The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of Americans’ comings and goings into a private national database that it makes available to police officers around the country. The system allows police to search the nationwide movement records of any vehicle that comes to their attention. That’s bad enough on its own, but the company is also now apparently analyzing our driving patterns to determine if we’re “suspicious.” That means if your police start using Flock, they could target you just because some algorithm has decided your movement patterns suggest criminality.
Flock appears to offer this capability through a larger “Investigations Manager,” which urges police departments to “Maximize your LPR data to detect patterns of suspicious activity across cities and states.” The company also offers a “Linked Vehicles” or “Convoy Search” allowing police to “uncover vehicles frequently seen together,” putting it squarely in the business of tracking people’s associations, and a “Multiple locations search,” which promises to “Uncover vehicles seen in multiple locations.” All these are variants on the same theme: using the camera network not just to investigate based on suspicion, but to generate suspicion itself.
This is exactly the dystopian future all privacy advocates were warning about.
Wow we really are living in the future.
It fucking sucks.
p r e c r i m e
With our new Multi-State Insights feature, law enforcement is alerted when suspect vehicles have been detected in multiple states, helping investigators uncover networks and trends linked to major crime organizations.
It always helps, when reading this kind of blurb, to mentally replace “major crime organizations” with things like “women or trans people seeking medical care” or “environmentalists” or “people attending protests” or “union members” or “police officers’ battered exes” or just “brown people going anywhere.” It gives you a better idea of how the police will actually use the tool.
I’m amazed folks aren’t systematically destroying ALPRs yet.
Very few people know about them. You might not understand how spaced out american cities are if you live in Europe. These things are harder to spot in the U.S.A.
I was just thinking about fun ways to mess with them the other day haha
A big rolodex scrolling through fake plates on a Lightning McQueen cutout would be interesting.
Fake plates aren’t legal. I was curious and looked that up the other day. Even at nonstandard locations.
Even if they’re not attached to an actual motor vehicle?
I imagine some picketers with fake plates for signs in front of LPR’s could claim free speech protections. Not their fault Flock’s system ingested bogus data. Haha!
You absolutely can do that. People sell clothing with license plates on them explicitly to fuck that LPRs
For example https://adversarialfashion.com/
Those would be cool as a vehicle wrap.
I’m really fucking tempted to sticker the cameras
Ride bikes, do crime.
Luigi approved.
Driving while black 2: electric boogaloo
So I’m seeing a bunch of complaining about this. Anybody have any actionable suggestions on how to frustrate this intrusion?
Ask the Brits:
Vigilantes took out a speed camera in Lincolnshire, England on October 23. A gasoline-filled tire was used to destroy the automated ticketing machine on the A153 Main Road at Anwick, the Sleaford Standard reported. Police have no idea who may be responsible.
When I was looking for a job recently, they kept coming up in the searches and even having spent time in defense, I couldn’t bring myself to engage with them.
This is why I don’t install a front plate and put reflective paint over my license. Readers can’t read it now. And it’s not visible by the human eye.
Please to suggest the right brand of paint? This is a very good idea. Something that will reflect infrared but is transparent in the visible spectrum….
It is definitely time for some popular resistance methods to be widely deployed.
Are we in psychopass yet or are we psychopast that?
I don’t psychknow
That’ll all be denied and used for parallel reconstruction.
