Surveillance Detection Scout

Your Lookout on Autopilot

Presented at DEFCON 27.


Surveillance Detection Scout is a hardware and software stack that makes use of your Tesla's cameras to tell you if you're being followed in real-time. The name, as you likely gathered, pays homage to the ever-effective "Surveillance Detection Route". When parked, Scout makes an excellent static surveillance practitioner as well, allowing you to run queries and establish patterns-of-life on detected persons.

Scout v0.1 has been released, and we're hard at work on the next iteration. There's plenty of work to do, but we're proud to be on the cutting edge of what we feel is an extremely important part of offensive security- leveraging the mass data that's already out there and opening the public's eyes to the dangers they face in this day & age.

The Framework:

Scout is built on a Vue.js front end, making use of a MongoDB backend, Node.js & Express for the endpoint, and a mix of Keras, Tensorflow, Darknet/YoloV3 and Nvidia TensorRT for computer vision. Things are constantly evolving, so if you have any ideas or if you'd simply like to take Scout for a spin, head over to the repo at and check it out!

Surveillance Detection Scout: Your Lookout on Autopilot

Scout analyzes your Tesla's 3 camera feeds simultaneously, running license plate recognition on them to alert you in real time if you're being followed. When parked, Scout remains vigilant, running familiar face detection as well. Whether you're evading or conducting surveillance, Scout has got your 6.