Spy vs. Spy

There’s been much discussion about how to stymie Flock (and all the other) cameras that have been erected as the eyes of the Panopticon the Tech Bros are busily erecting to enforce compliance with everything by coercing the population into self-policing. If you know you’re being watched at all times – more finely, if you know you can’t “get away” with even the most trivial illegality because the cameras will see it and the AI will punish it – then you don’t risk trying to get away with it.

That’s what a Panopticon is.

Well, someone’s come up with a way to stymie the Panopticon – and it ought to be perfectly legal, since it does not obscure your vehicle’s license plate, as a dab of mud or taped on leaf or some other such contrivance might do so that a cop can’t see it. It simply prevents the Flock camera from seeing it. Probably also the ALPRs – Automated License Plate Readers – which are basically the same thing only deployed by cops.

Probably, the argument will be made that the cops – the government – can use ALPRs to scan the license plates of our vehicles because we are driving on the government’s roads and do so only with permission rather than by right. It’s basically the same thing as us having to get the government’s permission to use the roads at all, which we must if we drive or ride anything that is powered. (Bicycle riding is pretty much the last vestige of the ancient right-of-way idea that people don’t need the government’s permission – in the form of a government issued ID/license – to ride a bicycle on the government’s roads).

The government will say that it has as much authority to use technology to read license plates as a cop does. But Flock isn’t the government. It is a private entity that is providing the data it sweeps up to the government, which of course pays Flock for the information. This is something akin to the greasy relationship the insurance mafia has with the government (or vice-versa). The insurance mafia is private (and for-profit) but it uses the government to make us pay.

Legalities aside, here is a way to avoid paying that we may be able to “get away” with using. It is called Flock-o-Matic and what it is, basically, is a way to blind the cameras invisibly (to the human eye). A piece of what’s styled “smart glass” that looks like ordinary glass or clear plastic is placed over the license plate. This glass remains clear until it is powered up – which happens when a Flock camera is detected nearby. Information about the Flock cameras is real-time downloaded via GPS from DeFlock and other databases,  kind of like the way the Waze app lets you know there’s a cop nearby.

When you’re getting close to a camera, the glass shifts to hazy – not from the viewpoint of the human eye but from the viewpoint of the Flock camera’s eye. What it can’t see, it doesn’t know.

This is a fine example of Spy vs. Spy. The reference is to a Cold War-era cartoon series that depicted two spies – one black, the other white (color, not race) – trying to out-spy the other. The point of the cartoon was that whatever one side comes up with will be countermeasured by the other side and there’s another point to that.  It is that while it’s easy to get depressed about the way technology is being used against us, we can use technology against them, too. The Iranians have been having a fine time using drone technology to stymie aircraft carriers and jet aircraft and multi-million-dollar missile batteries. The same radar technology used by cops to catch “speeders” can also be used to identify radar and get away with “speeding.”

Interestingly, radar detectors are legal in every state except Virginia (of course). Waze is also legal. Of course, the grant of legality is premised on passivity; i.e., the Waze app and radar detectors only inform you about cops and radar traps. Neither actively stymies the cops. Flock-o-Matic does stymie the cameras – both Flock and government – and that is likely to result in pretty much the same that happened, back in the day, to catalytic converter “test pipes” – which were just pieces of open pipe designed to replace a catalytic converter. They were very quickly outlawed – and the same is likely to happen to the Flock-o-Matic.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use it. Just don’t get caught using it. Part of that entails making your vehicle as otherwise “gray man” – i.e., inconspicuous – as possible, as by removing any identifiable bumper stickers or similar things that could identify your vehicle relative to others of the same make/model. Fix dents and so on.

Don’t feel guilty about doing whatever you can do to stymie the cameras – Flock and otherwise – because you’re under no more moral obligation to make it easier for them to prevent you from “getting away with it” than a rabbit has a moral obligation to make it easier on the fox.

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