NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

Public safety rules should be dull in the best possible way. Clear. Predictable. Written by people who understand what actually causes harm in a crowd of thousands. New York City usually gets this right. It has decades of muscle memory for doing hard things in public, under pressure, without panicking.Which is why the prohibited items list for the January 1, 2026 NYC mayoral inauguration block party seemed… off – https://www.transition2025.com/inauguration

Explicitly banned: Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero. WHY? Not categories. Not capabilities. Two named devices. Brand (TM) names. Parked right next to weapons, explosives, and drones, as if the list itself is supposed to do the thinking for us.

Raspberry Pi is a general-purpose single-board computer. It shows up in classrooms, newsrooms, accessibility rigs, art installations, and civic tech demos. Flipper Zero is a consumer electronics testing tool, but its functional territory overlaps heavily with laptops, smartphones, radios, and microcontrollers that remain perfectly legal to carry. If the concern is electronic interference, signal disruption, or hacking, the policy does not say that. It gestures vaguely by naming a couple of gadgets and hoping the implication sticks. Curiosity is now contraband.

There already is a list of prohibited items that works great.

At Times Square on New Year’s Eve, one of the most tightly secured public events on the planet, the prohibited list is blunt and practical. Backpacks. Drones. Weapons. Alcohol. Large objects that block movement or sightlines. The rules focus on crowd dynamics and physical risk. They do not play whack-a-mole a the end with brand-name electronics/

When a policy bans specific devices rather than behaviors or capabilities, it creates ambiguity for people on the ground. Once a Raspberry Pi is banned, a smartphone sails through security despite being way more powerful, more connected, and more capable of surveillance or disruption, or both! That is not a security framework. That is a “vibe” based list, maybe it was AI-generated, that would be interesting if that is what happened.

Anyway, speaking of – vibes are how rules get selectively enforced. If the goal is to restrict electronic interference, the language should say so plainly. Unauthorized transmitters. Signal interception tools. Electronic hacking devices. Those are enforceable things already. Naming a short list of familiar gadgets reads less like safety planning and more like anxiety fossilized into policy.

There is a cultural cost to banning brand names like Raspberry Pi. New York is full of educators, artists, technologists, and journalists who use small embedded computers as tools of expression and access. A device-specific ban turns curiosity itself into something suspicious, while ignoring the far more capable computers already in everyone’s pockets. The future ban list with have everything!

Today it’s Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero. Tomorrow it’s BeagleBone Blacks, Arduino Qs, ESP32 dev boards, Teensy boards, Pine64s, Orange Pis, Jetson Nanos, USB logic analyzers, SDR dongles, Bus Pirates, Defcon badges, hotel keycards, garage door openers, Tamagotchis, graphing calculators, old Nokias, Game Boys with link cables, a TI-83 held sideways, a Pocket Operator making beeps too abrasively, a Furby with unresolved father issues, and some guy’s wristwatch that definitely has a microcontroller in it. Meanwhile, everyone walks through holding a smartphone that can film, scan, transmit, triangulate, and livestream the entire event in 4K.

I tried to find emails to someone on the Mayor’s team, DMed their socialz, etc. So far here’s what I received from the Mayor’s team (and some auto-replies/bounces) “Looping in Audra Heinrichs to help answer your questions! Best, Penelope Birnbaum” … Penelope was the press assistant on Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, and now Press and Digital Associate – Zohran for NYC. Audra Heinrichs “directed all press logistics on the Mamdani campaign’s final events including: the “New York Is Not For Sale” rally at Forest Hills, and his election night rally.”

Public safety is a beacon, a flashlight, not a fog machine. They have heavy hitters, they can fix this. The list feels symbolic rather than functional. New York has done better before, and it can do better again. There is enough time for the new mayor’s team to check this out, and if they do, I’ll get the word out and say there will be no tickets to a security theater.

And if not?

I guess I am going to get arrested at the Mayoral Inauguration or not let in if they find my stuff. I will be using a Raspberry Pi as my computer, and the Flipper Zero needs to be fed every 3 hours, it’s expecting!

More later.