Wait you mean this fbi?
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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Unfortunately, it's impossible for me to believe that anything the FBI does under Patel is based on anything other than ideology and incompetence.
Healthcare? No! Only surveillance corruption!
Or is it not an unreasonable search?
Sorry for the length, but I think this is a great opportunity to discuss this point:
It could be argued that even in places where you have “no reasonable right to privacy”, a computerized network of thousands of cameras monitoring citizens accused of no crime in absence of probable cause and judge’s warrant constitutes an “unreasonable search”. Furthermore, I think the data analysis provided by such systems also constitutes an emergent power not delegated to the federal government by the constitution. It’s not just the cameras, it’s the information inferred by their continued use correlated automatically with other large datasets.
Security cameras that happen to catch crimes are one thing, but LPR networks are vast, specifically designed to monitor for personal identifiers, and correlated with other public data to infer where you go, when you go, who you go with, and what you’re going there for, perpetually, and then store that searchable information for long periods. Searching this information does not require a warrant, it’s used to create the justification for an arrest.
Here’s an oversimplified example: I travel past a convicted drug dealer’s house every day for work and once in a while I stop at the store next door to buy a soda. An officer sees this and starts searching for my car in an LPR frontend system, and creates an alert to pull me over and search my car.
The justification to stop and search me is unreasonable because that flimsy association is not evidence of a crime, and is based on further information circularly gathered because of that flimsy association. Furthermore, in an imperfect world, that cop just might decide he doesn’t like me, or needs to pad his arrest numbers connected to this case to keep his job. This is the sort of thing the Fourth Amendment is designed to protect against.
The reason these systems are popular with police is that they do uncover legitimate evidence of crimes, just like dragnet monitoring the Internet uncovers computer crime. But they’re also searching through large swaths of innocent citizens going about their lives, with the probable cause being someone out there is committing a crime, and I think that’s constitutes an unreasonable search.
ALPR's have been proven constitutional because you have no "reasonable right to privacy" in a public place. US courts already hashed this out in the 90s and state that being tracked in public is not a 4th amendment violation- which is 100% total bullshit, but the police state isn't going to take power away from itself. Despite these systems now going above and beyond traditional ALPR systems- police pigs will hide behind the same rulings.
In public is different than a computer network that reconstructs all of your movements for months and years
Lol they have unfettered access to flock as soon as they watch any Benn Jordan video in the last 2 months, idiots.
Time to remove my plates and be like “got stolen sorry”
luckily for you, the cloud ALPR systems like Flock also identify make, model, color, occupants, and any identifying features like dents, bumper stickers, roof racks, etc
So why do they even bother with the amber/silver alerts with plate info? Sounds like they don’t ever use it for “good” :(
Shocker.
Running those things costs money, there’s no money to be made finding lost old people or kidnapped children, tracking everyone and collecting data however…
feeding it to palantir, gives them "target/analytics" on "demographics/dissidents"
Not street-legal without them.
In theory, if you had some kind of camera that could identify ALPR cameras automatically, I don't think that there are any laws against dazzling them with a laser or something, but I don't think that there are any products that can do that.
There is a project for that! It's called "Flock you" at this github page: github.com/colonelpanichacks/flock-you
I flashed it to my board once, yet I couldn't manage to get it to work. This was back when I was new to ESP32 systems, so I likely could've just flashed it wrong, but even if it doesnt function in the current state, the framework is all there to go off of if someone wants to make a fork of it. It doesnt necessarily detect location though, but it does detect proximity.
Edit: I attempted this a long while back, it has since been updated though, so yay.
Edit2: upon inspection, I definitely fugged up the first time, and it likely has always functioned.
As for tooling to take one down, I do discourage the laser route because it's a risk to the eyesight of those in the surrounding area. What another thread pointed out is that a simple spraypaint can on a pole can do the job in a safer way, but the technology behind the lense/panel would still be functional. Do avoid cutting it down unless there's a way to trash it within proximity, too.
For passive protection, surrounding your License plate with 840nm IR LEDs works well in most conditions that isn't clear daylight. It would also block police plate readers though, so do consider adding a toggle switch to the LED circuit.
As for tooling to take one down, I do discourage the laser route because it’s a risk to the eyesight of those in the surrounding area.
Oh, I'm not talking about something powerful enough to destroy a camera, just to make it so that it can't read anything while the laser is aimed at it. Laser dazzlers are a thing when it comes to countering satellite reconaissance, and if someone could work out the software side enough to rapidly identify cameras on earth, I'd think that it'd be a legal way to keep them from doing omnipresent monitoring.
I'd think that a lower class lasers, of the sort used in a low-power laser pointer or similar, should be fine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety
A Class 1 laser is safe under all conditions of normal use. This means the maximum permissible exposure (MPE) cannot be exceeded when viewing a laser with the naked eye or with the aid of typical magnifying optics (e.g. telescope or microscope).
A Class 2 laser is considered to be safe because the blink reflex (glare aversion response to bright lights) will limit the exposure to no more than 0.25 seconds.
I don't know if it's possible to do that, though, with current software; identifying camera lenses might be a hard problem. And if someone made a successful implementation, I could imagine laws against it being passed ("criminals will use it to evade surveillance!")
Tell that to the 1 in 10 car in my area who just doesn’t have plates.
And yes it’s illegal to modify or cover in any way in most states. Any cover, even clear, is often illegal.
But, no one is pulling anyone over.
Ben jordan on YouTube figured out how to make cheap overlay stickers that break the AI and poison it's data
How can he prove it poisoned the data?