Possibly a stupid question: I know it's illegal to cover (or just not have) license plates, but this seems to only be so that they can be read by cops on the ground. Could you add little canopies to your plate so that they can be read by anyone on ground level, but not by surveillance cameras up on lampposts etc.? Or add an electronic screen in front of them that's transparent to the naked eye, but when recorded, has a weird distorting effect that garbles the image? Pretty out-there idea, but "would it be legal if it were possible?" is my main question.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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The whole Luigi Mangione thing isn't helping them, since the only reason he got caught was an extensive surveillance camera network. Well, that and a snitch. But yeah, ever since Mangione got caught, it seems to me that the anti-CCTV sentiment has been growing.
How do you fix “incompetent c-suite, spaghetti code, civil rights lawsuit beacon”
Chop em all
Flock Surveillance State announces pretend changes amid backlash over its license plate reader network
Typical. Corp does evil, people get wise to it and take action, politicians and advocacy groups like the ACLU call for some "adequate safety measures", and corp does damage control. The cameras stay up, the network expands, and a future OTA update rolls back whatever concessions the corp and cops made now after giving the frogs time boil.
Well I don't want "adequate safety measures". I don't care about the "balancing act" between surveillance police state tech and privacy that this article mentioned. There is no compromise. These cameras should not exist and anything less is unacceptable.
Oops! There was a regression error and we accidentally rolled back the privacy mitigation! And we'll accidentally do it again later, too.
will make what were once optional guardrails mandatory for its users to implement by Jan. 1.
Jan. 1.
It's more insulting than that. They're hedging their bets that they won't have to do it at all in the first place, first.
Their fascist die roll doesn't land, then they can swap to the standard corpo bullshit described above.
I went to Flock Depot yesterday to buy a bracket that only they had, expecting to be flocked. But I was happy to see that someone cut the cameras right off of the poles.
Oh look, it works. Keep going.
Oh! I super-duper believe you!
Nah. Nothing will actually change. They'll just lie.
Let me guess. They're going to change the look of their camera models now that everyone knows what they look like.
If they only fix shit after we complain, then they'll only fix the things we know to complain about...
If they didn't think this would be a problem, we can't trust anything this company does, or any company that hires them after they go bankrupt.
Oh the cops will investigate themselves, I'm sure that's never gone sideways.