from becoming invisible wallpaper in American towns.

If you want to skip the soldering iron and just see what's already been documented in your area, check our crowdsourced camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a deployment near you, our take-action page has concrete next steps.