bypassing automated number plate readers is easy!

Our Take

Elmar mc.fly Lecher's demo, teased ahead of a talk at Northern RST, is a useful gut-check: automated plate readers are marketed as infallible policing infrastructure, but the underlying tech is often just optical character recognition running on a camera pole. When someone can show that spoofing or confusing that recognition is "easy," it undercuts the whole premise that these systems produce reliable, court-ready evidence — even as they hoover up location data on every driver who passes, guilty or not.

That gap matters because Flock Safety and similar vendors sell ANPR to police departments and HOAs as a low-error force multiplier, not a fallible pattern-matcher with real bypass vectors. If the systems are this brittle, the people most burdened are ordinary drivers stuck in a growing database, while bad actors with enough know-how route around it entirely. That's the surveillance trade-off in a nutshell: broad, dragnet data collection on the law-abiding public paired with security theater that doesn't reliably stop the people it's supposedly built to catch.

We'll be curious to see the full conference talk once it's public. In the meantime, check our camera map to see how much of this fragile infrastructure is already watching your street, and hit up take-action if you want to push back on it locally.