George Orwell might’ve predicted the surveillance state, but it’s still surprising how many entities took 1984 as a how-to manual instead of a cautionary tale. [Benn Jordan] decided to take a closer look at the creepy cameras invading our public spaces and how to circumvent them.
[Jordan] starts us off with an overview of how machine learning “AI” is used Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras and some of the history behind their usage in the United States. Basically, when you drive by one of these cameras, an ” image segmentation model or something similar” detects the license plate and then runs optical character recognition (OCR) on the plate contents. It will also catalog any bumper stickers with the make and model of the car for a pretty good guess of it being your vehicle, even if the OCR isn’t 100% on the exact plate sequence.
Where the video gets really interesting is when [Jordan] starts disassembling, building, and designing countermeasures to these systems. We get a teardown of a Motorola ALPR for in-vehicle use that is better at being closed hardware than it is at reading license plates, and [Jordan] uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250.
[Jordan] was able to develop a transparent sticker that renders a license plate unreadable to the ALPR but still plainly visible to a human observer. What’s interesting is that depending on the pattern, the system could read it as either an incorrect alphanumeric sequence or miss detecting the license plate entirely. It turns out, filtering all the rectangles in the world to find just license plates is a tricky problem if you’re a computer. You can find the code on his Github, if you want to take a gander.
You’ve probably heard about using IR LEDs to confuse security cameras, but what about yarn? If you’re looking for more artistic uses for AI image processing, how about this camera that only takes nudes or this one that generates a picture based on geographic data?
We should set up decoys that use screens that project wanted criminals faces in from of the cameras with new ones every day.
So many false positives and the police start ignoring the cameras.
I kind of want them to catch those guys instead of ignoring them… But just spitballing here, what if we take a photo of the license plate of somebody in parliament, print it out, staple it on a drone, and run it by every one of London’s speed and emissions zone cameras at extreme velocity on a continuous circuit several times a day?
Was done..in Stockholm a few years back. Someone copied the plates of the CEO of the company operating a toll road in the city and posted it online. Folks pasted it over their own plates and used the toll road all day. The ALPR dutifully generated an humongous bill…
Which, at least in this jurisdiction, is an actual crime, not just an offence.
Well hardly a humongous bill given that the charge has a daily cap of ca €12.
There already had been a few false positive with AI leading to lawsuit for false arrest and imprisonment. Like that one case in Detroit https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2024/06/28/man-wrongfully-arrested-with-facial-recognition-tech-settles-lawsuit/74243839007/
I searched, there seems to have been a lot of false ID leading police to the wrong person instead. As it is, the AI technology is costing cities a lot of money settling lawsuits and leading some to ban police from using AI to find wanted suspects.
False positives are the bane of neural networks.
Weather it’s a LLM ‘hallucinating’, you thinking you hear the phone ring when it’s loud, same bug.
Humans need to be taught not to just pull pure BS from a dark smelly place when they don’t have an answer.
Kids do it naturally.
We’ve all known adults that lie like a 5 year old.
Completely unaware that literally everybody knows they are lying.
e.g. Jimmy Kimmel.
Nah, I’d sooner they catch rapists and DV perps and OCGs. And find my car if it gets nicked. In the Uk certainly ANPR is used extensively and really helps police catch people with very few side effects – The false positive rate on car plates is also very low.
Surveillance generally isn’t great, but the benefits of ANPR are huge.
Facial recognition on the other hand, I’d guess has a much higher error rate, and is not really ready for use. And what we need is not tracking of every person, but flagging of specific individuals, with the rest of the data deleted.
What we need is good oversight and robust pushback against this being misused.
Good to hear they solved crime in the UK through ANPR. They didn’t? Oh dear.
Your line about misuse is the whole problem. Misuse is inevitable. Sometimes it’s a bad execution of a good idea, oftentimes it’s just plain old power corrupting, and sometimes it’s a new regime gleefully using the tools left be their predecessors. Governments can inherently not be trusted with the power they’re given, and checks and balances and free press should prevent the worst of it, but sometimes can’t.
Any system you implement for good should be presumed to eventually be used for bad. If that scenario leads to unacceptable results, don’t implement that system.
Sorry Dan, you’re flat out wrong there mate.
ANPR use in the UK has exploded but it’s also why false plate, cloned plate, disguised plate, mis-spaced plates have also exploded.
Plus it’s not like the police are noticing some kid in a 1.3L ford escort then hunting them down in their senator.
The tables have turned. There is (if you’re in on the fringes) a massive (comparatively) culture of people in very high powered cars which are affordable on credit, PCP, etc running around with just flat out fake plates, who the police stand zero chance of catching.
Watch a few youtube dashcam videos and run the plates through the DVLA (hey, you can even script it…) and see how many false plates you get when it’s a blacked out German marque involved.
Boots on the ground: when you’ve seen one black on black Audi you’ve potentially seen 10 of them with the same plate in the same town. Why do you think there is this crazy her now for petrol in water style windscreen wraps? That’s very illegal, but hides the driver very well and little is being done about it.
This attitude is all part of the break down in general law and order in the UK – if you dont enforce X then Y is also fair game. Different rant.
ANPR itself isn’t any better on average than 99% accurate either. Dwell on that one next time you go to a supermarket car park with charging for overstaying. So what if you rectify the mistake. How much time and effort did it cost you with no compensation for proving yourself innocent when automatically considered guilty by the technology ?
Dont fall victim to shilling this tech as being beyond reproach – that’s exactly what they want you to think.
As for the author of this study.
Smart guy.
But also dont overestimate what the GDPR means in practise. it’s not some magic white knight protecting us in the UK it’s far from it.
It’s also blatantly being ignored by many tech companies. Who is going to find out and how huh?
Sure the big ones will be almost squeeky clean, but that cheap cloud cam you bought off amazon from China ? lol sure thing.
And whilst it’s fun to rag on China (because they really dont care about external laws, no really, they dont until caught) , plenty of European and US companies do it too.
Sit inside the circle see what goes on.
History says they don’t care even then 99.999% of the time, as those external laws they broke nothing will happen to them, worst case they suddenly have a new brand to sell the same crap under, and most likely they just tweak the product to be ‘clean’ in these external markets for bugger all cost. As when their trading partner nations generally won’t put in any real effort to prevent or punish it…
Flock cameras have been going up all over the place near me, Cambridge MA is in the middle of a huge deployment, of all places…. Not cool.
Get a hat with bright UV and IR LEDs in the rim.
They’ve finally found a way to solve the ‘People aren’t wearing enough hats’ problem.
FFFDRB^& 988GHJGHG &&&&&((bghjbjXC GBJvKJK33JJ*** *** 8B **** ***8 8ihb 888888888888888 Sorry we are unactive at this time please try again later.
Chat ? No si injection on the plates storzge and tirage plateforme though a especially crafted license plate?
I’m disapointed :)
FAIL!
Now instead of being just a random data point you’re drawing attention to yourself.
What do you think:
Their % ‘successful’ read is?
Their % accurate read is?
I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘successful’ was 150% (it finds 15 of 10 license plates in a test image) but accurate was sub 50`%
I doubt it’s high enough to warrant attention for any single fail and doubt they could coordinate the fails in real time.
They might keep the fail images, for subsequent analysis…bumper stickers could give them a thread to pull.
Is any image without a license plate in it a fail that needs examination?
But these aren’t the FBI’s computer smart floor.
These are local cops, work interferes with their nap time.
I suggest small windmills with license plate/back of car images on the blades.
Put them in front of traffic cams, (poison the well).
Angled so it can only image one blade at a time, perhaps engineer in a little drag to slow the turn.
Trick them into programming the system to ignore specific plate #s.
Sell those plates to criminals (including cops).
Profit!
Also:
De-badge your car, not just to make things harder, on principle.
I’ve gone so far as to put a V6 bumper cover on the back of my ‘half race’ Mustang…
It won’t fool anybody with ears.
Maybe if their engine was loud.
But why would I be lined up right next to another fast car and be trying to convince them I had a V6?
That makes no sense.
I ride my bike most places I need to go on a daily basis. I usually wear dark glasses and a helmet, so I don’t think facial recognition can follow me. If I want to eliminate automated tracking (for now, anyway), I can leave my phone at home. I can use cash to buy things when I’m out.
Some genius will probably program bicycle recognition into the automated surveillance systems eventually. In the meantime it’s pretty easy to spot my bike on video and track it from one camera to another visually.
The billionaires are going to win. That’s what they do.
Facial recognition is only a small part of surveillance tracking, in no small part due to the limitations of even modern cameras and resolutions. Often it is your posture or gait and other properties that are tracked, so even with top to bottom cover different observations can be tied together.
Attaching an identity to those observations is at that point not too hard, especially when you combine data sources like Bluetooth, WiFi or payment data.
Or they’ll simply start requiring license plates on bicycles with hefty fines and jail time for noncompliance.
Anything covering your license plate is up to 600€ and transport road worthiness certificate invalidation. Even a bolt that is holding the plate must not be in the vicinity of letter or digit.
PROTIP: not every place in the world is a neo-fascist dictatorship like EU. Curiously enough people in China enjoy more freedom than netizens in Europe.
Why in earth would you think he’s talking about the EU? The comments so far referenced the US and the UK.
Oops, sorry, I keep forgetting he renamed it, it’s not ‘US’ anymore but ‘New Belarus” now if I’m not mistaken. So make that ‘NB and the UK’
Rent free in your head!
You think the EU is less of a panopticon?
I’d say the UK has a clear lead, but other than that, it’s regional.
Cities w too much money are installing cameras literally everywhere.
The poorer ones are only putting them in profitable locations.
This is generally true on the planet earth in 2025.
China is another thing, they’re government has ‘too much money’ at a national level.
Completely typical ‘late stage leftism’: ‘NAZI fascist’ (means nothing now, so throwing in), authoritarian, crony economy dressed as market, police state.
There is going to be some culture factor…
I expect every square cm of Switzerland (Including mountains) is videoed from 3 angles, but it’s a crime for anyone except the cops to access it.
Every toilet in Berlin has a bowlcam aimed up. (e.g. Simpsons in Tokyo…Ahhhhh. Also ‘The Boys’, Herogasm IIRC.), Of the ones being used, a rando is broadcast from their big old antenna at all times.
Maybe because he referenced 600 euros…
Don’t cover it.
Illuminate the F out of it, w IR and UV light.
Real shame what that does to big brother cameras, they should install better filters.
UV can hurt people and eyes. Check the wavelength and power levels and how it reflects off the license plate to make sure a child or large pet that gets close to the plate while the car is stopped doesn’t get eye damage.
We should start placing black garbage bags over the cameras. If not that, then at least affix a large sign tp the poles that says “SPY CAMERA” with an arrow pointing up at it.
it was the comment about bicycling that helped me put my finger on the psychology of what’s going on here…
i mean, people say they care about privacy, but what they really care about is their own personal privileges…they want to use the toll road for free. they want to speed and run red lights without concern for the effects of that on other people.
but why is privacy such a big bugaboo? why do people believe there is such a thing?
and it’s because of the dehumanizing effect of the car. when you’re in the car, you don’t see all the people around you. t’ve got some gear-head friends, they know everyone by what car they drive. so if i’m going around town with them, they’re like “oh, there’s jim”. but for most of us, we get in our cars and do our morning commute in complete anonymity. everyone around you is a stranger.
that’s an absolutely nuts perspective. if you leave the house at 8:32am every morning and turn into the parking garage by your office at 8:57am every morning, you are not anonymous at all! those “strangers” in the other cars are the same strangers you saw every other day. the steel box you’re in gives an illusion of an unfamiliarity that isn’t reflective of what used to be an obvious social reality. you are travelling with a group of people that you see every morning, and you have no idea that’s happening. they aren’t strangers at all.
there’s some scale factors — a freeway vs a highway vs a neighborhood street, you will have different mixes of strangers. a big city vs a small city. but if you have a daily routine — and most of us do — you are seeing the same people over and over again, even if you don’t know it.
which is just a long way of saying, i bike. and even though my bike isn’t very distinctive and i’m not very distinctive, i’m seen. everyone sees me. and after a while, the people i interact with every day in traffic learn to recognize me. just being on a bike without a number plate doesn’t make me anonymous at all. if you go somewhere popular, you’re part of a crowd but you’re seen by many. if you go somewhere unpopular, you stand out as the only bike in hours.
we live in a society, and people in cars can just forget that sometimes
Funnily enough, I feel the opposite, I recognise many cars on the road because of their number plates, and bicycles are recognisable by the person and (possible)modification or accessories on the bicycle.
Also, a lot of cars look the same, thus without number plates they would be unrecognisable, but when you see a familiar number plate, it gives you a sense of familiarity that like “I know this car”.
I know think I’m just adding fluff to this comment, but I felt obliged to respond to this comment (as you said “we live in a society”)
I meant “I now think”
HaD needs an edit button
I guess your country doesn’t have the phenomena of people riding around on illegal e-scooters and e-bikes capable of 40mph+, up to some ridiculous speed, riding around with their faces cover like they are part of a seal team raid because they know 100% what they are doing is illegal and they are either 1) trying to avoid getting identified 2) also here illegally.
I totally agree with you that people want to have their own special excuses.
but guess what, society has enforced that wholly.
Through pulling back on the concept of shameful behaviour, actually encouraging it.
Celebrating criminality in culture and media.
Pulling back on law enforcement for petty crime.
Blaming others and promoting victimhood.
With people not held accountable for their actions AND others seeing them get away with it, what do you expect ??
That picture looks like everyone’s front license plate during love bug season. “Bug splats” all over the plate.