License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars
(www.wired.com)
from Xatolos@reddthat.com to technology@lemmy.world on 06 Oct 2024 11:27
https://reddthat.com/post/27154690
from Xatolos@reddthat.com to technology@lemmy.world on 06 Oct 2024 11:27
https://reddthat.com/post/27154690
From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americansā political leanings and more.
threaded - newest
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 itās questionably legal. Thereās more than a few people out there with definitely not legal smoked covers to the point you literally canāt read their plates unless youāre tailgating them, and cops donāt give a shit because nobody is ever pulled over for illegal mods. Iād wager that the cameras canāt read them either if you canāt at 10 yards
The real dystopian nightmare is the one where everyone conforms and acts neutral out of fear. Thatās 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?
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.
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.
Weāre 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 youād 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
ā¦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.
Iāve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic cameraās view when trying to read it
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I wonder if it would be illegal to put IR lights around your plate to blind the camera ā¦
Gears turningā¦
Yep. Then automatic tolls and traffic cams canāt track you. Cop would pull you over real quick.
If you rtfa youād see there is already an easy workaround for this. You just need to be driving faster than 150mph and the camera canāt read the plate.
Also, this isnāt what the article is about. I think it bad enough there is a network of cops and scumbags (guess thatās redundant) recording all this LP data into the DRN network, but itās being abused to go well beyond LP data as a free for all search of acquired imagery.
those covers do not effect license plate cameras.
the only people this prevents from viewing the numbers are pedestrians and other drivers.
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.
Iāve never wanted to post signs in my yard or put stickers on my bumpers because I didnāt want PEOPLE judging me. And people are judgmental. Now Iām 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? Itās 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 govāt 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.
Add to that how much more difficult (and time consuming and expensive) it is to build/rebuild than it is to destroy and youāve got a real problem on your hands.
I wish we could elect people we trust
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 canāt look up my affiliation. and I donāt 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 youāre not loyal enough to The Party. If you were a good citizen, you wouldnāt have anything to hide. Throw him in the gulag!
Time for a bobby drop table sticker
QR code sticker-bomb
Hmm. I have a bumper sticker that says āI ā¤ļø Nuclear Warā. I wonder what bucket that puts me in.
The non credible defense bucket.
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 ājust in caseā they need it later?
What happens when a regime that criminalizes dissent has access to realtime vehicular and individual (via mobile phone) tracking data?
They already do this to flag potential traffickers. Iām not sure what we want has anything to do with what happens.
If I ever get the chance Iām going to use it to take peopleās guns away and go after vehicles with modified emissions systems.
thereās a town nearby with dispensaries that have some amazing deals. there also happen to be three red light cams and two license plate readers the have been reported to give their information to out of state agencies and ICE on the two other stoplights in town. You canāt convince me thatās not some kind of honeypot.
They literally scan your ID when you buy green in my state. They already know who you are and where you live. The cameras are to keep people honest (intimidated).
I mean in addition to all that even if they didnāt scan your id of you pay with anything but cash then the credit card company or bank knows and can be made to give up that info pretty easily.
Not a single cannabis store that I know of in the US accepts credit card. Theyāre all cash only because the banks donāt want any part of it. (Technically itās still federally illegal, and they donāt want to get in trouble as national business)
I have seen many run it as an ATM transaction rounded to the nearest dollar and refund the change in cash. I saw this in two states.
Having said that. I love cash only businesses. Visa and the other CC companies have way too much power. We should all go back to cash tomorrow, but we wonāt.
I ran a business, not weed related, that was cash only for the better part of 5 years. When I started taking cards I made sure cash and bitcoin were also options. The only downside was going to the bank every week to grab stacks of small bills for change. The upside was never having to deal with credit cards and every payment settling instantly when the cash changed hands. Under $100, cash is king.
Why under $100?
Simply because most people wonāt walk around with $100+ in their wallet. If you are specifically going to pay for something I guess cash is king until it hits 30-40lbs and gets harder to carry.
False. Went to one in June, 2024, in New York City, right around Timeās Square, and the guy behind the counter asked if I was paying via cash, debit, or credit.
I asked him about the credit option, and he said Visa has started working with some dispensaries and offering their credit services for payment. I even mentioned it to a dispensary employee in Maine (they only accept cash), and he said the same thing: Visa is the only one thatās barely starting to offer credit service for dispensaries.
That person was reporting their experience. It's not false that they have not seen it. I haven't, either.
Lots of āstoresā sell āweedā (delta 8) and thatās not illegal for credit cards.
You are not buying real weed from a real dispensary in the US with a credit card, yet. One day, but if you arenāt paying cash, thatās a red flag.
Yep, that must be why I walked into a dispensary, that sold only recreational and medicinal marijuana to adults aged 21+, that checked all IDs at the door, and reverified them by the cashier. Then, after completing my transaction using a debit card, and having my aforementioned conversation with the cashier, who was wearing the identification as is required by all states with recreational marijuana on a lantern around their neck, and proceeded to leave with legitimate marijuanaā¦
I know delta 8 and all those substitutes. This was a legitimate dispensary advertising and using Visa for credit transactions for their purchases.
Hence why I said theyāre very barely doing so, but Visa appears to at least be starting to, and that your statement of āno store selling marijuana will use a credit careā was false.
Ahhh, debit. Not credit.
My point still stands.
It doesnāt.
I didnāt want to use a credit card, that doesnāt mean they donāt accept them. They made that clear they do.
So noā¦ Your point does not still stand.
Yeah thatās pretty dystopian. Something worse hasnāt been done with it probably just because many bad actors havenāt been aware its an option.
If you could access the database, then you could put a camera near an electronic billboard and then serve personalized ads to people as they drive down the road.
But a digital gun database is unconstitutional?
Only for the government. The workaround for mass warrantless surveillance is to contract a private company. Since you donāt have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, itās not illegal to take a picture of your car as it drives by. You could do the same thing, just go outside your local police station and take pictures of the cars and write down the license plates and times they go by. Nobody will bother you because itās perfectly legal and the police obviously wonāt care that youāre doing it because itās not illegal and they will thank you for making them feel safer.
So what youāre saying we create a Credit Score system, but for guns. Might just work š§
Since those cameras are so easy to deploy, it would be trivial to place them near gun stores and gun ranges, and other places frequented by gun owners, itās not a gun registry though. Itās simply four catching criminals and for the childrenās safety of course. If you go against the police you are un-American
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Unless youāre taking pictures of police vehicles, in which case they definitely care. Still not illegal, but theyāll most likely harass you for it.
But hey, you can make a living suing police departments, there are worse things to spend your time on.
Federal civil rights lawsuit: any%
Iām 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.
Literally illegal
to modify the license plate itself. but itās surroundings? why?
What do you think obscuring means?
Obsucuring means making it partially or entirely not visible.
Obfuscating, howeverā¦
the other user defined it well
It varies by state and there are no laws that say it needs to be machine readable. It only needs to be human readable.
I am curious what just running it over with a yellow highlighter might do at night
The readers are smart enough to distinguish between them, so it wonāt 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.
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 itās able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume itās able to trim excess characters.
However, Iām not telling you what to do at all. I donāt know how they operate; Iām 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 arenāt sure what is or isnāt a license plate). These kinds of databases are so massive thereās little to no human eyes on images. Anyway I donāt think it would be very hard to send garbage into their database.
The readers are just cameras with a sim card and use a simple motion sensor to trigger the camera. All of the processing is server side.
I donāt disagree. The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If itās able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume itās able to trim excess characters.
However, Iām not telling you what to do at all. I donāt know how they operate; Iām 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.
I once saw a teardown of one of the flock safety fixed position cameras, but Iāll be damned as I canāt find it anymore.
Itās a very simple system, much like a trail camera. It has a motion sensor, a camera, a sim card, a gps module, a battery, and a solar panel.
They simply stick the pole in the ground along a right of way and the camera knows where itās at because of the gps, it doesnāt need any kind of wires installed. The camera isnāt super high resolution, it just has a narrow lens on it so that it can capture text. These things are made with inexpensive off the shelf parts. I canāt speak for the Motorola systems, but I image they have some object recognition built in because they are mounted to a vehicle. I believe those are a much older design, but I have seen parts for sale on ebay, so they have probably updated it in the past few years to make it cheaper to produce.
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 weāre one election away from one-party autocracy.
The police state is here. It always was. ššØāšš§āšš«
Pretty this was is also
Theyāve been doing that shit since the country was founded. The fourth and fifth amendments only exist if youāre a rich person and the cops need an excuse not to investigate you.
With enough readers ā¦ Your location and minute by minute tracking of your every movement
Or just the phone in your car or on your person.
Which has a pair of nice microphones!
<img alt="" src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/license_plate.png">
Drive around with a permanent bike rack in the way of your tail plate. No front plates.
Some states require front plates.
Blocking a plate with a bike rack isnāt 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 itās 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 Iāve never seen it enforced.
If you didnāt want to use a tracking sensor for tolls, canāt you just pay cash? Whenever I visit Florida, thatās what I do. It sucks when the machine is busted, but then I just chuck my change at it and go.
Theyāve been dismantling cash toll stops to erect automated readers in their place.
Dang. I havenāt 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.
Thatās a privacy nightmare.
Iāve 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 mean if youāre 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 donāt 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? Theyāll probably let it slide.
Iām pretty sure itās illegal to intentionally hide your plates
But is it illegal to intentionally always be ready to carry bikes?
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.
Iāve heard of card counters getting stopped by security when they try to walk into a casino, there are definitely ways to āmakeā someoneās car and put it in a database but the tech is still spotty afaik.
Yup, but these systems are a lot less sophisticated than many people make them out to be. Itās also not illegal to count cards, the casinos just arenāt big fans of losing money, so theyāll enforce their right to refuse service to anyone if they suspect you of counting cards.
Ah yes, the freedom of owning a car.
hackaday.com/ā¦/sql-injection-fools-speed-traps-anā¦
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