From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more.
Yeah that’s pretty dystopian. Something worse hasn’t been done with it probably just because many bad actors haven’t been aware its an option.
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Wow this article goes into the nuance. And it terrified me.
a big thank you for your comment. comments like these really do help me to not skip worthwhile articles.
I’ve never wanted to post signs in my yard or put stickers on my bumpers because I didn’t want PEOPLE judging me. And people are judgmental. Now I’m glad I had that opinion because we have to worry about computers logging us so we can be judged in the future for whatever weird reason someone comes up with?
What happened to freedoms in America? It’s easy for a government to strip them after the people stop believing in them being important. Corporations are making free thought and self expression unimportant and dangerous and the gov’t will have no choice but to curb our freedoms in response. And we will cheer it on. I hate this shit.
We got attacked and then in fear gave away our freedoms for the promise of more protections. There were people blowing the whistle each time but we ignored them. Patriot Act. Lobbying to not consider social platforms news aggregates. Lobbying to not pay news outlets, Lobbying to weaken anti-trust laws. Lobbying to kill legislation protecting children online. Lobbying against legislation to protect user privacy. Lobbying for the use of tech like facial recognition.
This kind of thing has been happening for ages.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
What happened to freedoms in America? It’s easy for a government to strip them after the people stop believing in them being important.
Add to that how much more difficult (and time consuming and expensive) it is to build/rebuild than it is to destroy and you’ve got a real problem on your hands.
Mount an e-ink display with a rotating slideshow of different images on your car until they have a record of your car having thousands of different bumper stickers.
Maybe the crazies with an absolute mountain of nonsense obstructing their rear windshield and all over their bumper are the ones who are right?
Track-me-not, automobile edition.
Alright! Dystopian nightmare timeline is a go!
I especially like the part where cops are reported to heavily abuse these databases for personal agendas or to share with criminals. Truly ACAB
This is a very good reason to maintain the appearance of neutrality while facing your local community
This might even be an argument for putting those smoked opaque covers on your license plates even if it’s questionably legal. There’s more than a few people out there with definitely not legal smoked covers to the point you literally can’t read their plates unless you’re tailgating them, and cops don’t give a shit because nobody is ever pulled over for illegal mods. I’d wager that the cameras can’t read them either if you can’t at 10 yards
I’d wager that the cameras can’t read them either if you can’t at 10 yards
I might not take a bet on that. most license plates use reflective paint to aid in this. it would surprise me if paint and cameras are not tuned to at least one non human-visible wavelength.
polarized plate covers, specialized spray coatings, etc may work, but I am not betting my freedom on it. time to go bond style and get rotating plates.
I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it
What about a thin e-ink layer plus led layer display that fits over the plate and would block the plate while displaying a digital plate over it? May need a few rounds of evolution there but might work
very cool idea. they will counter with RFID or turn the plate into the equiv of a qrcode. store a cryptographically secure hash of the plate number and you pretty much put an end to that, no?. if I cant get a crypto signed version of your plate, flag the the car as a scofflaw (or worse) and track it as it travels in other ways. I think we are pretty much screwed without a change in laws.
with anti-women laws in some of these states, this is terrifying.
We’re probably decades away from them countering with anything meaningful like that unless large swaths of people start doing it.
You could just copy others signed codes, so you would also need some sort of totp system.
Then you could still place some camera capturing and streaming plates of parked cars in real time, so you’d either need 2 way communication with the license plates, where the cameraa tell them to show a code for some specific nonce, and which you could then potentially still stream so would also need severe latency checks, or you would have to get way more reliable gps and make that part of the totp.-
plate number is tied to a VIN which describes the make/model. (sir, this is a
wendystoyota. where is the honda?) -
replies not required from the plate - plate has a specialized qrcode printed across the entire plate (infrared reflector?) with an identifier (lic + other public info?) and signed with an RSA keypair - reader can authenticate the information and a qrcode read counts as a verifiably good read
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…or just ship RFID tags in the yearly inspection stickers - same cryptographic concept
none of this is hard or costly. only impediment is public rejection and we all know that can be managed.
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those covers do not effect license plate cameras.
the only people this prevents from viewing the numbers are pedestrians and other drivers.
I wonder if it would be illegal to put IR lights around your plate to blind the camera …
Gears turning…
Yep. Then automatic tolls and traffic cams can’t track you. Cop would pull you over real quick.
If you rtfa you’d see there is already an easy workaround for this. You just need to be driving faster than 150mph and the camera can’t read the plate.
Also, this isn’t what the article is about. I think it bad enough there is a network of cops and scumbags (guess that’s redundant) recording all this LP data into the DRN network, but it’s being abused to go well beyond LP data as a free for all search of acquired imagery.
The real dystopian nightmare is the one where everyone conforms and acts neutral out of fear. That’s how we really lose who we are and any sense of improving the situation.
There are other ways to resist, esp in the days of the internet.
Modern tech permits state actors to obtain real life information about your where abouts. This tech now appears to be percolating to street police. There is a lot of abuse already happening but we are several big cases away before the daddy sam tryied to reign this shit in, if ever.
Point being got to be careful when dealing with the state or other quasi state insinuations as such corporation. Remember when Chevron got a lawyer with some bullshit criminal conviction with a private prosecutors as retaliation about his work on case against them in LatAm?
This is old news from a decade ago, before the US public was aware how the police had long been fabricating probable cause (and gunning down Americans by the hundreds) and SCOTUS had been carving out exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
Then Trump won in 2016 and we saw what it looked like under mask-off tyranny. And now we’re one election away from one-party autocracy.
The police state is here. It always was. 🌍👨🚀🧑🚀🔫
And now we’re one election away from one-party autocracy.
Pretty this was is also
It always was. 🌍👨🚀🧑🚀🔫
before… SCOTUS had been carving out exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments
They’ve been doing that shit since the country was founded. The fourth and fifth amendments only exist if you’re a rich person and the cops need an excuse not to investigate you.
I’m looking for some adversarial material - numbers and letters at various angles that I can stick to the left and right of my license plate. To a human it will be obvious which part is my license plate but it might be sufficient to confuse an ALPR algorithm.
The readers are smart enough to distinguish between them, so it won’t actually do what you want. You could try to flood the plate with IR and cover the plate with clear-to-human IR reflecting cover. Might work. Might not.
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I don’t disagree. The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If it’s able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume it’s able to trim excess characters.
However, I’m not telling you what to do at all. I don’t know how they operate; I’m just making assumptions based on what they said and my knowledge of the processes used. Basically, just adding to the general knowledge pool, so someone smarter than I will have more data to make a more informed decision.
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Readers are not smart. They are trained on data with license plates, and I doubt their training had license plates with extra characters on both sides.
The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If it’s able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume it’s able to trim excess characters.
However, I’m not telling you what to do at all. I don’t know how they operate; I’m just making assumptions based on what they said and my knowledge of the processes used. Basically, just adding to the general knowledge pool, so someone smarter than I will have more data to make a more informed decision.
The article gave me the opposite impression. Basically their database contains lawn signs and bumper stickers on accident - they save all images where text is found but they keep it just in case it had a license plate (because they aren’t sure what is or isn’t a license plate). These kinds of databases are so massive there’s little to no human eyes on images. Anyway I don’t think it would be very hard to send garbage into their database.
Literally illegal
to modify the license plate itself. but it’s surroundings? why?
What do you think obscuring means?
the other user defined it well
Obsucuring means making it partially or entirely not visible.
Obfuscating, however…
It varies by state and there are no laws that say it needs to be machine readable. It only needs to be human readable.
Time for a bobby drop table sticker
QR code sticker-bomb
I’ve heard of card counters getting stopped by security when they try to walk into a casino, there are definitely ways to “make” someone’s car and put it in a database but the tech is still spotty afaik.
card counters
Yup, but these systems are a lot less sophisticated than many people make them out to be. It’s also not illegal to count cards, the casinos just aren’t big fans of losing money, so they’ll enforce their right to refuse service to anyone if they suspect you of counting cards.
This is and has been a big deal for a while. Do we really want easily trackable movements on every major road? What happens when they start feeding that data into federal fusion centers for cataloging and storage “just in case” they need it later?
What happens when a regime that criminalizes dissent has access to realtime vehicular and individual (via mobile phone) tracking data?
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They already do this to flag potential traffickers. I’m not sure what we want has anything to do with what happens.
this kind of thing is why I do not advertise my politics at all. no bumper stickers or yard signs or campaign t shirts. im even registered without a party so you can’t look up my affiliation. and I don’t talk politics on the internet because nothing is truly anonymous. if someone wants to come after you they will be able to find you with enough effort.
Sounds like you’re not loyal enough to The Party. If you were a good citizen, you wouldn’t have anything to hide. Throw him in the gulag!
Drive around with a permanent bike rack in the way of your tail plate. No front plates.
I mean if you’re planning on doing all these weird work arounds, just get a fake plate/mess with your old plates so the letters are more difficult to read.
this will make them more likely to pull you over: each license plate will add to the number of potential cars under a warrant. Imo just don’t use a car to commit crimes or get a ride.
A bike rack maintains plausible deniability.
Messing with your plates or getting fake plates could land you in court.
Exactly. Cops hate plate obfuscation and will probably pull you over on that alone. Having a bike rack? They’ll probably let it slide.
I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to intentionally hide your plates
But is it illegal to intentionally always be ready to carry bikes?
Some states require front plates.
Blocking a plate with a bike rack isn’t a bad idea, except - a) the rack will wear your paint, b) any automated toll collection based on license plate reading will also be blocked. Probably NBD once in while, but if someone regularly skips tolls and is caught it’s gonna hurt. They just had a toll-skipper sting near me where they caught a crapton of people who regularly skipped tolls with license plate blockers and temp tags. They lost their cars instantly, a few got slapped with 6-figure fines and fees, and I imagine jail time might be on the menu for some.
Ours apparently does, but nobody follows that law, and I’ve never seen it enforced.
- a - easy fix, drive a beater
- b - the only tolls in my area use a sensor
If you didn’t want to use a tracking sensor for tolls, can’t you just pay cash? Whenever I visit Florida, that’s what I do. It sucks when the machine is busted, but then I just chuck my change at it and go.
They’ve been dismantling cash toll stops to erect automated readers in their place.
Dang. I haven’t been to Florida (or anywhere with tolls) for a few years, but I knew plate readers were an option, but I thought cash tolls were still quite prevalent.
That’s a privacy nightmare.
I’ve resigned myself to just pre planning longer routes to avoid tolls. I am not putting a transponder in my car and I am certainly not going pay for that privilege or to help normalize it.
I wish we could elect people we trust
