I need help. I've hit a wall with a project. A good deadline for this project would be November 8th, 1938, and I realized yesterday that its already February 2026 and I've bitten off more than I can chew. But you guys are so friggin' smart here. If you're hanging in the devs territory of sn, this project is almost assuredly beneath you in technical terms. But I suspect there's no other like it, and it solves a problem many have grown to live with. I want a mapping tool that creates routes avoiding surveillance points along the road. Forgive me if this post is too untechnical for these territories. I'm mostly hoping to inspire someone who's more of a dev than myself.

What's the problem?What's the problem?

Minor headachesMinor headaches

Sometime in 2011 I received a letter in the mail. I don't remember the date, but I remember the year because it corresponded to a particular route I took from a particular apartment to a particular job. It was a ticket. It was a picture of my car going forty-something in a thirty-something.

I had just gotten off the road as a musician and was working as a gopher in a factory to keep busy. Slowly they taught me to weld, to cut steel, to operate huge cranes. I made stuff. I designed things, made after work, and brought them home. It was great.

However, that ticket was for more than I made in a day. I could have stayed home that day. But here's the kicker. The ticket was for a date two weeks in the past. It came from a camera and I never knew I was speeding. I had actually taken that same route at that same speed for the past two weeks. I was in the red for going to work for two weeks. I would have been better offer staying at home. I think I cut a deal with the city or something like that. I don't actually remember how we resolved it, but at the minimum, it was really annoying.

Fast forward, and I got my first, many months delayed, intercontinental ticket last year. Never once did a human interact with me about it.

Major catastrophesMajor catastrophes

You probably know where this is going, but lets dig in just to make sure we're all on the same page. Five years ago, we all lived through a varying degree of imprisonment without due process. Do you know anyone that died of Covid? If so, I'm sorry to hear it. But do you know anyone that died from the lockdowns? I do. Do you know anyone who's life is irreversibly damaged from the lockdowns. I am one. I know others that got it way worse. We don't even know the extent this has affected children whose developmental stages were impacted. Recently, I met someone who was in Australia for all of this. Suffice to say, I needed a drink after hearing that tale.

Rats on your faceRats on your face

There's currently a mass deportation campaign taking place in my home country. Meanwhile, a private company is leasing devices to government organizations at various levels that are incredibly insecure, opaque to the public, and are, without a warrant, recording people's movements, affiliations, and personal habits. They are a threat to national security, even if they are legitimately helping law enforcement with real crimes.

Renegades in this atomic ageRenegades in this atomic age

So people have started mapping these things out:So people have started mapping these things out:

https://deflock.org/
https://ringmast4r.github.io/FLOCK/

This is super helpful

People have started campaigning against them:People have started campaigning against them:

https://www.muckrock.com/search/?q=Flock

This is probably what we should focus on and it's way less passive aggressive than these other
approaches.

But what about actually making a GPS that avoids them?But what about actually making a GPS that avoids them?

I discovered OpenStreetMap (OSM) when bitcoiners in South Africa showed me how btcmap.org is using this awesome opensource project to help merchant bitcoiners and customer bitcoiners connect. It wasn't until coming back to Ohio, where there are almost no bitcoin merchants, that I realized OSM is good for so many other exciting uses. For one, it's damn fun! All my geography quizzes that I've been sharing here use it. But that's just for fun and learning.

People are putting anything and everything on OSM. It's currently like the (early) Wikipedia of maps. The folks making maps of surveillance are pulling that data in real time from OSM. I thought, let's take it up a notch.

Below you will find the repo and a deployment of my sad attempt to make a direction service that avoids and alerts of surveillance. Currently it just highlights the cameras that the most efficient route drives through.

REPO - https://github.com/ttooccooll/SCARP
DEMO - https://scarp-sandy.vercel.app/

As you can see, there's lots to do. Half the time, the cameras get rate limited. When they're there, they don't get routed around (at least you can get an idea of where you need to make detours, right now I feel like the primary use is to show someone with political bumper stickers^[1] how to get to your house without ended up in a database). It's basically worthless on mobile. There's lots to do.

So far, it's mostly vibe coded (poorly), but I think the need is imminent everywhere. Did someone else already do this? Anyway, feel free to start over from scratch or work with what I've started. I think this project is beyond my current technical ability, even having LLMs doing most of the heavy lifting.

1. Yes, flock is recording your bumper stickers. Hopefully, if you have a political bumper sticker, your party is in power and will be forever with no exceptions. ↩