Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Federal Surveillance Program

None of this holds a candle to having a functional government that works for the benefit of the public.

Crowdsourcing tracking of government vehicles might prompt a more reasonable reaction from politicians.

Show up at town halls and vote.

Automated vehicles driving by with eink licenspeplates?

There is at least one attempt [0] of input manipulation I am aware of, but it was several years ago, unproven, and I have to assume that input data manipulation vulnerabilities are unlikely to be present. If a new destructive attack could be found by visual data input, mass simultaneous deployment would be the most effective use of it, the logistical issues of which are a substantial barrier to efficacy.

Changing stickers or vehicle color would have little effect since they would all be read normally: you change your clothes daily but that does not have any impact on the database itself or the cameras. Swapping or covering plates is illegal, and even things like ghost plates [1] are just misdirection and would do nothing to combat the surveillance system itself.

Wrapping tour vehicle in a custom tailored adversarial pattern [2] may work, but this is mostly unproven technology in the field, and it would only work until the failures it caused became part of the training set, at which point you would need to re-wrap tour vehicle. It would also be a lot of effort and expense to do something that wouldn't make any impact on the surveillance systems themselves (by definition the best case scenario here is that object detection does not work on the wrapped vehicle, but it could still be recorded and you would not be doing anything to combat the surveillance itself).

Ultimately, our best bet is to start with the end goal: stop the data from being collected in the first place, don’t just try to hide from it. Social and political campaigning is probably the most effective path currently. Map your neighborhood on deflock.me, put flyers on your local streets, talk to your neighbors, attend city council meetings, and call your reps incessantly. Change the incentives… If you are independently wealthy, offer your county or PD a donation (via their PAC or a grant) in exchange for signing an agreement for X years to not use these technologies. If you work in governance, tie funding to privacy agreements. Make individual donations to groups like the Ludlow Institute or EFF, or ask them about grant funding for your projects. If we are able to pass better privacy laws, it’s possible that a private right of action would make it prohibitively costly for private companies to create programs like this which mass infringe on personal rights.

Some individuals have taken to the more expedient solution of direct action, physically disabling cameras with spray foam, tin snips, etc for a more expedient solution (vandalism is obviously illegal, don’t do crimes, that would be bad and naughty).

[0] https://www.ioactive.com/sql-injection-in-the-wild/ [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq9860162dj2o [2] https://sandbox.norecognition.org/

Most people who claim to be against big government are really just opposed to the idea of the government restricting them, personally. If it's their friends wielding government to hunt and punish the right people then they're in support. You could see this well before the current turn, recall the overlap between small government support and pro-police, pro-military, pro-death penalty, pro-stop and frisk "law and order" types.

To steelman your argument and respond: 1) there is ample reason to believe that a Harris presidency would not have done any better on this front (that is, the choice was between big government and bigger government), and 2) the federal government being as big as it is already makes it hard for states and local governments to say no to requests like these. (You might recall how highway funding was used as a cudgel to "force" the drinking age to 21.)

There isn't a true (and viable) "weaker federal government, stronger state and local governments" party in this country at the moment. And the two party system being what it is, voters have to pick one out of two choices, neither of which will represent the voter's beliefs fully, or even mostly. Even the "pro-Trump MAGA camp" disagrees with itself on a ton of issues, perhaps more so than the camp on the opposite side[0]. I personally know many people who voted for Trump in 2024 and would describe themselves, ironically or not, as MAGA, who all did so for different reasons and are from very diverse backgrounds.

Though, if there indeed was a peep from any of them against this particular project, would you even hear it in today's fragmented informational spheres?

[0]: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso....

Coincidentally, the loudest pro-gun, anti-govt-overreach, don't-tread-on-me voices had precisely nothing to say as the government did exactly what they feared it would do as ICE started running amok.

These are uneducated folks that don't even understand technology surveillance

AFAIU, the San Francisco peninsula (San Francisco + San Mateo counties) has one of the densest networks of ALPRs in the country. You can't drive more than a mile or two in the peninsula without passing an ALPR. And my educated guess is this is a response to the rise of property crimes, including car break-ins and theft, over the past 15 years, which became a huge political issue, locally and of course nationally. Those crimes began to drop precipitously after it became evident that criminals were being tracked and apprehended by the cameras, and I doubt it's a coincidence. IOW, at least in this region the cameras exit because of crime, and they're working.

That's not a defense of these wide ALPR networks, and certainly not a defense of how they're managed. But my point is that it's a thorny political issue because in many areas they actually work, at least to some significant degree. Whether or not they're worth the privacy cost, or whether or not alternatives would work sufficiently well, are fair questions, but precisely because they're fair and contentious questions means preventing their use won't be easy politically. Many of politicians and LEO officials pay lip service to privacy concerns, but behind the scenes they're wary of doing anything that would rollback the capabilities these systems provide.

Working together legalizing drugs?

Define the win condition.

Not once in human history has prohibition worked for any substance.