From War Driving to Counter-Surveillance with Colonel Panic and Cooper

License plate readers, police drones and fake cell towers are spreading fast, and two hackers are proving that anyone can detect them with about ten dollars of hardware and some open source firmware.
Colonel Panic is a malware researcher and hardware builder whose hacking started with AOL dial-up and stacks of 2600 Magazine. After years in restaurants and grocery retail, he went back to school during COVID, earned his certs and turned his love of rapid prototyping into privacy tools like OUI Spy. Cooper got his start on a hand-me-down 286 in fifth grade, spent his early years teaching privacy and security to activists, and has been a public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for almost thirteen years, where he works on Rayhunter.
Building on their DEF CON talk, “ESP32 as a Counter-Surveillance Platform,” this episode covers:
– How OUI Spy uses an ESP32-S3 and a buzzer to alert you when specific Bluetooth or Wi-Fi devices or drones are nearby, and what changed when Flock updated its firmware
– Mesh Detect, which sends alerts over Meshtastic networks to build a sensor net for tracking drones
– Rayhunter, EFF’s open source firmware that turns a cheap Orbic mobile hotspot into a cell-site simulator detector
– Why “I have nothing to hide” falls apart, including a Flock misread that put an innocent woman in jail for weeks
– The national security risk of ALPR data piling up with vendors who have a track record of vulnerabilities
– The current surveillance boom and EFF’s work on litigation, activism, Privacy Badger and Certbot
– Why war driving is legal, and how to get involved by building tools or showing up at city council meetings

DEF CON 34 – ESP32 as counter-surveillance platform:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcK-TDmzshcEFF
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Connect with Colonel Panic:
Website: https://colonelpanic.tech
https://x.com/_colonel_panic
https://colonelpanic.tech/
Connect with Cooper:
https://bsky.app/profile/cooperq.com
EFF: https://www.eff.org
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
X: https://x.com/PhillipWylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie