Microblog Memes

Seriff*

Once heard a cop telling a story of the most petty criminal they apprehended.

A school teacher with no criminal record decide to break into a random gardening store in the middle of the night.

Was unable to find money, and then decided to steal sacks of potting dirt..

Got caught on the home after passing the cop on patrol.

The guy had covered his license plate…

The problem is...then what? Are you going to walk from your front door to the flock camera, all in full black clothing and face coverings? You're going to have to walk past any closed-circuit security and Ring doorbell cameras. Police can follow you through multiple cameras and maybe even see you walking through your front door.

Are you going to drive a few blocks from the camera, park, and then walk to it? They can search vehicle position records for any vehicles that came and left within a certain distance from the cameras within a certain time period. If they can trace you walking to your car, they can find you. Even if you left your phone at home and use an old vehicle without spytech in it, there will still be video of your vehicle in the area.

Flock cameras are probably the single most capable cameras police departments have regular access to. But they have access to countless tools of surveillance. I think the only way you could reliably damage a flock camera and get away with it is if a Flock camera is near some nature area or other natural feature. For example, if there's a forest area a short distance from where the camera is, or a stretch of tree-covered river or creek you could duck into to break the camera track.

In order to destroy a flock camera and get away with it, you would need to have access to some large area that is not under surveillance. This allows you to walk into the area while in plain clothes, change into concealed clothing while in the area, and the reverse on the return trip.

Destroying a flock camera while keeping your face covered is trivial. The hard part is getting to the camera and getting back home without leaving a trail to your identity. And unless there's a big nature area nearby you can disappear into, I think that would be a challenge.

Notably, this is actually the technique Luigi used. He ducked into a wooded park to change clothes and escape the surveillance net. With enough resources they were still able to catch him. But someone destroying a flock camera won't justify as much resources to hunt them down as what Luigi did.

The fact that old school tactics still work makes me wonder why nobody tries false noses, fake contacts, and other stuff costume designers are good at. There's an awful lot you can do to disguise yourself besides just the hat/mask/sunglasses.

Some patterns can. This one won't.

Adversarial patterns/noise can confuse cameras, but that's usually done not by tricking it into thinking, for example, that this one van is actually a hundred mini vans crammed into the same space, but by tricking it into thinking there's not a car there because the pattern just confuses it and it recognizes it as any random sequence of random objects and things simultaneously.

Just slapping a bunch of car photos won't make it think it's a car, because the little photos are tiny, don't move like a car, are still visually distinct from the background, and are on a much larger car-shaped object. If your car has patterns that makes it look like the general concept of an asphalt road, road signs, lamp posts, etc, then it might be enough to confuse the camera into thinking the odd blob shapes are something else, because cars on the road are also always passing on top, in front of, and by asphalt, road signs, lamp posts, etc.

The cameras don't have depth perception, so if your car looks close enough to the road and objects around it, it'll blend right in, to the camera.

They'll never be able to spot it now!

It doesn't break the camera like the post suggests, however. It just prevents them from registering it as a vehicle.

Knowing that the state that submits the image for human review is that the system must automatically (1) identify a car (2) whose license plate can't be automatically read, the more productive trickery would be to defeat the "identify a car" part where the software doesn't even know that a car drive within its field of view, and therefore doesn't know to take a still frame and forward it to a human.

Alternatively, have the software automatically read a license plate incorrectly so that it doesn't trigger human review but is instead confidently incorrect in what it did log to the records.

Also bluetooth signals from your phone, likely also from your car...

The point is trying to trick the cameras is a fun exercise, but realistically we just need our representatives to represent us, which they've proven over the years to be entirely uninterested in doing

Instead of using a car wrap, what about just setting up a big TV on a pole, pointed directly at a camera, set to continuously generate and display images of vehicles with random license plates? In that case you wouldn't be actually displaying alternate plate numbers on any vehicle. You would just be fuzzing the camera with images of fake cars.

The entire legal justification for flock cameras is that it's legal to record anything that's in public. But it's also perfectly legal to display images of cars on a TV.

Hell, you could probably do this as a protest, holding up a TV on a pole while standing on a public sidewalk. (Might need to make it a cart of some sort.)