Vehicle Cloning — Another Reason Not To Use Automated License Plate Readers
from the you-wouldn’t-copy-a-car dept
Over the last decade, increasing numbers of automated license plate readers (ALPR) have been installed on roads, bringing with them a variety of privacy problems, as Techdirt has reported. It’s easy to see why ALPR is popular with the authorities: license plate readers seem a simple way to monitor driving behavior and to catch people breaking traffic laws, by speeding, for example.
Since the whole process can be automated, from reading the license plates to sending out fines, it looks like an efficient, low-cost alternative to placing large numbers of police officers around the road network. There’s just one problem: the whole system is based on the assumption that the license plate on the car is genuine, and can be used to identify the person responsible for the vehicle. As an article on “car cloning” in the Guardian reports, drivers in the UK are discovering that this assumption no longer holds.
The problem is that people are making copies of other drivers’ license plates, and using them on similar-looking vehicles — generally the same model and same color — to break the law with impunity. When the ALPR cameras catch the cloners speeding, or failing to pay fees for entering special zones like London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), the fines are sent to the actual owner of the license plate, not the perpetrator. The result is misery for those unlucky enough to have their license plates cloned, since it is hard to convince the authorities that automated license plate readers have made a mistake when there is apparent photographic evidence they haven’t. The experience of one driver interviewed by the Guardian is typical:
The most recent incident happened in July 2021, when he received two penalty charge notices from different London councils — one for driving in a bus lane and the other for an illegal left turn. Both notices included photos purporting to show his five-door Audi A3 car.
Despite him providing extensive evidence that at the time of one of the offences his vehicle was in a car park, and demonstrating that the one in the photo appeared to be a three-door Audi A1, the council concerned rejected his appeal.
Only when he sent in photos of his vehicle type and the one in the CCTV image where he had “circled all the differences” was the matter dropped.
Even when no fines are involved, vehicle cloning can cause financial problems for innocent drivers, as another case mentioned by the Guardian shows:
Late last year, the Guardian was contacted by another driver who had fallen victim to car cloning. The 88-year-old’s insurance doubled at renewal to £1,259 [about $1600] and she was told this was because her Ford Fiesta had been involved in an accident on the M25 [London’s main ring road] .
Despite her pointing out that she had not driven on the M25 for more than a decade, and that she had been either at church or at home at the time of the accident — and the fact that she had reported that her car had been cloned to Hertfordshire police — her insurer, Zurich, refused to take the claim off her file. Only after the Guardian intervened did the firm restore her no-claims bonus and reduce her premium accordingly.
The more automated license plate readers are installed in order to stop people breaking traffic laws, the greater the incentive for criminals and the unscrupulous to use cloned plates to break those laws without any consequences. What may once have seemed the system’s great strength — the fact that it provides photographic evidence of law breaking — turns out to be a huge weakness that can be turned against it.
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Filed Under: alpr, automated traffic enforcement, cctv, cloning, insurance, london, police, the guardian, ulez
Companies: zurich
Comments on “Vehicle Cloning — Another Reason Not To Use Automated License Plate Readers”
“The problem is that people are making copies of other drivers’ license plates”
…. Com’on this rarely happens
ALPRs have much bigger problems, and cops mis-identify innocent people all the time without ALPR
Edison Carter investigates
This is totally the sort of scheme that would trigger an episode of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future
When automated systems such as this were first introduced, people noted the problem that a picture of a vehicle involved in illegal activity does nothing to implicate the driver. So, the fix was to make people liable for owning a vehicle involved in such activities (with no negative record being placed on anyone’s driving license). The obvious fix for this case, then, is to make it illegal to own a vehicle whose license plate number appears in a photo of someone in some vehicle doing something illegal.
“Innocent” is the wrong term here. Machiavellian efforts have been taken to prevent any implications of guilt: it would, after all, be absurd (and illegal) to require anyone to have to prove their innocence. To be found “guilty”, the matter would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, maybe a jury trial would be needed, etc. Whereas courts seem happy to take money, with little recourse, from people found merely “liable”.
Re: your car is guilty
I suppose the legal basis is that “innocent until proven guilty” doesnt apply to your car since your car has no rights being that it is not a person.
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Yeah, they’re fucked now. I’ll have my car incorporated by the end of today. BobsCar, LLFuckingC. Then me and my car are fucking immune to anything more than a pittance fine and a handie.
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Isn’t that kind of the idea behind Civil Asset Forfeiture… the money/property is being charged with a crime except it is the owner of said property that pays the penalty.
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Nothing new under the sun.
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That only applies to criminal cases. With a civil case, they can take away all your money, but can’t put you in jail (except maybe for failure to pay the fines). ’Cause money doesn’t matter to anyone, right?
This was NOT how I imagined downloading cars would work…
That is why you need one of these infra red LEDs that overwhelm cameras, so your number cannot be read.
There is now current law in any of Canada’s 14 provinces, Ameerica’s 50 states, or Mexico’s 31 stats that makes that method illegal.
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There is now current law in any of Canada’s 14 provinces, America’s 50 states, Mexico’s 31 states, and the UK’s 157 counties that makes any method of obscuring your license/number plate illegal, dipshit.
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I cannot cite any country in the world where obscuring car plates is legal, in any way, because that’s the whole point of the car plates. So yeah, there is already laws for that, even in UK.
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It’s legal in some way probably in every country. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, ruled that one can obscure state mottos one finds offensive.
Sometimes laws just aren’t enforced. Lots of people have transparent license plate covers. They’re not necessarily meant to obscure anything, but from the right angle, they will; it might be enough to “accidentally” get one out of an automated ticket.
Besides all that, completely obscuring license plates is often completely legal when a car is on private property. If you want to put a tarp over your car or completely remove the plate(s) whenever you park at Walmart, people will find it weird—and it may frustate cops trolling the lot for plates—but it would probably be no legal basis for trouble.
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Not as long as the plate can be seen by the human eye
Using methods like LEDs to screw up cameras is not illegal, because the plate itself is still visible to the human eye.
Using infra red LEDs to evade cameras is not illegal
Re: Re: Re:2 infra red LEDs and license plates
It’s illegal in California: https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-vehicle-code/division-3-registration-of-vehicles-and-certificates-of-title/chapter-1-original-and-renewal-of-registration-issuance-of-certificates-of-title/article-9-display-of-plates-tabs-and-stickers/section-52011-product-or-device-obscuring-reading-or-recognition-of-license-plate
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The companies that sell them can do bitcoin only, and there would be no bank trail leading to anything in California
Bitcoin, if done right, cannot be traced.
The sites that sell these should just go to the dark web
Dark web vendors have learned not to make the same mistake that Ross Ulbicht did. He did not use Tor or VPN the hide his IP address when he logged on to his site.
Dark web vendors have learned, and I figure that the owners of some dark web marketplaces that did shut down before they were caught are going to be very rich men, some rich enohgh to rival the richest men int the world.
Just wait for the statutes of limiations to expire, cash out, and they will be very rich, with the way Bitcoin is going up.
The old saying of crime does not pay is so true any more. There are some people who shut down their dark web markets before getting caught who are going to be very rich men in a few years time from now.
They will never have to worry about where their next meal.
Has Ross Ulbright not made the mistake of not hiding he was coming from, I figure he would be trillonaire instead of doing 40 to life in prison. He would the worlds first Trillionaire and among the 10 richest people in history, when their fortunes they had are adjusted for inflation into today’s.
Just the California state taxes, if he could have cashed out by now, would have given the state of California on huge budget surplus for that year, probably enough to cover nearly the entire state budget for that year.
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However. infra red is invisble to the human eye, making eforcement impossible.
Infra red plate blocking is in a class by itself, as it is invisible the human eye, and nothing is done to the license plate itself.
I would be surprised if a lot of Australians did not during their Covid lockdowns being that police there were using plate readers.
Infra red radiation is totally invisible to the human eye and would never have been suspected anything.
If I was going to use something like that, I would get something with a kill switch to turn it off and on, so I can turn it on going to Cedar Fair, Six Flags, or Disney parks.
Becuase a few miscreants were brawls and Disney and Cedar Fair parks, all of them now are using ALPRs in their parking lots.
I intend to use infra red blockers when going there, and if Disney, Six Flags, or Cedar does not like me blocking their plate readers, they can just flag off.
I could turn it off on tolls so that the tolls could be properly assessed and then using the kill switch to turn in on again when approaching any of those parks.
As long as I am behaving and following the rules they have no business reading my plates, and I will use infra red plate LEDs coming into or out of their parking lots, and if Cedar Fair, Disney, or Six Flags do no like that, they can just flag off.
I refuse to bow down to the surveillance state
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Which is exactly what I said. Go to your nearest elementary school and ask for a basic reading comprehension check, Stat!
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“That is why you need one of these infra red LEDs that overwhelm cameras, so your number cannot be read.”
How would that help?
You can obscure your license plate while you go about following the law all you want.
It won’t stop someone else from using your cloned license plate from going about breaking the law at all. And you’ll still be liable for their actions.
Unless you are trying to convince the people that cloned your plate?
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Any fines, arrest warrants, or apbs are all on computers
Just break into their computers and erase it and that would will be the end of it
And the professional and ultimate future versions of windows will have secure disks wiping built in where you can not only do a reset on windows but securely wipe the hard disk as well where digital forensics will not be able to recover anything
No evidence = no CASE
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Just ignore the dude, he thinks how they hack computers in movies is real.
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Hakcing is different, true.
First, you go through the database backend, which does not have any logging
Second, you use Tor and VPN combined, which is what I do when I post here, because is no doubts are probably iterested in my posts, so I first log on to a VPN in Russia, and then jump on to Tor from that, making myself ubtraceabole. To the Feds I say good trying to trace back throug 3 Tor nodes, and then on a VPN in Russia.
Right now, Putin is not very likely to copperate with the United States.
The Feds could break into the database backend here, and get the metadata, but it will do them no good, when they find out that its a tor node, where it will be all but impossible to trace.
The Feds could break into the databawe backend here, and Mike would never know the Feds were in his database.
Orace, MySQL, MsSQL, rBase, etc, do not have any logging, so the Feds could go that route, if they want, and Mike will never detect the presence in his database.
There are other times the Feds almost certainly did this. That is how they tracked down Bradley/Chelsea Manning. They could break in to the MySQL backend on Wiklleaks and Julian Assange would never detect their presence. They is liekly how they got evidence to indict Assange and he would have never detected their presence is his dataabase.
I believe that is how they gathered evidence on Hal Turner. They likely broke into the MySQL backend on his web site of the time, and Hal would never know the Feds were there until they showed up at his door. A port scan on his server at the time of his arrest showed port 3306 being open, meaning the Feds could have come that way and surveilled him that way, and Hal would have never known the Feds were in his database until they showed up at his door.
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Talk about being reality-challenged…
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Must do because he clearly thinks it’s as easy as just saying it.
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No, you can’t because obscuring your license plate breaks the law. Look it up online if you don’t believe me.
FTFY. In the UK, cars have number plates rather than license plates, and they’re documentarily attached to the vehicle rather than its owner.
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Yep but the car is attached to his owner, so knowing the car plate (number), you (at least the police) can link it to its (last and current) owner.
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And here comes yet another dipshit with nothing to say and no point to prove.
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The Priory Group, for example. You think a whole company is driving the fucking vehicle, dipshit?
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Actually, the AC you replied to is correct
Nothing New...
There was the old urban legend many years ago, when colour printers were becoming common, about the kids who took a photo of their teacher’s license plate, printed life-size copies and taped it over the license of one of their group. They then proceeded to speed through red-light cameras all over town.
The joke goes on…
“Do you think we’ve done enough now?”
“Hey, the paper license fell off…”
“When?”
“I don’t know, it could have been gone for a while…”
In Germany, the resulting photo’s are required by law to show the face of the driver, for identification purposes. This situation would alleviate a large part of this problem.
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Yes, like in many other countries but it seems that in UK, not only (manually or fixed) speed radars can fee but also any police CCTV camera, with sometime weird angle, because of the increased tough transit regulations in London (I haven’t heard anything like this in moderate sized cities in UK).
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Radar can be jammed.
I know this because when I had to.habe my car towed some years ago the tow truck driver was using radar and lidar jamming because he did did not like the California law where he could only do 55 while towing a vehicle.
While he was breaking California state law he was not breaking any federal laws using his radar and lidar jammers
Jamming radar and lidar breaks California state law, but he was not breaking FCC or any other federal laws using his radar and lidar jammers
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Incorrect, jamming any legal transmission is banned by federal law in the US.
First, ask yourself if the authorities actually care whether they’re getting the right person.
The answer is “no.” They have a system. They do the system. Even when the system is wrong, they do the system.
Most people in positions of authority aren’t fit to hold authority over an ant farm.
perhaps if the folks who support and install the cameras get cloned, they might change their feelings towards ALPRs.
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They will never be affected – their vehicles are on the “do not fine” whitelist.
(probably)
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Bricks it is then.
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The whole thing’s rather reminiscent of Robocop, isn’t it? A lot of people missed the point, thinking it was just a high-concept movie about a cool robot. But it was precisely criticising the “justice” system’s loss of humanity, and the trend toward corporatization and its resultant conflicts of interest.
At the time, that was in the form of things such as mandatory sentencing—like Alex, judges are forced to follow laws they know are unfair—and private prisons. Automated enforcement of even minor laws, though, has long been a staple of dystopian fiction in general.
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When did the “justice” system ever have humanity?
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In the UK, it’s called the ‘criminal justice system’, presumably on the basis that everyone trapped by it is a criminal. Guilty until proven innocent, just like the 88-year-old female driver.
Re: Re: Re:3
It’s called that because it deals with accusations of crime, i.e. criminal matters.
Re: Re: Re:4
*whooooosh*
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Perfect. First I’m gonna make a copy of Clarence Thomas’ plate, then a Nancy Pelosi.
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Good idea. First find out the numbers, get them made up as vanity plates, then go to the US and trade the plates on the rental car with them. 😈
The problem is people assume that tech can never ever be wrong & will ignore their own lying eyes to keep that charade up.
The computer said you broke the law so it must have been you!
But I was at church 3000 miles away!
No the great computer says it was you so you must be responsible!!
Media asks 4 questions based on what the person already told the company.
Oh, wait, perhaps there was a tiny error.
This is a lot easier in the UK
In the UK, the government does not provide number plates. You buy them from private vendors. The vendors are supposed to verify that you own the vehicle to which the number is assigned, but I expect at the right price the annoying documentation can be waived.
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Given how often His Majesty’s government is shocked just shocked when their best laid plans (that everyone told them was screwed up and a really bad idea and shouldn’t be done) go awry this is hardly shocking.
England, where if we just add more cameras, THIS time it will solve the problem!
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Yes and no. Number plates in the UK are documentarily attached to the vehicle rather than anyone associated with it, so unless they’re vanity plates, there are limited circumstances in which you can legally buy them separately from the vehicle.
Well, I guess this means they will force all vehicle license plates to include some sort of rf readable tag like rfid or similar. woohoo
And yet? Maybe?
Let many countries use video and LPR to do what is generally known in English as, “no contact policing”.
There are bad uses of any technology and bad people do bad things.
But if the general idea of people at this site is less policing, this makes sense:
Les interactions with police!
See, the real issue here has nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with a poor legal framework.
Clearly the UL has multiple problems here.
First, the ability to defend is lacking.
Second, poor use of video. In countries where these methods work (there are many dozens) methods are pared. LPR, HD video, multiple angle.
And hard to reproduce vehicle plates
On the flip side is all the things video enforcement eliminates!
The claimed “racism” in stops. Interaction with police. Pretextual stops. Etc.