I'm Puking Monkey. And we're going to talk about how your car is tracked today. Higher.
So there's a lot of ‑‑ originally I noticed license plate readers about four years ago
or so. All right. And there we go. And initially I didn't know what they were and it took me
a while to figure out what they were and then I did. And then I built a detector for them
so I knew when I was being tracked and then I found ‑‑ it wasn't particularly new
to me, but I built a detector so when my easy pass, my electronic toll collection was read,
it would notify me. And then I ran across some other things like companies called in
Renix and other places that just track you with your smart phones and even your dumb
phones. I did a little research to make sure that you could actually ‑‑ do you actually
have the right to travel? Is this a privilege or is this a right? It turns out it's a right
and I won't go through it, but this is why it's a right. There's Supreme Court rulings
on all of it. But do you have the right to drive? And that is an absolute no. It's a
privilege. You must be licensed. So that's ‑‑ and so then do you have the right to travel
anonymously? And generally it's yes, except for three ‑‑ three times. It's if you're
driving because you have to be licensed. If you're taking a commercial, you have to be
on commercial flight, as we all know, to get here, or crossing a national border. Otherwise
you do not need to have ID. License plate readers, if you're not familiar
with them, basically are an OCR on steroids. They use both infrared and optical to find
the license plate, do an OCR on it, track it where it's been found through GPS coordinates
and time. And if you get enough of it, you can send it to the police. So if you have
of these, enough data points, they can track you wherever you've been.
Here's some pictures of some New York City license plate readers.
New York City tends to use a company called LSAC North America.
You can see on the back of the car, the one on the left is an older model.
The one that's a little bit larger is a medium model.
It's not the newest.
You can see how they're mounted to aim towards license plates.
You can just see back.
On the back of it, this is actually another jurisdiction.
This is by federal PIPS system.
You can see it's under the light bar.
There are three of them, left, right and side.
And that's LSAC's newest model.
If you go back and look.
Most of these, they look like they have ‑‑ get the other one ‑‑ they look like they
have ‑‑ this is the old model, which has two cameras in it.
There is ‑‑ there is a visible light and infrared light camera and a bank of infrared
LEDs.
And if you look on the back of it, it says, do not look at this.
Infrared LED radiation.
The new one appears on the light bar.
You can see there's two of them.
Looks like it only has a single camera.
I haven't quite figured out if ‑‑ it's probably just IR.
And if you get it just right, you can see on the back, you can see the nice red glow
of the infrared LEDs.
And they pulsate.
These are fixed cameras at 40 Wall Street, the Trump building.
On Broadway.
Three cameras.
And that's the same three cameras at night.
You can see the glow.
When I told people I found all these cameras, they said they see ‑‑ I see them everywhere.
They're at every intersection now and they are not.
These are not light split readers.
These are traffic control cameras.
They're just looking for your car instead of the inducting loop in the ground.
So to change the lights.
And these are not light split readers either.
These are red light cameras.
And that's a ‑‑ and it has a big xenon strobe.
And so what's the big deal about capturing?
Because the cops have been running your place forever when they see you.
The problem with this is this now has time, location, and they keep it forever.
Well, not forever.
A lot of places have it.
Like Maine says they'll keep it like 21 days.
New York City will keep it five years.
Jersey will keep it five years.
And I couldn't find data points for anything lower than 2009 in New York City where they
had 108 fixed and 130 mobiles and I'm sure this number has not gone down.
And it's impossible to opt out.
As you drive by, you get red.
So is it legal to do this warrantless tracking?
And it turns out it is.
Because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy of your license plate in public.
And these are some of the cases of why it is.
And then people say, I heard that you couldn't GPS track my car without a warrant.
But that's slightly different.
Because the ‑‑ you could ‑‑.
The warrant was needed to put the GPS on the vehicle, not to actually track it.
And the other ones is ‑‑ I got questions is that they said they couldn't use technology
like to use infrared to look into my house.
And that is true.
But those are constitutionally protected areas.
Again your car on a public street is not a constitutionally protected area.
And ‑‑.
So FEMA has been funding this to local police departments for the last couple years.
100% cost of the license plate readers has been coming from FEMA.
This is one of the grants to Vermont for $6.6 million.
And this is the Vermont side of it saying, yes, we'll use 100% of the proceeds from this
to fund license plate readers.
And this is Burlington, Vermont.
They purchased two for ‑‑ I know you can't read it.
But I'll read it.
For $45,000.
For $45,000.
For two.
So the retention data, New Hampshire has a general ban on this.
People in New Hampshire said no.
Which is great.
I heard they're trying to ban them in Montana.
They're working on that.
Maine actually has a law that said you cannot store this data for more than 21 days if there's
no criminal investigation.
In New Jersey, they must retain all data for five years.
And then after five years it must be destroyed.
I'm not sure how that works.
I guess they don't have backups.
And New York City retains it for five years, even though they have video camera, video
feeds that they will ‑‑ after 21 days, if there's no crime involved in a video feed,
they destroy the ‑‑ they claim they destroy the videos.
But they will keep the data for five years.
So now we have this data, it's actually public data.
Minneapolis actually released the data to the public and then recanted.
And I'll show you some of that later.
And can it be discoverable?
Because it's data about you.
Generally if there's an investigation about you, you can ask to see what the police have
on you.
Like in New York it's called Rosario and it's statements made by them, but the courts have
claimed that this is not a statement by any police officer or law enforcement organization
so therefore you cannot discover it.
So they can use it to investigate you, but you cannot discover that they're using it
to investigate you.
And this is ‑‑ this is what ‑‑ this is what ‑‑ this is what Minneapolis
‑‑ this is one of the reports from Minneapolis, looks like they released photocopies of records
and as you can see on here, has the first column is the license plate number in text,
the time and the GPS coordinates with a picture of the license plate and the picture of the
back of the car.
And they had fixed ones, too, and this is how they redacted it so you could not find
where their fixed license plate readers were.
That you could just look for them.
And it may not matter if there's retention or not because there is a commercial market
for this.
There's a company called Vigilant Solutions and they just ‑‑ and their sole ‑‑ their
sole customer is law enforcement and tow operators, basically the repo guys, use this to find
cars to be repoed and law enforcement will just buy it whether they have it retained
or not.
And you actually can buy this from a company called TLO.com for $10.
You can put in a license plate number and they will tell you where it has been seen.
They say they have 1 billion data points, TLO.
This is not a law enforcement, this is one of the cars from Vigilant and they have many
cameras on the back and you can see they have their own branded license plate reader
and it's both optical and infrared.
So I went about building it.
So I wanted to know when my license plate was being redacted.
So I could find the fixed ones and maybe avoid them.
It's hard to avoid when there's a lot of them.
But at least you know they're there.
Because they're always on and I had a lot of ‑‑ because it was IR, I said this
should be easy.
I had a lot of failures because I was ‑‑ you know, built the detector.
I'm full sunlight, have my detector, I'm detecting my remote control for my TV at 80
feet and I can't detect the reader but then I had to go through and use some optical filters
to look.
The LEDs they're using are not standard infrared like you find in remote controllers.
They're near IR, they're 735 nanometer.
So I went through and used some optical filters, it blocks everything below 720 nanometers
and you get this and you can see it glows but there's still a lot of ambient IR there.
So I got another filter that was 730 plus or minus 30 and you can see it just shines
right through.
So I used that to do it.
And this is why the ‑‑ this failed.
I'll describe this graph.
The magenta is your standard infrared detector that you would find in commercial stuff.
The bright red is the wavelength of where the LSAG, North America detector, the LEDs
transmit.
You can see I put up where the visible was and it's just above red.
And the green is the filter and the black line is the detection of a ‑‑ I bought
a wide range photo diode.
And the detector ‑‑ the basic detector looks like this.
I'll be at the hardware hacking village at 5 o'clock today and go over the full specs
of this.
And that's the detector with the filter on it.
I just super glued it onto it and put it into a little old DSL splitter case and put
some LEDs on it and that's the main thing.
And this is ‑‑.
This is the proof of concept.
And you'll see that's the same frequency that the license plate meter actually is.
And what it's actually doing in the IR, it's not actually pulsating.
It's ramping up from zero to full because they're trying to get the best exposure of
the plate.
It looks to us like a ‑‑ from there it ends up looking like a three hertz frequency
on it.
So eventually it turned into this because I tried to prevent false positives.
So anything between three and nine hertz will set it off.
Above it, it won't.
Below it, it won't.
And I used the monkey to tell me I got red.
So these are the same three.
But you'll see there's ‑‑ this is just so you can see in the next video where it
is.
There's a TGI Fridays on the right and some scaffolding.
And it's right before the light but you get red right near the TGI Fridays because of
the way it's angled.
And we just traveled down Broadway.
There's the scaffolding on the right.
And the light.
Friday and the monkey screams.
ALije.
Yes.
So is there anything you can do about your license plates being red?
There's some things you can.
Steve Jobs never had plates on his car.
California had a law that you did not have to have plates for six months.
That's now been changed to like 90 days.
But he got the same car over and over.
So he got a new car every six months that was identical and he never had plates.
So if you have enough money, you don't need plates either in California.
So maybe law enforcement can help us because these are the guys running these devices and
they know what's happening.
So I went around and found some personal vehicles of some police, I blocked their numbers not
for their protection but for mine.
And you can tell this guy, most of them are near police stations and they usually have
tinted windows, they usually don't have inspection stickers, all kinds of things parked illegally
so they're easy to find.
This guy doesn't have front plates, which he's required to.
He has a cover on his license plate that's very dark, another illegal thing and you can
see all except his windshield, he also has a PBA shield in his windshield.
That's not always indicative of a cop but this guy is.
And the windows are illegally tinted for the state.
This New York guy has those Fridell lens things that shift on the back, I know he's
a cop.
This guy has it all tinted up and he's parked in a MTA police only.
And this is the front and back , you can never get the full license plate number, you'd
have to put it together.
This guys tinted, no front plate, back is there and I know it's a cop because he's standing
right next to the car.
I like this one.
one. You see the police car in the background. He didn't care about his front plate, he cared
about the back plate more and I liked it because he has EFF plates. I don't think he knows
what that is. This was a uniformed officer making a right turn that I just happened to
capture and he's driving with his tailgate down. And he has a piece of wood preventing
what's ever in the back from rolling out. He also has stickers that says New Jersey
State Police and HERO which is another police organization. And I said, is that common?
And you find out, yes. So this is another police. And you can see him, he's standing
near the car as well on the top photo. He's got a blue line front plate and even his windshield
is tinted black. And he has his license ‑‑ he has his tailgate down, too, so you can't
read it. So I said maybe he's just parked there because the other guy was actually driving,
this guy is parked, maybe he was getting something out.
A few days later, found it again, different spot, tailgate's down. Same car. Another one,
it's illegally parked, completely black, no inspection sticker, no front plate. And he
puts ‑‑ and he also as well has a darker cover on his back plate. This was the only
one that scared me because he came out as I was taking the picture and said, what are
you doing? I said, this car is absolutely beautiful. I love it.
I'm glad it was a nice car and not a piece of crap.
Again, thin blue line front plate, completely blackened windows, windshield, everything,
and PBA license plates. And it's ‑‑ it doesn't ‑‑ it looks as ‑‑ but it
also has a black shield over the back plate. And so what these cops do is typical of what
I just said, but you can't do any of this. This will get you pulled over in most jurisdictions
unless you're a police.
They can do it because no cop is going to actually give them a ticket. They're going
to get professional courtesy. And so you can try and do temp tags, but you run out of time.
And temp tags are always great because New York temp tags are not good in Massachusetts.
They will impound your car as it's unregistered and uninsured and then you have to tow it
home. They don't show up because they're pieces of paper and they tend to have not ‑‑ you
know, the registrations tend to be, you know, kind of one use number. They don't show up
as big numbers. And I ran across these temp tags.
I have no idea how they are. It's just has an expiration date. There's no number, and
it seems to be from a company. So ‑‑ or maybe they just don't care. Or maybe it's
Georgia doesn't care, because one is from Georgia, the other one doesn't say anything.
So you get 90 days of use out of that and most people can't go through that. You can
also try and get commercial plates so they're not registered to you. But that's a very thin
in Vail and there's problems with commercial plates because in New York commercial vehicles
have a different rule set than personal vehicles. As you can see, please check point, all commercial
vehicles must stop and this is not just to check your documents, they look inside each
truck. And since it's not usually theirs, they always comply. Sure, you want to look
in the back of my truck, sure, go ahead, because they just want to get their job done.
So the other things that are hard for the LPR, so North Carolina actually took a bunch
of plates and ran them through to see what LPRs had difficulty reading. If you have a
nonreflective plate, it's invisible at night, completely invisible, and it's difficult during
the day. And nonreflective plates are very uncommon now. And if you decide you can remove
your reflectivity, but this is a crime in California to do this, and if you're in Massachusetts,
you'll fail inspection. That's one of their checks and you'll have to get a new plate
and go through.
Low-consciousness.
Low-consciousness plates, you know, the color of the letter is close to the color of the
background it has trouble with. Red characters it tends to have trouble with. And if you
have three or more stacked characters, because they tend to be small, it tends to miss those.
And if you put registration stickers, like Missouri, I think, puts a registration right
in the middle of the plate, near the letters, and that tends to screw it up, too. So they
have trouble with that. And if you have eight digits or more, narrow
letters are not great for it. And great if you don't have a front plate, only read half
the time.
These are the states that have ‑‑ the greens are the states that have one plate.
Red have two. And Nevada is special, because they can or can't, depends on ‑‑ there's
some rules for it. And these are the states with legal nonreflective plates that are still
valid. Not very many.
Thank you.
You can also try year of manufacture plates. This is the date of the oldest ‑‑ of the
youngest car you can have. For, like, California, you would only go to 1962. So that doesn't
work either. See a lot of obscure plates. People will use ‑‑ whether they're doing
this on purpose or not is unknown to me. But this causes problems. You get salt spreaders,
monkeys, more salt spreaders, you know, tail gates, not sure what the front one of those
is but the bicycle things, all makes it impossible to get a read. But these are all ‑‑ these
all get you a citation. They tend to be not movie violations, obscure plates. In Jersey
it's $100 fine, no court appearance, you just pay it and move on. Or you can get some plates that are reduced,
is not your number. This is University of Michigan plates. But the leading M on both
of those is actually not part of the registration number. But I can still get you because they
have a full number. It will be eventually figured out. You can do bumper guards if you're
parked. Especially if you're parked because they read them when you're parked. They just
drive down the street reading all the plates. More bumper guards. But don't drive ‑‑
I've seen people driving down the road with that covered. That will get you pulled over.
The other worry with these, if you have actually no plates on your car, every jurisdiction,
no plates cars are abandoned and subject to confiscation. You can legally ‑‑ if you
have easy pass in your jurisdiction, you can usually legally obscure your front plate.
There's usually a law for it and there is one exception and that's for the external
easy pass reader. And this makes it hard to be read on the front.
Since it's OCR, what do you think? You think CAPTCHA? But don't do this, these are government
documents. You will be charged with tampering. So I built a camera to see what the license
plate readers are seeing
with that as well as 850s on it and it turns out the 735 LEDs, the 420 guys like this for
grow lights so I'm on some other list now, too.
So it's an old license plate and you can actually buy these things that say, that's the bottom
one that say, hey, no red light camera, put this on the back, it's clear, it basically
blocks above 850 nanometers but since the license plate reader is below that, you can
see the first one, it's just regular, the middle one is actually with the 730 and the
one is the 850, so if it's 850, these kind of work but they're illegal as well.
You can see what they do on a couple of other plates.
So I ran across this kind of by accident.
Using the little camera.
I'm on plates during the wintertime since I'm from a place that salts their roads.
And so this is a license plate with a whole bunch of salt on it.
Visibly it doesn't look too much different on the top.
This is with a flash and that's with the IR.
And that's just a moderate amount of salt because it looks like the salt absorbs enough
of the IR to make it unreadable.
And that's with a lot of salt.
I don't want to go through those.
These states just have stacked characters.
You want the one like the New York that has NYP in three because that makes it very difficult
for it to read.
The Jersey one isn't so great because they're half‑eyed characters, easy to detect.
You can also get special characters like hearts and ampersands that are not part of your
plate number.
And they tend to get OCRed.
And sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't.
And only a few states have those.
Or you can just change your plates as much as possible.
So this won't avoid detection, but you won't have as big of a history.
And this is the cost to change your license plate in these states.
If it's white, I couldn't figure it out, like Florida, it's county by county.
But one of them, I think it was Mississippi, it's $1.25.
You can change your plates every day at lunch.
.
If it weren't for the DMV taking four hours.
So many of them are very reasonably priced, less than ten bucks.
These are the states with eight‑character plates.
Not very many.
And that's kind of it for the license plate reader.
Then I kind of moved on to the easy pass, which is electronic toll collection tags because
they're always on and most people just stick them in the window and forget about them.
.
And all electronic toll collection in the United States is at 915 megahertz.
And there are multiple incompatible protocols all over the place.
And these are a couple of them.
But it's basically RFID with batteries and some of them don't have them anymore.
And so I took mine apart, has a nice battery in it, put a switch on it and figured out
the current draw when it was being read and when it was being not.
You shouldn't do this because it's not your property.
You have to return these.
And so I just basically built a low‑side voltage detection.
And when it went off, it would just set off the timer and make the cow.
It says to moo cow.
And the circuit integrated into it, put on‑off switch on it so I can turn off it while I'm
driving and drove around and found where it got read.
So this place, there's no tolls near here, but it would always go off underneath the
sign.
So I stopped at the side of the road and looked backwards and it's hidden.
It may not be on purpose, but you can see there's two readers right behind the sign.
They're white, little white boxes under the antennas.
And these aren't hidden.
They're just out there.
And this is the access to the Lincoln tunnel from the Jersey side.
If you're up top, you're committed to going through the tunnel to pay the toll.
And there's three here.
And you can see the two up top under the easy pass things.
It reads you, but that's not going to charge you the toll.
You will get charged the toll at the toll and you also get read right at the entrance
of the tunnel.
And they also kind of want to know, because this is the last exit, there's one right at
the light at the end at the exit for the last exit in Jersey.
So it's just being watched.
You drive around New York City and you'll see them hanging from lights.
And I made it easy to see.
Another one.
I got tired taking pictures of them.
These are from a company called Transcore.
Now Transcore can read all the protocols, including the easy pass.
Easy pass was a closed protocol until a few months ago.
They had reversed engineered it.
But it will read any ‑‑ the sun pass from Florida and that's why New York City
likes it.
They get everybody.
But I didn't like ‑‑ after a while I didn't like that I had to be detected.
It's kind of like a ping.
So for me to find out if I was being read, I had to give away my position as well.
So I decided to get a 915 megahertz radio, use an Arduino and put it in a tin and with
a little meter on it.
And we'll do a proof of concept here.
The Arduino one is in the tin on the left, the cow on the left, the one on the right
is the one that I had built.
And we'll go by that first.
And right under the sign as predicted it gets read.
And just ‑‑ we'll go through the Holland tunnel here.
Maybe we'll do that again.
To go through and show that a real easy pass works fine.
So this is that 42nd and 8th, that first one I showed you.
I circled the tag and you see the cow on the bottom.
He's already going off.
And I did a run down 7th Avenue from 44th Street.
Times Square.
To Madison Square Garden and 34th Street.
And you'll see how often it gets read.
It's going already.
You won't move until ‑‑ it moves only a couple of times, but as long as the nose
is on, it's being read.
This is sped up a bit because it's like a five minute journey to 90 seconds.
Still on.
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Thank you.
And it goes off as soon as we turn on 31st Street and remained off until the exit for
the Lincoln Tunnel, which is not a toll, but this is exiting from Manhattan at the Lincoln
Tunnel.
The New York State Department of Transportation absolutely admits that, yes, they do read
your E-ZPass, but I didn't expect it as much at every intersection.
So they say they do this for travel times.
I've never seen travel times in the middle of Manhattan.
And what do they do with this data?
Since they have your data, do they retain it?
Do they give it to the NSA?
That's a yes, because the New York Times said they did.
I don't know.
And so what do you do with this?
This one's kind of easy.
If you have these things, you put it in the anti-static bag they gave you.
It can't be read.
Or if you have a sticker, you're going to have to build a Faraday cage around it and
put the sticker in that.
And I got that idea from a car rental company because they have these little fold-down things
so you can just pop it up and it won't be read.
But if you do that, just like you saw, it gets read right before the tolls, at the
toll, and after the toll.
So if you're doing that, you're not showing up at these other places.
You may be a person of interest if you're only seen at the toll.
Then we come to your tires.
Back in 2000, Firestone had a strike and replacement workers make their tires and
they tended to blow up.
So something got passed called TREAD.
And to do this, they wanted to track.
Who made the tires?
And because there was never any, there's no serial number on tires.
They're all molded.
The mold from 10 years ago is the mold that's the same today.
So you couldn't tell if it was 10 years ago or yesterday they got made.
So this came through.
So there's a couple of things in your wheels.
First one is the tire pressure monitoring system.
And that's not in the tire.
That's part of your rim.
It's on the backside of the valve stem.
And this transmits at 315 megahertz and it's unique per wheel.
This is not so bad because to get your ID, somebody has to come to your car and get
the ID.
But they could.
And then the tire manufacturers are putting RF IDs in the sidewalls themselves to track.
There's a unique serial number in each of them.
Michelin loses 915 megahertz.
Goodyear could not get that to work because rubber absorbs RF very well.
And they were using originally 125.
I don't know if they actually fixed their 950 megahertz.
And if you get your tires from Ford, Chrysler, they put the VIN number in the tire.
So now the VIN number that goes to your state, now it's easier to track.
I know of no one that's actually doing this, but if I were somebody that wanted to track,
I'd be putting sensors at sides of roads.
And this is the tire pressure monitoring system.
This was actually a picture showing a run-flat tire.
But as you can see where they cut away the run-flat, that's actually the transmitter.
It's a little battery.
It's like the...
E-ZPass has a little bit of circuitry with a battery in it.
So what can you do about these?
These are tough because you can't really take your tires off and put them back on yourself.
You need somebody else to do that.
And if you disable your tire pressure monitoring system,
you will have that light on your dashboard the entire time.
And if you have automobile inspection, you probably won't pass it.
Because I know in Jersey, if you have any indicator light on,
check engine, low tire pressure, seatbelts,
indicator doesn't work.
You will not pass inspection.
So you might want to try and jam it.
At the time, I was unsuccessful at doing that.
That's for later.
And you can try EMP pulse,
that may be the chips in the sidewall of the tires,
but they absorb...
Rubber absorbs RF very well.
Then there's some other RFD things around.
Parking passes, you'll find them.
They're hang tags.
You could just get a radio to see if that's what happens.
If it's just a hang tag and something automatically opens a gate for you,
it's probably an RFID.
And there is a community that used their parking permits
because they had so much counterfeit parking stickers for the street.
They put RFIDs in them and put them on the cars.
You want to park on the street, you're going to be detected too.
It's tough to get around it.
I heard Italy is doing this,
and Texas was going to put them in their inspection stickers,
but I don't know if that actually passed.
So you need to not use those if you can.
Then comes to this company I came across.
I'm not sure I came across it.
It was a company called InRenix.
And this is...
They collect position data from 100 million devices.
Google Maps uses them for their traffic flow.
Six out of the auto manufacturers with built-in nav uses InRenix.
Eight of the 12 top navigation apps in the iStore use these people.
And they even track dumb phones with contracts with the cell phone companies.
And they originally started by tracking commercial truck fleets.
So they have lots of data on you.
If you use any of these apps, you're giving it to them,
and they know who you are.
So at the end of the day, you need to salt your plate,
bag your tag, zap jam your tires,
you have to turn off all your electronic devices.
And that's it.
So I'll take any questions if people have them.
What about lighting up the back of your car with LEDs?
Yeah, his question is lighting the back of the car with LEDs.
Yeah, you can do that to block it.
You're going to need both of them.
But many states have...
If you jam a red light camera, you have committed a crime.
No, no, no.
The back of the lights?
No.
It's usually open-worded, saying if you can defeat a red light camera,
any means, any way, you have committed a crime.
So they're illegal, and if I was the LPR guys,
and you think you have IR and you use the 850,
if I was LSAC, I don't know if they do,
I'd put the same blocker that you put on your plate
to block the 850, and I wouldn't even see your LEDs.
Because 740s are kind of uncommon.
Oh, sure.
Tell me where you want to go.
Wait, wait, he's coming.
All right, thank you.
You stated the toll collection is shared with NSA.
Does that also apply to LPRs?
I don't know that.
The only reason I know it was shared is because New York Times said
in one of the articles right after Snowden
that the NSA did get E-ZPass data.
They didn't say that the E-ZPass was collected everywhere.
Most people, when they see that, say, oh, it's at the tolls, big deal.
But it's much more than that.
But LPR data tends to be government data,
so I wouldn't see why not,
especially since FEMA is funding it.
It's probably part of their, hey, you have to,
for this money, we want your data, too.
But I have no documents saying that.
How about Fresnel lenses or dust covers?
All these things, every jurisdiction has an obscure plate law.
So if you obscure your plate,
Obscure to what?
To?
It depends on the jurisdiction.
Most of them, like if the red light camera can't get it,
one of them is Pennsylvania.
That's the one I knew well because it actually says,
basically it's so broad,
anything you do to defeat a red light camera is illegal.
It's a misdemeanor, but it's more than a moving violation.
It's a crime.
So that would fall under to that.
I think California has the same law, too,
but don't quote me on that.
I read a lot of state laws,
and they all start to blur together.
Hey, I would suggest you check your sources
on the New York Times article
as far as the availability of the TOTAC reader ID to NSA.
I know the people who built the system.
Yeah.
The data, we don't keep any of those data.
Is that New York City dot?
New York City dot, along with a number of other systems.
The DOT, the last thing they want to do,
is to know who the hell is driving that car.
Okay.
So the New York Times published that,
but when they said they just said easy pass data,
they didn't say if it was New York dot data or toll,
actually toll data.
All TOTAC data are scrubbed.
So I would double check that source on New York Times.
And also with the NREX data,
you might want to double check that source, too,
because I challenge you to find anyone at NREX
that can pinpoint a vehicle.
I'm not saying they can't,
but I'm saying,
you know, is that it's being tracked at this point.
You're being tracked in your Android phone,
but I think Google probably has a better chance
of identifying you than NREX.
Where do you want to go?
I got an answer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was just wondering if you,
if you've done any experiments
with putting like a coat of like clear coat paint
over a layer of salt just to stabilize it
so it doesn't wash off.
No, I actually want it to wash off
because let's say you need to go through a car inspection.
You have to wash it off.
But these are up to,
I'm not saying to do any of this, actually.
This is just ideas.
Yeah, and I'm not sure how they,
if that's even,
how they even detect if it's reflective or not, right?
Is it just, you know,
a little laser beam that says I get enough back,
it's fine at a corner.
You know, all I know is that's part of their
inspection criteria in Massachusetts.
Is there any state law that says
you must keep your license plate clean?
Like what if there's mud or?
Yeah, actually that's the same as the obscured plate.
Plate law.
Every state has an obscured plate law.
You cannot put mud or stuff on it.
Typically it has to be visible
and that's why I kind of like the salt
because visibly it doesn't look like it.
And in states that have winters,
it's kind of common to have salted plates.
Not probably very common out here.
Yeah.
Okay, so my question is
how did you salt your plates
to maintain deniability?
You just, water, salt, super saturated,
pour it on the plate, off the car, let it dry.
Hi, thanks for coming up and speaking with us.
I just had a quick question about the data
and how it's available.
If we can contact our local,
local counties
and get this information for free
as far as when our plates were read?
I don't know how,
they typically will not give this data out.
Minneapolis, I only know they did it briefly
and then they recanted and said
no, we're not going to provide this anymore.
Okay.
So I know of no other place
that it was actually providing the data
available to people.
But the company, that TLO.com,
you can purchase it.
But that's not government data.
It's privately collected data,
which there is no laws against any of that.
Okay, thank you.
Maybe half a lap.
You put a lot of effort into investigating
state by state the rules for changing license plates
and I appreciate that.
But I was wondering what the perceived advantage is.
How is it any better than a dynamic IP?
You just, you have less of a history.
You could still, if people have a routine
that's every day of the week,
you're detected very quickly.
But they could go back and say,
well, you know, he's only done this for a week
if you change your plates every week.
But they also have all your previous plates,
but I don't think that's a common practice
to change your plates a lot.
So they might not say,
oh, let's go back and look for all his old plates.
But it would be trivial to,
once it's figured out if that's what's happening,
to do that query.
Oh, here's his,
his ten plates, just run them all.
Do you know of any kind of paint
that you can use on the infrared spectrum
that would be transparent on the visible spectrum?
So, yeah, Mythbusters did this and busted it.
So I didn't go down that road.
Because they said they had a bunch of things
for a red light camera thing.
They had some sort of spray that did not work.
And I saw it advertised.
I did not purchase it nor try it.
That's usually for speeders
trying to detect,
trying to avoid the laser detectors.
A lot of the questions here are focused on
trying to prevent reading of your plate.
And as you mentioned,
every state has an obscure license plate law.
What about a different approach?
What about feeding it bad data?
Lots and lots of bad data.
Yeah, so that's one of the things,
yeah, I had things.
So the detector's trying to find your plate.
So if you get some reflective material,
with non-reflective numbers on it,
it will probably still find your plate,
but will read all the other bad data along with it.
So your plate,
you will still probably be captured,
but as well as your bumper sticker
that you try to say semicolon one equals one
to try and dump on it.
But you got to do that in like eight characters.
My question is about sanding the license plates.
I have a bunch of people in Arizona
that sand them down.
Everything around the numbers.
What's that about?
Well, they leave the sand on it
or are they actually sanding it to remove it?
Sanding the plate will remove the reflectivity.
Yeah, it has the numbers though on it, right?
Visibly.
Yeah, one of the ways the detectors are looking
to find the plate on the back of the car,
because let's say,
you have a plate on the back of the car,
you have a hundred bumper stickers.
It needs to find your plate and all the noise.
And one of the ways it does that is by the reflectivity.
All right.
Thanks.
Thank you.