So...
We put the "tiny" adversarial bits on every car in every car park we visit, and visit lots of police stations...
How hackers are fighting back against ICE surveillance tech
While watching us now seems like the least of its sins, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was once best known (and despised) for its multi-billion-dollar surveillance tech budget. Clever hackers and digital privacy advocates are fighting back against the snooping activities of Kristi Noem's masked agents. The …
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Saturday 10th January 2026 19:37 GMT MachDiamond
Re: So...
"Obviously, just need the ink to be of a similar composition to tyre rubber and road tar so that analysis is consistent with plausible deniability claims."
There's law and then there's enforcement of that law. If the overlay is not obvious, the chances of being cited for it is low. I see smoked perspex covers on license plates all the time and it doesn't seem like enforcement of that is reducing the incidence of people doing that. Those covers, while illegal, are easily available on Amazon along with exhaust cutouts and other illegal mods.
I often see tinted windscreens and side window tint beyond limits. If the window is cracked, it's easy to smell the pot smoke too.
I don't think that the fine for a "defaced" number plate is too much to pay for the privacy it may afford. Perhaps there's enhancements for doing it to evade, but that's harder to prove and a prosecutor would have to bring those charges. In the US, one can fight a traffic citation and being an "infraction", it's only heard in front of a traffic court judge. An enhancement to a misdemeanor would need a representative of "the state" to argue the charges and the defendant would have a right to legal representation. That's likely too much to bother with and the charges would either be dropped or reduced to an infraction.
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Sunday 11th January 2026 01:20 GMT Blazde
Re: So...
Here (UK) it's pretty common for 'nice' cars to do away with especially the front license plate entirely, on the grounds that it spoils aesthetics of the car from it's most photogenic angles.
The fixed penalty fines are merely a vanity cost I suppose. £100 first offence. Cheaper than a decent wax job.
I'm not sure how common fines are but at least in my parts the police are much focused on the street racing some of the same cars are involved in, since that's lead to some nasty deaths and - as far as I'm aware - failing to present a license plate properly to an ANPR never has.
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Sunday 11th January 2026 14:30 GMT nobody who matters
Re: So...
Those 'nice' cars often carry a vanity registration though; the right to assign it to the car often bought by the owner for a significant sum of money. They often seem also to alter the spacing to make it look like their name or spell a word.
One of the penalties that can be (and often is) imposed for registration number abuse is that DVLA take away the right to assign that number and re-register the vehicle on a standard format age related number. Losing something that may have cost them several thousand pounds might have more impact than the fine.
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Saturday 10th January 2026 04:43 GMT DS999
Re: So...
Yeah was gonna say, what stops you from putting that on your car and then feigning innocence if you're caught? It was probably my ex wife, or the neighbor down the street who has it out for me, or the guy competing with me for the promotion at work.
Buy a pack of 20, put the rest on cars owned by your neighbors (especially ones who have had Trump signs in the past) and random co-workers.
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Saturday 10th January 2026 19:58 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Re: So...
There are a few optional extras on this which should help...
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Friday 9th January 2026 23:20 GMT elsergiovolador
Same old
Funny how this all sounds familiar.
There was a time when people learned which streets to avoid, which neighbours talked too much, and how to make themselves uninteresting to men who travelled in unmarked vehicles and preferred anonymity. They called it survival, not “counter-surveillance”. The technology was cruder, but the logic identical: if being seen gets you taken, you learn how not to be seen.
Back then it was knocking on doors at dawn. Now it is ALPR logs, data brokers, face searches, and agents hiding behind masks like they are ashamed or just allergic to accountability. Same fear, better bandwidth.
The uncomfortable part is not that hackers are building tools to evade this stuff. The uncomfortable part is that they have to. When people start sharing maps of watchers, building alert networks, and printing adversarial noise to stay invisible, that is not clever activism. That is a population adapting to power it does not trust.
History usually gives this phase a name later, once everyone agrees it was bad. At the time, it is always sold as necessary, legal, and for your own good.
Still, reassuring to know that in 2026 the answer to creeping authoritarian surveillance is the same as it was in the 1940s: know where the eyes are, warn each other quietly, and hope the lawyers catch up before the boots do.
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Friday 9th January 2026 23:24 GMT Dan 55
Another normal day in a normal country
r/ICE_Raids and r/ICE_Watch.
Well the US tourist office has got their work cut out for them this year.
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Friday 9th January 2026 23:26 GMT that one in the corner
ANPR that can be fooled by adversarial noise indetectable by humans
Using an expensive and fragile modern "AI" to do ANPR and opening yourself up to being defeated by these adversarial noise stickers is a demonstration that people like Flock should not be allowed to work without adult supervision.
ANPR systems have been around for donkeys years now and are pretty robust, using boring old image manipulation algorithms. And if they are being installed, rather than trying to jury rig a tap off a feed that wasn't designed for the purpose, you can even use light outside the visible range, which can be a help.
But no, no, use the latest fashion, no matter how expensive or easily fooled (adversarial noise attacks on these systems have been known about for years now). If somebody dares to come up with a way to embarrass you, make sure you use the law against them instead of admitting your system is worse than what came before:
> screen printing "tiny bits" of adversarial noise and putting the sticker on your license plate. These "abstract invisible license plate overlay patterns … cannot be detected by humans but make license plate recognition systems utterly shit the bed," Benn Jordan said on his video. We'll note that this is illegal in California
>> A casing, shield, frame, border, product, or other device that obstructs or impairs the reading or recognition of a license plate by an electronic device operated by state or local law enforcement, an electronic device operated in connection with a toll road, high-occupancy toll lane, toll bridge, or other toll facility, or a remote emission sensing device, as specified in Sections 44081 and 44081.6 of the Health and Safety Code, shall not be installed on, or affixed to, a vehicle.
> Jordan also uncovered a massive Flock security snafu involving hundreds of misconfigured Flock cameras that exposed non-password protected admin interfaces to the public internet
Like I say, don't let Flock out without adult supervision. FFS stop giving them more money and contracts (although, hopefully it is difficult to find competent people who are willing to sell out to these sortes of surveillance contracts).
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Saturday 10th January 2026 10:08 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: Regardless of one's views…
…on immigration, or the irony of a bunch of Europeans that showed up on boats now claiming the land as "theirs", it seems clear that this is what the collapse of an empire (albeit a very short lived one) looks like. ✓
Shame they didn't get their arses handed to them by the Skraelings as I think Leif Erikson's was in Vinland much earlier.
When a majority cease thinking of themselves as American — first and foremost — the collapse will be rapid, possibly rivalling that of the former USSR. I suspect the Roman Empire endured partly because it was fundamentally inclusive which the US, despite the mountains of bullshit to the contrary, is not.
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Saturday 10th January 2026 20:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Regardless of one's views…
Industrial Workers of the World, Civil Rights, LA Riots, Occupy Wall Street, MeToo ... (started in US, spread worldwide)
Hopefully, the tools, techniques, and determination to fight back against the "boot stamping on a human face - forever" also spread successfully! ;)
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Sunday 11th January 2026 05:02 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Regardless of one's views…
It's not just a class struggle
The USA is essentially 12 different countries overlaid on each other whose inhabitants don't interact with and are fearful of inhabitants of the others
When I say overlaid, I mean that it's not like X city and Y city don't get along. You'll find the same 12 countries in EACH city
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Saturday 10th January 2026 19:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Regardless of one's views…
> Shame they didn't get their arses handed to them by the Skraelings as I think Leif Erikson's was in Vinland much earlier.
As I recall (and I might be wildly wrong, if so I apologise), the Viking settlements did not survive due to their inability to sustain themselves not due to external attack.
Also, they were not a conquering force but simply the rough equivalent of a trade mission. This involves a combination of raiding and sacking on the one hand, and trading on the other. I do not recall that there was any evidence of widespread conflict between Norsemen and North American natives in the archaeological record.
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Sunday 11th January 2026 05:06 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Regardless of one's views…
The primary reason places like Iran still have their administrations in place is BECAUSE of external USA posturing snd sanctions
Everyone hates the local government, but they all band together to fend off the external threat
Which brings up the point that in order for any authoritarian to survive, there must be an external bogeyman to point to in order to keep the populatrion pliant
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Saturday 10th January 2026 18:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Happy to help here from the UK
> Nigel
Are you referring to Mr Garage? That's nothing to do with Russia (what does the UK have that Russia might want, in your view?) but, AFAIK, with a loose group of old school ties of whom he is their devoted jester. As the product of a second / third tier public school that's the closest association with Etonians that he can aspire to.
He, at least in his public persona, I haven't met him, is embarrassing in his lack of self respect and the way he fawns around those he sees as occupying a higher station in life.
But, be that as it may, he is a product of the remnants of the British empire, not of some Kremlin conspiracy.
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Saturday 10th January 2026 22:31 GMT Roland6
Re: Happy to help here from the UK
>” Are you referring to Mr Garage? That's nothing to do with Russia (what does the UK have that Russia might want, in your view?)”
” Farage accused of ‘parroting Kremlin lines’ after remarks on UK troops in Ukraine”
Remember the UK and France are (or is it were?) the two biggest European contributors to NATO. Divide Europe and NATO is no longer a threat…
So it’s not so much what the UK has as to what it could contribute to a united NATO and European defense…
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Saturday 10th January 2026 23:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Happy to help here from the UK
> Divide Europe and NATO is no longer a threat
That is indeed a sensible answer. Ironically, that is Russia's own worry (the West trying to break it up to gain access to its oil, mineral, and agricultural resources).
Just like during the cold war days (yes I'm that old :( ) when each side was worried about the other side invading.
Still, Garage is not controlled by Russia, at least not directly, but by a cohort of UK (and possibly US?) ultra conservatives with more money than sense or ethics. It is all fairly well documented from the Brexit and Cambridge analytics (IIRC) days.
As for the Grauniad article (which I managed to read without accepting cookies), it is just a standard political accusation, the usual theatre.
Re. expenditure, just for info, according to their 2025 report, aside from the US the biggest spenders in absolute terms are Germany (~94B), UK (~84B), and France (~64B). Italy follows with (~35B).
Edit: down vote not mine. I wish people would leave an explanatory note when they do that.
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Sunday 11th January 2026 15:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Happy to help here from the UK
> An approach for which the US has long been a beacon to the rest of the world, eh?
I'm not sure what you're implying. Care to explain?
I'm the AC you're quoting, and my comment is a reflection on the extent of US influence and control over European societies and public opinion, which appears to me to be more attentive to whatever happens across the Atlantic (in the metropolis, if we're using colonial terminology) than in their own countries. That reinforces, not weakens, the power of the colonial overlord (and by implication, of whoever is ruling the metropolis).
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Saturday 10th January 2026 20:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Tipover of the ICEberg
Flock's spreading dystopian ecosystem of snoop-enabling stalkerware for (by and large) spying on individuals without their knowledge or consent should be court-ruled just as illegal as Fleming's pcTattletale imho. That and the unspeakable barbarity of ID-less masked thugs' arbitrary kidnapping of folks right off the street, and straight-up shooting them dead on the spot ... human life is awfully cheap to these psychopathic wankers; state-sponsored January-6-style domestic terrorists in full sedition battle gear, same goals, same targets, way more money. A boots-on-the-ground version of DOGE brownshirts. Maduro would've loved such extrajudicial militia ...
What's next? ICE Putin-style defenestrates journalists? ICE Prigozhin-style sledgehammer-bludgeons opponents to death? ICE Novichok-slaps folks in airports? ICE Khashoggi chops critics to bits on plastic-lined floors? ICE Tehran-style beats protesters to a pulp and detains them without medical attention until death does them part? Where is the red line? Do we have to self-immolate ourselves by fire to stop this lawless state-sponsored fascist insanity? Extraordinary rendition?
The insistent perverted voyeurism that underlies all this is where totalitarianism meets surveillance capitalism in forcing normative alignment of behavioral surplus through the sausage extruder of manufactured consent imho; ultra-transforming purported critical thinking into the insipid industrialized conformity of the reactionary so-called "alternative rebellion" of empty skullcaps and hair extensions, fortified by such zero-impact artificial pseudo-deviance substitute as having killed one's dog, goat, (neighbors?), wow! Pretty vacant.
We need more ICEbreakers, defrock DOGE and chihuahuas, and empty the orange banana republican's fruitcake basket case imho! ;{
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
