Breaking the Creepy AI in Police Cameras [video]

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18 points·nativeit··4 comments

Company in question:

> One of the nation’s leading operators of automated license-plate reading systems announced Monday it has paused its operations with federal agencies because of confusion and concern — including in Illinois — about the purpose of their investigations.

> Flock Safety, whose cameras are mounted in more than 4,000 communities nationwide, put a hold last week on pilot programs with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection and its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations, according to a statement by its founder and CEO, Garrett Langley.

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/license-plate-camera-com...

Watched 3 minutes, and that far in it didn't say good to break the AI... So I left. What is the tldr?

He develops and iterates on an overlay for license plates that are invisible to human eyes, but render Flock cameras (and similar tech) unable to reliably interpret the images they collect.

It largely eliminates mass-scale tracking and location collecting, while leaving the ostensibly intended utility of license tags to law enforcement and broader society unaffected.

Edit: added specificity to the topic sentence

If you're interested, you should watch it. It's a good video and Benn is a smart, funny and talented person.

Here's the code he used to generate transparent overlays to confuse the OCR ... sorry VERY COOL SLICK GAMECHANGING A.I ... systems.

https://github.com/bennjordan/PlateShapez/blob/main/PlateSha...

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