2. Louis tries to defend whatever Ben's doing by saying that it's basically like random specks of mud or bird shit, but he doesn't seem to realize that intent is a thing. Having random specks on your license plate isn't going to send you to jail, but if it's obvious that you intentionally crafted the specks to defeat the ANPR, that's a whole different thing entirely, even if they vaguely look the same.
3. As much as I don't like ANPR networks or government surveillance, haven't courts consistently ruled that drivers have less rights (ie. "driving is a privilege, not a right")? For instance, the constitution guarantees free movement, but you need a drivers license to drive and police can ask for your license without probable cause. You also can't refuse a blood alcohol test while driving.
He does realize this. The problem is the police can make up intent just to mess with people. How easy is it fro the cops to say "You purposely splattered mud on you license plate" and fine you or put you in jail. Or even use it as an excuse to pull you over.
> haven't courts consistently ruled that drivers have less rights
This is not about the right to drive. This is about a database of collected data on you that can be searched by anyone. ANYONE.
Except this part isn't true?
Like an ex boyfriend: https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...
Or the Feds: https://centralcurrent.org/federal-immigration-agents-access...
Or a cop anywhere: https://data.aclum.org/2025/10/07/flock-gives-law-enforcemen...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flo...
https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/11/13/atlanta-police-flo...
Maybe don't make the blatantly false claim in the first place?
I don't think FOIA requests can be used to run your own searches of these databases.
That's not the problem. The fact that intent is considered by the law is a good thing, because it allows you to use the defence "I didn't intend for the mud to obscure the number". Without that, the cops can just say "there is mud on your license plate" and you have no recourse.
Negligence will still get you in trouble.
Except in this case, it'll be pretty obvious that you used a carefully crafted pattern, because it's a custom printed license plate rather the state manufactured one. Moreover, of the list of plausible excuses capricious cops can use to arrest/ticket you, this is pretty near the bottom. Something vague like "speeding" or obstructing traffic (for driving at or below the speed limit, since most people speed) already exists, for instance.
>This is not about the right to drive. This is about a database of collected data on you that can be searched by anyone. ANYONE.
My point is that the courts (and to some extent, the public) have generally accepted that you have less rights while driving, so it's going to be an uphill battle. This is in spite of the fact that I oppose ANPRs.
I’m told the reason is so that they don’t have to pay bridge tolls (which are quite high).
It’s illegal, but I see cars with bare-metal license plates, all the time.
[1]: https://www.syracuse.com/news/2019/08/new-york-ends-contract...
This was pre-public internet, so no link that I could find.
I suspect it gives cover for the ones that do it on purpose.
The software isn't a person and so I think there's a real question as to whether or not you can even say the license plate isn't visible to it because the software doesn't have eyes it can't observe anything, that's just our way of conceptualizing what it's doing. And I don't think this is theoretical because this idea that the machine isn't a person is argued by the state for why dragnet surveillance isn't a search until a human actually goes and looks at it.
IANAL but I think that would be a violation, since it falls under the "detectability" of a "feature" being "recorded".
> A person may not apply or attach [...] onto or around [...] which interferes with the legibility, angular visibility, or detectability of any feature or detail on the license plate or interferes with the ability to record any feature or detail on the license plate. A person who knowingly violates this section commits a misdemeanor of the second degree.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/253/?Tab=BillText
A bit of silver lining is that the law does require intent, which was a pleasant surprise since it reduces how easily a bad official could weaponize the law against an innocent person.
> A person who knowingly violates this section commits a misdemeanor of the second degree
[0] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/253/?Tab=BillText
Is there a legal specification of "knowingly" that requires intent? Or is "awareness" adequate?
E.g. If you know (or would be reasonably expected to know) that your license plate was obscured by mud from your offroading adventures, does this verbiage apply to you?
1. I didn't notice there was anything different.
2. I noticed, but I didn't cause it.
3. I decided to alter it for a innocent reason.
4. I decided to alter it for a guilty reason.
You probably need a Florida lawyer for a high-certainty answer, but I suspect both 3 and 4 will be a violation.
If it were only 4, then it'd be a bit too easy to evade: "Oh, gee golly officer, I didn't know, I was just following that instasnaptok trend of putting glitter on it to make it pretty. The law doesn't say I can't make it fabulous."
I would guess that 2 would also be adequate, and 1 would require a positive defense.
I fear that there's enough ambiguity to hang any disfavored violator, though.
It's illegal for the cops to put a GPS tracker on your car to track your movements without a signed search warrant. But it's legal for them to place so many cameras that they can do the same thing with no warrant? Bullshit. Recording every single license plate and its movements in perpetuity constitutes a search of random people with no cause. Searching for your specific movements constitutes a search, and therefore must require probable cause or a warrant.
But the law doesn't protect us from this yet, because it's relatively new. When new technology comes out that current laws don't cover, the police abuse it. It's up to us to demand the laws be updated to protect us from this abuse.
It's not any "bullshit" then the fact that police don't need a warrant to follow you. It might be tempting to report with some variant of the "2nd amendment was only intended for muskets" argument, pointing out that the founding fathers never imagined a cop at every street corner, but then you have to deal with all the associated implications. For instance, does that mean first amendment protections don't extend to the internet?
A police dept with 500 employees can't see at 10000 places at once. So, it isn't "simply to automate".
It would be like saying that rifle is just a simple automation of how one can use a hammer to drive a nail into a victim, and thus if one is allowed to own/carry a hammer and nails then the one is allowed to own/carry a rifle.
On a related note, when I lived in FL, I often saw cars with this opaque plastic cover on number plates. I think these are installed by the drivers so that they can avoid paying road toll (FL has many road tolls). I also noticed that these drivers tend to be more aggressive in driving than others (that's how I noticed their license plates are covered). Will the same punishment be applied to those drivers?
I've noticed the same thing in my area of CA. Lots of folks with different devices to obscure their plates, and a strong correlation between the obscured plates and very poor or aggressive driving.
I've started to quip that the obscured plates + tinted windows + blacked-out taillights is the "frequent moving violation starter kit".
Or "tell me you violate the rules of the road without telling me you violate the rules of the road".
> Will the same punishment be applied to those drivers?
One could imagine that's actually the targeted demographic, and not the subset of folks trying to circumvent Flock cameras.
And the more and more I want one. Not to drive like an ass. I don't. I just want to drive around without being tracked.
Color me skeptical
In the off chance someone is looking up that information, it's probably a mistake (i.e. mistaken identity), and seeing where I've been will likely clear that up.
And in the infinitesimal chance it doesn't, I imagine motive would be really hard to establish.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have proper oversight, strong data controls, etc, but I'm not opposed to this kind of tracking on principal alone. It does have real benefits!
But personally, seeing and meeting the kinds of people who oppose this kind of tracking _on principal alone_, I'm immediately suspicious of all of them. But that's definitely bias on my part: I've known many folks in this category from the world of crypto, and 90+% of them are just trying to avoid taxes and/or scrutiny of accountability for whatever scam they're running.
Fake leaves, as OP said, probably are.
I guess laws should no longer say:
A license plate should be attached to a car.
Instead it should say:
All vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal, the spirit of this law is to make it so we can identify through the number assigned to the vehicle from the state that identifies it is obvious if a picture is taken of the vehicle from the front or the back.
Better yet, judges and legal experts should just stop playing these games with words and figure out a new way to make things that are supposed to be legal, legal.
Still, this is arguably a step up from not needing any technicalities at all to get the same result.
Quarter inch high license plates are now legal. It’s hardly the motorist’s fault if the camera is too low resolution :)
Regular license plates are illegal, because they’re unreadable to a type of camera - thermal cameras :)
The "spirit" of any law requiring license plates on vehicles is that the license plate can be read under normal conditions. The letter of the law may have been more generic, although many countries define very precisely everything about the plate, its condition and legibility. So demanding visible plates is exactly in the spirit of the law. What's the point of a license plate that nobody can read?
People exploited the letter of the law by having a license that was illegible somehow. Covered, faded writing, flipped under the motorcycle seat, etc.
> vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal
License plates predate traffic cameras and the requirement for readable plates has been in force in many countries since for almost all that time. The license needs to be visible first and foremost so humans can easily identify a car. It can be police or a witness when someone runs you over.
Cameras automate this so they make abuse far easier. But the need was always there for various legitimate reasons.
Almost no law would survive if everyone was allowed to just take some literal interpretation of their own choice. The attitude that "well technically the law says" is usually shot down by any judge for good reason. Someone could have a lot of fun with your right to "bear arms".
dont obstruct the plate, obfusicate it with bumperstickers that have license plate like fonts, but are clearly not plates to human perceptions.
Have a friend who got pulled over recently and given a warning for the clear cover on his plate. Apparently, they can be a felony in some cases.
I recall on an old Top Gear episode years ago, in the UK, people were selling mud in a spray can. You apparently sprayed the mud up the bumper and across the plate so it looks like it’s just slung mud, but it just so happens to block the plate. Plausible deniability in a can…
https://nypost.com/2022/11/26/unbe-leaf-able-scofflaws-dodge...
Here in Tennessee I'm also thinking about making a "frame" which extends out about 12 inches from the rear of the bumper, blocking aerial observation (but still in compliance with Tennessee law, "visible from rear at 100ft").
Our photo tickets aren't legally enforceable (across the entire state, except for automated school/bus citations), but the Flock cameras have really started being deployed over the past year.
Most of our new Flock cameras have additional security cameras prominently recording, nearby (like you'd see in a bigbox parking lot for security). I hope we can legislate these out of existance, pronto.
Which statute is applicable here?
Daily Show segment on a guy who "uncovers" these in NY including cops' personal vehicles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1J5nuA1QNs
The “secret sauce” of Flock is the extensive nature of the camera network and database correlation.
"No more gaps – just evidence.
A license plate is just a start. Flock’s Vehicle Fingerprint® tech turns footage into evidence that solves cases by pinpointing vehicles by make, color, type, and unique characteristics like decals, bumper stickers, and accessories. This capability proved to be instrumental in a recent case in Catoosa, OK where police were able to track down the suspect connected to a mass murder after their vehicle was spotted by a Flock camera."
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/6-benefits-of-lpr-for-law-e...
The "jammer" is an adversarial pattern applied to the plate. The cameras are undamaged by it.
Also, from the video the license plate is modified, which is illegal - it’s like modding your passport. As the video states…
definitely avoid CA
Or you'd move if you like Mexican food more than Cuban and South American food.
Talk about a lateral move.
Public transit is minimal, everything is spread out, 8 months of the year are extremely hot, several months get monsoon rains.
Especially when the boss move is just to retrain the network with a bunch of examples with the flock camera jammer applied. And if that's beyond the pythonic acumen of the employees of flock, that's their problem.
Personally, if I cared enough to obfuscate my plate info from these devices, I would just taint their data by wrapping my car in a wrap with various different "plates" themed art. I like cars and the exterior has traditionally been treated like art. Tainting data is just as effective at making the core dataset useless as omitting data in the first place.
Edit: I have no concept of what camera sensors are doing these days.
Nothing.
> Couldn't you just slap an additional bright enough IR light in that makes it impossible to even see the plate clearly through cameras?
You could: but it will only work at night (and even then, I don't know if the amount of light you could concentrate in that area would be enough to blow out letters), because all of these cameras have switchable IR cutoff filters.
The license plate can still be recorded. A human viewing the license plate recorded would still be able to visualize it.
There is nothing shown in this video in the law that states that the license plate has to be legible to a computer or specifically an AI.
This one was particularly good, given the technical difficulties of recording low frequency sounds. I can't vouch for his conclusions, but the effort he goes to to record these sounds is crazy.
I don't remember what website it was (it's probably redacted anyways, but I'm sure he does and others do now) but I remember him once getting joking that someone uploaded his album before he could.
> The Flashbulb is good shit
I'd recommend trying these. I doubt people will like all but I think these are all approachable and have good coverage.
- Terra Firma, on Terra Firma
- If Trees Could Speak, on Red Extensions
- Passage D, on Kirlian Selections
- Piano variant on Old Trees (Not on Spotify [1])
- Precipice, on Piety of Ashes
- Undiscovered Colors, on Arboreal
- Three Hundred CC, on Hardscrabble
- Dishevel, on Krilian Selections
- Coinage, is this even in an album?[2] Dude makes a fucking song out of dropping coins.
- Or watch what he does with a fucking straw...[3]
Side note: he isn't anti-AI. As a ML researcher myself I actually generally like his takes. Use AI to better us, not replace us, not further harm (like Flock), and to make it an extension of us rather than to offload. There's a fuck ton of cool stuff that ML/AI can do and I'm really not sure why we're so hyper-fixated on having it create slop. But hey, I don't get the fixation with human generated slop either. There's two paths we can go with this technology. Either we can use it to drive costs down and produce lower quality stuff quicker or we can use it to make higher quality stuff at the same rate (there's a spectrum of course). I'm already frustrated by the low and declining quality of things, maybe we shouldn't just strap a jet engine to the train already moving that direction...
[0] https://www.discogs.com/artist/67855-The-Flashbulb
[1] https://bennjordan.bandcamp.com/album/old-trees-1999-2011
You have to respect the integrity needed to use such a hard-won platform to de-platform yourself, in the interests of your audience.
The only thing I'm shocked about is that it hasn't wasn't illegal before.
Jokes aside I think this is an issue for the reason of hypocrisy (not that I want to track people) and usage of the technology.
Noaidi•8h ago
Because it is so obvious that they are coming.
yfw•8h ago
PaulDavisThe1st•8h ago
metalman•8h ago
SNAP!
Noaidi•8h ago
Forums will make fun of you for saying that Nazi's are here until they are surrounded by Nazis wondering what happened.
honeycrispy•8h ago
https://legislature.mi.gov/Bills/Bill?ObjectName=2025-HB-493...
metalcrow•8h ago
unethical_ban•8h ago
LgWoodenBadger•7h ago
rationalist•8h ago
Kids used to be taught gun safety in public school. Public schools used to have indoor ranges (I've seen one with my own eyes).
When someone learns gun safety, they are less likely to accidentally shoot themselves or someone else if they come across one.
15155•1h ago
The problem is that this normalizes the behavior, something that a specific political sect (coincidentally overlapping heavily with those employed in education) desperately wants to avoid.
quesera•6h ago
If you survive the initial encounter, you're on the run and an enemy of the state?
honeycrispy•5h ago
One of the reasons that doesn't happen in America is because the protestors would promptly shoot back and there would be a rapid formation of a militia. Hard to do that when you don't have guns.
quesera•4h ago
In particular, the largest protests against American elections (in my life at least) have been populated by almost-certainly unarmed protesters.
And there are many other countries with strict gun laws (i.e. not the US) where police don't fire upon crowds for any reason.
honeycrispy•4h ago
quesera•3h ago
I know that hasn't been much in evidence lately, and I know that American humans are no more special than any other humans.
But we're starting from a very different place than, e.g., Tanzania.
I predict reversion to the mean, not revolution. (It can be argued that what we're seeing right now is the reversion to the mean, which is a whole different cart of apples.)
whoopdedo•2h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
metalcrow•17m ago
metalcrow•20m ago
lisbbb•24m ago
willis936•8h ago
ericmcer•8h ago
willis936•7h ago
quesera•6h ago
Walk to Canada? That works from some areas.
willis936•5h ago
quesera•4h ago
80% of modern Americans would not survive and successfully complete a month-long walk of hundreds of miles.
Add in the logistical challenges, necessary supplies, and secrecy ... and of course the possibility of harsh seasonal weather ... and I think we're talking about a 5% survival rate, at the absolute max.
People might think they are more likely to be in that 5% than their neighbors, but I suspect most of the dangers are random or universal enough that this would not be true. Fortune favors the prepared, certainly. But that only gets you so far.
There is no viable bug out strategy, after a certain point (and that point is far from today, and will likely never be reached).
But there are midterm elections, and those are important.
willis936•4h ago
quesera•4h ago
But again, I don't think it matters. The current insanity has an expiration date, and I think the useful calculation is to ask yourself whether "badly damaged but slowly recovering to a new but lesser plateau" is where you want to spend the next couple decades, or not.
If that's an acceptable compromise for the benefits of staying, then stay. If it is not, then get out now while it's easy. I've done this math for myself, and it was a very close call, but I'm in a highly advantaged physical location. Most people are not.
[Edit: And, I reserve the right (ha) to make a new decision at any time I feel necessary. To that end, I have arrangements, and plans, but I have not yet packed a bag. :) ]
alistairSH•8h ago
phendrenad2•7h ago
Scubabear68•7h ago