 I'm puking monkey. And we're going to talk about how your car is tracked today. Higher. So there's a lot of ‑‑ originally I noticed license plate readers about four years ago or so. All right. And there we go. And initially I didn't know what they were. And it took me a while to figure out what they were. And then I did. And then I built a detector for them. So I knew when I was being tracked. And then I found ‑‑ that wasn't particularly new to me. But I built a detector so when my easy pass, my electronic toll collection was read, it would notify me. And then I ran across some other things like companies called in Rinnick's and other places that just track you with your smart phones and even your dumb phones. I did a little ‑‑ little research to make sure that you could actually ‑‑ do you actually have the right to travel? Is this a privilege or is this a right? It turns out it's a right. And I won't go through it, but this is why it's a right. There's Supreme Court rulings on all of it. But do you have the right to drive? And that is an absolute no. It's a privilege. You must be licensed. So that's ‑‑ and so then do you have the right to travel anonymously? And generally it's yes, except for three ‑‑ three times. It's if you're driving because you have to be licensed. If you're taking a commercial flight, as we all know, to get here or crossing a national border. Otherwise you do not need to have ID. License plate readers, if you're not familiar with them, basically are an OCR on steroids. They use both infrared and optical to find the license plate, do an OCR on it, track it where it's been found through GPS coordinates and time. And if you get enough of these, enough data points, they can track you wherever you've been. Here's some pictures of some New York City license plate readers. New York City tends to use a company called El Sag North America. And you can see they're on the back of the car. The one on the left is an older model. The one that's a little bit larger is a medium model. It's not the newest. And you can see how they're mounted to aim towards license plates. And you can just see back. And on the back of it, this is actually another jurisdiction. This is by Federal PIPS system. And you can see it's under the light bar. There are three of them, left, right, and side. And that's El Sag's newest model. And if you go back and look at most of these, they look like they have, and I'll get the other one. They look like they have, this is the old model, which has two cameras in it. There is a visible light and infrared light camera, and a bank of infrared LEDs. And if you look on the back of it, it says, do not look at this. Infrared LED radiation. The new one appears on the light bar. You can see there's two of them. It looks like it only has a single camera, so I haven't quite figured out if it's just, it's probably just IR. And if you get it just right, you can see this on the back. You can see the nice red glow of the infrared LEDs. And they pulsate. These are fixed cameras at 40 Wall Street, the Trump building on Broadway. Three cameras. And that's the same three cameras at night. And you can see the glow. When I told people I found all these cameras, they said they see, I see them everywhere. They're at every intersection now. These are not license plate readers. These are traffic control cameras. They're just looking for your card instead of the inducting loop in the ground so to change the lights. And these are not license plate readers either. These are red light cameras. And that's a, and it has a big xenon strobe. And so what's the big deal about capturing license plate data? Because the cops have been running your place forever when they see you. The problem with this is, this now has time, location, and they keep it forever. Well, not forever. A lot of places have it like Maine says they'll keep it like 21 days. New York City will keep it five years. Jersey will keep it five years. And I couldn't find data points for anything lower than 2009 in New York City where they had 108 fixed and 130 mobiles. And I'm sure this number has not gone down. And it's impossible to opt out. As you drive by, you get red. So is it legal to do this warrantless tracking? And it turns out it is. Because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy of your license plate in public. And these are some of the cases of why it is. And then people say, I heard that you couldn't GPS track my car without a warrant. But that's slightly different because the warrant was needed to put the GPS on the vehicle not to actually track it. And the other ones is, I got questions, is that they said they couldn't use technology like to use infrared to look into my house. And that is true. But those are constitutionally protected areas. Again, your car on a public street is not a constitutionally protected area. And so FEMA has been funding this to local police departments for the last couple years. 100% cost of the license plate readers has been coming from FEMA. This is one of the grants to Vermont for 6.6 million dollars. And this is the Vermont side of it saying, yes, we'll use 100% of the proceeds from this to fund license plate readers. And this is Burlington, Vermont. They purchased two for, I know you can't read it, but for $45,000 for two. So the retention data, New Hampshire has a general ban on this. People in New Hampshire said no, which is great. I heard they're trying to ban them in Montana. They're working on that. Maine has actually has a lot they said you cannot store this data for more than 21 days if there's no criminal investigation. In New Jersey, they must retain all data for five years. And then after five years, it must be destroyed. I'm not sure how that works. I guess they don't have backups. And New York City retains it for five years, even though they have video camera, video feeds that they will after 21 days, if there's no crime involved in a video feed, they destroy the, they claim they destroy the videos, but they will keep the license plate data for five years. So now they have this data. It's actually public data. Minneapolis actually released the data to the public and then recanted. And I'll show you some of that later. And can it be discoverable because it's data about you. Generally, if there's an investigation about you, you can ask to see what the police have on you. Like in New York is called Rosario and it's statements made by them, but they, the courts have claimed that this is not a statement by any police officer or law enforcement organization. So therefore you cannot discover it. So they can use it to investigate you, but you cannot discover that they're using it to investigate you. And this is, this is what Minneapolis, this is one of the reports from Minneapolis, Minneapolis. Looks like they released photocopies of records. And as you can see on here, has the first column is the license plate number and text, the time and the GPS coordinates with a picture of the license plate and the picture of the back of the car. And they have fixed ones too, and this is how they redacted it so you could not find where their fixed license plate readers were. That you could just look for them. And it may not matter if there's retention or not because there is a commercial market for this. There's a company called Vigilant Solutions and they just, in their sole, their sole customer is law enforcement and tow operators, basically the repo guys use this to find cars to be repoed and law enforcement will just buy it whether they have it retained or not. And you actually can buy this from a company called TLO.com for $10 a pop. You can put in a license plate number and they will tell you where it has been seen. And they say they have 1 billion data points, TLO. This is not a law enforcement. This is one of the cars from Vigilant. And they have many cameras on the back and you can see that they have their own branded license plate reader and it's both optical and infrared. So I went about building it so I wanted to know when my license plate was being red. So I could find the fixed ones and maybe avoid them. It's hard to avoid when there's a lot of them. But at least you know they're there because they're always on. And I had a lot of, because it was IR, I said this should be easy. I had a lot of failures because I was, you know, built the detector. I'm full sunlight, had my detector, I'm detecting my remote control for my TV at 80 feet and I can't detect the reader. But then I had to go through and use some optical filters to look. The LEDs they're using are not standard infrared like you find in remote controls, which is 850 nanometers. They're near IR, they're 735 nanometer. And so I went through and used some optical filters. It blocks everything below 720 nanometers. And you get this and you can see it glows, but there's still a lot of ambient IR there. So I got another filter that was 730 plus or minus 30 and you can see it just shines right through. So I use that to do it. And this is why the, this fail, I'll describe this graph. The magenta is your standard infrared detector that you would find in commercial stuff. The bright red is the wavelength of where the ELSAG North America detector, the LEDs transmit, you can see I put up where the visible was. It's just above red. And the green is the filter. And the black line is the detection of a, I bought a wide range photodiode. And the detector, the basic detector looks like this. I'll be at the hardware hacking village at five o'clock today and go over the full specs of this. And that's the detector with the filter on it. I just super glued it onto it and put it into a little old DSL splitter case and put some LEDs on it. And that's the main thing. And this is the proof of concept. And what it's actually doing in the IR, it's not actually pulsating. It's ramping up from zero to full because they're trying to get the best exposure of the plate. It looks to us like a, it ends up looking like a three hertz frequency on it. So eventually it turned into this because I tried to prevent false positives. So anything between three and nine hertz will set it off. Above it, it won't. Below it, it won't. And I use the monkey to tell me I got red. So these are the same three but you'll see this is just so you can see in the next video where it is. There's a TGI Fridays on the right and some scaffolding. And it's right before the light but you get red right near the TGI Fridays to the way it's angled. And we'll just travel down broadly. There's the scaffolding on the right and the light. That's Friday. And the monkey screams. So is there anything you can do about your license plates being red? There's some things you can. Steve Jobs never had plates on his car. California had a law that you did not have to have plates for six months. That's now been changed to like 90 days. But he got the same car over and over. So he got a new car every six months that was identical and he never had plates. So if you have enough money, you don't need plates either in California. So maybe law enforcement can help us because these are the guys running these devices and they know what's happening. So I went around and found some personal vehicles of some police. I blocked their license plate numbers not for their protection but for mine. And you can tell this guy, most of them are near police stations and they usually have tinted windows. They usually don't have inspection stickers. All kinds of things parked illegally so they're easy to find. This guy doesn't have front plates which he's required to. He has a cover on his license plate that's very dark. Another illegal thing and you can see all except his windshield. He also has a PBA shield in his windshield. That's not always indicative of a cop but this guy is. And the windows are really, really tinted for the state. This New York guy has those Fresnel lens things that shift on the back. I know he's a cop because he's all tinted up and he's parked in a MTA police only. Otherwise he's got a lot of balls. And this is both back. He has the full license plate number. You'd have to put it together. This guy's tinted, no front plate. Back is there and I know it's a cop because he's standing next to the car. I like this one. You see the police car in the background but I only like this because he didn't care about his front plate. He cared about the back plate more and I like it because he has EFF plates. I don't think he knows what that is. This was a uniformed officer making a right turn that I just happened to capture and he's driving with his tailgate down. And he has a piece of wood preventing what's ever in the back from rolling out. He also has stickers that says New Jersey State Police and Hero which is another police organization. And I said is that common and you find out yes so this is another police and you can see him he's standing near the car as well on the top photo. He's got the blue line front plate and even his windshield is tinted black. And he has his license he has his tailgate down too so you can't read it. So I said maybe he's just parked there because the other guy was actually driving this guy's parked maybe he was getting something out. A few days later I found it again different spot tailgates down. Same car. Another one it's illegally parked completely black no inspection sticker no front plate and he also has a darker cover on his back plate. This was the only one that scared me because he came out as I was taking the picture and said what are you doing? I said this car is absolutely beautiful I love it. I glad it was a nice car and a piece of crap. Again thin blue line front plate completely blackened windows windshield everything and PBA license plates and it doesn't look as big but it also has a block shield over the back plate. And so what these cops do is typical what I just said but you can't do any of this this will get you pulled over in most jurisdictions unless you're a police they can do it because no cops can actually give them a ticket they're going to get professional courtesy. And so you could try and do temp tags but you run out of time and temp tags are always great because New York temp tags are not good in Massachusetts they will impound your car is unregistered and uninsured and then you have to tow it home. They don't show up because they're and they tend to have not you know the registrations tend to be ranked you know kind of one use numbers. And I ran across these temp tags I have no idea how they are it's just as an expiration date there's no number and it seems to be from a company. So or maybe they just don't care or maybe it's Georgia doesn't care because once from Georgia the other one doesn't say anything. So you get 90 days of use out of that and most people can't go through that. You can also try and get commercial plates so they're not registered to you but that's very thin veil and there's problems with commercial plates because in New York commercial vehicles have a different rules set than personal vehicles as you can see please check point all commercial vehicles must stop and this is not just to check your documents they look inside each truck. And since it's not usually theirs they always comply. Sure you want to look in the back of my truck sure go ahead because I just want to get their job done. So the other things that are hard for the LPR so North Carolina actually took a bunch of plates and ran them through to see what LPRs had difficulty reading. If you have a non-reflective plate it's almost it's invisible at night completely invisible and it's difficult during the day and non-reflective plates are very uncommon now. And if you decide you can remove your reflectivity but this is a crime in California to do this and if you're in Massachusetts you will fail inspection. It's one of their checks and you'll have to get a new plate and go through. Low contrast plates you know the color of the letter is close to the color of the background it has trouble with. Red characters it tends to have trouble with and if you have three or more stacked characters because they tend to be small it tends to miss those. And if you put registration stickers like Missouri I think puts a registration right in the middle of the plate near the letters and that tends to screw it up too so they have trouble with that. And if you have eight digits or more narrow letters are not great for it and great if you don't have a front plate only read half the time. These are the states that have the greens are the states that have one plate red have two and Nevada is special because they can't or can't depends on there's some rules for it. And these are the states with legal non-reflective plates that are still valid not very many. You could also try the year manufacturer plates but this is the date of the youngest car you could have California you'd only go to 1962 and so that doesn't work either. See a lot of obscured plates people will use whether they're doing this on purpose or not is unknown to me but this causes problems you get salt spreaders plows monkeys more salt spreaders you know tail gates not sure what the front of one of those is but bicycle things all makes it impossible to get a read but these are all these can all get you a citation they tend to be not movie violations obscured plates like in Jersey it's a hundred dollar fine no court appearance you just pay it and move on or you can get some plates that is not your number this is University of Michigan plates but the leading M on both of those is actually not part of the registration number that can still get you because they have a full number it'll be eventually figured out you can do bumper guards with your parks especially if you're parked because they read them when you're parked they just drive down the street reading all the plates more bumper guards but don't drive I've seen people driving down the road with that covered they'll get you pulled over and the other the other worry with these if you have actually no plates on your car every jurisdiction no plates cars are abandoned and subject to confiscation you can legally if you have easy pass in your jurisdiction you can usually legally obscure your front plate there's usually a law for it and there is one exception and that's for the external easy pass reader and this makes it hard to be read on the front and since it's OCR what do you think do you think capture but don't do this these are government documents you'll be charged with tampering so I built a camera to see what what the the license plate readers are seen but most most commercial infrared cameras are 850 so I put I bought the 750 nanometer LEDs to see what what showed up with that as well as 850s on it and it turns out the 735 LEDs the 420 guys like this for grow lights so I'm on some other list now too so it's an old license plate and you can see you can actually buy these things that say that's the bottom one that say hey no red light camera you know you put this on the put this on the back it's clear it basically blocks above 850 nanometers but since the license plate reader is below that you can see the first one as just regular this is what this the middle one is actually with the 730 and the one is the 850 so yeah if it's 850 these kind of work but they're illegal as well you can see what they do on a couple of other plates so and I ran across this kind of by accident using using the little camera on plates during the winter time since I'm from a place that salts their roads and so that's this is a this is a license plate with a whole bunch of salt on it visibly it doesn't look too much different on the top this is what the flash and that's what the IR not just a moderate amount of salt because it looks like the salt absorbs enough of the IR to make it unreadable and that's what a lot of salt and I want to go through those you can get stacked care these states just have stacked characters you want the one like the New York that has NYP in three because that makes it very difficult for it to read the Jersey one isn't so great because they're half-eyed characters easy to detect you can also get special characters like hearts and ampersands that are not part of your plate number and they tend to get OCR and sometimes they are sometimes they aren't and only a few states have those or you could just change your plates as much as possible so this this won't avoid detection but you won't have a big of a history and this is the cost to change your license plate in these states if it's white I couldn't figure it out like Florida it's it's county by county but one of them I think it was Mississippi it's a dollar twenty five you could change your plates every day at lunch if it weren't for the DMV taking four hours so many of them are very reasonably priced less than ten bucks these are the states with eight character plates not very many and that's kind of it for the license plate reader then I kind of moved on to the easy pass which is electronic total collection tags because they're always on and most people just stick them in the window and forget about them all trying to collect it in the United States is that nine hundred and fifteen megahertz and there are multiple incompatible protocols all over the place and these are a couple of them but it's basically RFID with batteries and some of them don't have them anymore it's and so I took mine apart has a nice battery in it put a switch on it and figured out the the current draw when it was being read and when it was being not you shouldn't do this because it's not your property you have to return these and so I just basically built a low side of the voltage detection and when it went off it would just set off the timer and make the cow says to move cow and the circuit integrated into it put on off switch on it so I can turn off it while I'm driving and drove around found where it got read so this this place there's no tolls near here but it would always go off underneath the sign so I stopped inside a road and look backwards and it's hidden it may not be on purpose but you can see there's two there's two readers right behind the sign there white little white boxes are the antennas and these aren't hidden they just just out there and this this is the access to the Lincoln tunnel from the Jersey side if you're up top you you're committed to going through the tunnel to pay the toll and there's three here and you can see the two up top under the easy past things it reads you but that that's not going to charge you the toll you will get charged the toll at the toll and you also get read right at the entrance of the tunnel and they also kind of want to know because this is the last exit there's one right at the light at at the end at the exits for the last exit in Jersey so there it's just being watched you drive around New York City and you'll see you'll see them hanging from lights these and I made it easy to see and another one I got tired taking pictures of them these are these are these are from a company called trans core now trans core can read all the all the all the protocols including the easy pass easy pass was close protocol until a few months ago but they had reversed engineer but it'll read it'll read any the sun pass from Florida and that's why New York City likes it they get everybody but I didn't like it after why I didn't like that I had to be detected it's kind of like a ping so for me to find out if I was being read I had to give away my position as well so I decided to get a 915 megahertz radio using Arduino and put it in a tin and with a little little meter on it and we'll do a proof of concept here the Arduino one is in the tin on the left the cow on the left the one on the right is the one that I had built and we'll go by that first and right under the sign as as predicted it gets read and just we'll go through the link we'll go through the Holland tunnel here now maybe we'll do that again to go through the show that a real easy pass works just fine so this is this is that 42nd and 8th that first one I showed you I circled the tag and you see the cow in the bottom he's already going off and I did a rundown 7th Avenue from 44th Street Times Square area to Madison Square Garden and 34th Street and you'll see how often it gets read it's going already until it moves only a couple times but as long as the nose is on it's being read this is speed sped up a bit because it's like a five minute journey to 90 seconds and traffic so it went off a bit and it goes off as soon as we turn on 31st Street and it remained off until the exit for the Lincoln Tunnel which is not at all which is not at all but this is exiting from Manhattan at the at the Lincoln Tunnel the New York State Department Transportation absolutely admits that yes they do read your easy pass but I didn't expect it as much at every intersection so they say they do this for travel times I've never seen travel times in the middle of Manhattan and what do they do with this data since they have your data do they retain it do they give it to the NSA that's yes because New York Times said they did and so what do you do with this this was kind of easy if you have have these things you you put it in the anti-static bag they gave you you can't be read or if you have a sticker you're gonna have to build a Faraday cage around it and put the sticker in that and I got that idea from a car rental company because I have these little fold down things so you can just pop it up and it won't be read and but if you do that just like you'll see that you saw it gets read right before the tolls at the toll and after the toll so if you're doing that you you're not you're not showing up at these other places you may be a person of interest if you're only seen at the toll then we come to your tires back in 2000 firestone had a had a strike in replacement workers build that make their tires and they tended to blow up so something got passed called tread and to do this they wanted to track who made the tires and because there was never any there's no serial number on tires they're all molded the mold from ten years ago was the mold that's the same today so you couldn't tell if it was ten years ago or yesterday they got made so this came through so there's a couple of things in your in in your wheels first one is the tire pressure monitoring system and that's not in the tire that's part of your rim it's on it's on the backside of the valve stem and this transmits at 315 megahertz and it's unique per per rim this is not so bad because to get your ID somebody has to has to come to your car and get the ID but they could and then then the tire manufacturers are putting RF IDs in the sidewalls themselves to track there's a unique serial number in each of them Michelin loses 915 megahertz good year could not get that to work as rubber absorbs RF very well and and they were using originally 125 I don't know if they actually fixed their 950 megahertz and if you get your tires from Ford Chrysler they put the VIN number in the tire so now the VIN number that goes to your state now it's easier to track I know of no one that's actually doing this but if I were somebody that wanted to track I'd be putting sensors at sides of roads and this is this is the pressure tire pressure monitoring system this was actually a picture showing a run flat tire but as you can see and where they cut away the run flat that's actually the transmitter it's a little battery it's like it's like the easy pass has a little bit circuitry with the battery in it so what can you do about these these are tough because you can't really take your tires off and put them back on yourself you need somebody else to do that and if you disable your your tire pressure monitoring system you will have that light on your dashboard the entire time and if you have automobile inspection you probably won't pass it because I know in Jersey if you have any indicator light on check engine low tire pressure seat belts indicator doesn't work you will not pass inspection so you might want to try and jam it at the time I was unsuccessful at doing that that's for later and you can try EMP pulse the maybe the chips in the sidewall the tires but they absorb rubber absorbs RF very well there's some other RFD things around parking passes you'll find them they're hang tags you could just get a radio to see if that's what happens if they're you know it's just a hang tag and something automatically opens a gate for you it's probably it's probably an RFID and there is a community that used their parking permits because they had so much counterfeit parking stickers for the street they put RFIDs in them and put them on the cars you want to park on the street you're going to be detected to it's tough to get around that I heard Italy is doing this and Texas was going to put them in their inspection stickers but I don't know if that actually passed so if you need to not use those if you can and then comes to this company I came across I'm not sure I came across it was a company called in renex and this is they collect position data from a hundred million devices Google Mac uses them for their traffic flow six out of the auto manufacturers with built-in nav uses in renex eight of the 12 top navigation apps and the high store use these these people and they even have they even track dumb phones with contracts with the cell phone companies and they originally started by tracking commercial truck fleets so they have lots of data on you if you if use any of these apps you're giving it to them and they know who you are so at the end of the day you need to salt your plate bag your tag zap jam your tires you have to turn off all your electronic devices and that's it so I take any questions if people have them yeah it's questions back of the car with LEDs yeah you can do that to block it you're going to need both of them but many states have if you jam a red light camera you have committed a crime no no no the back of the lights no that's it's it's usually open-worded saying if you if you can defeat a red light camera any means anyway you have committed a crime so they're illegal and they and if I and if I was the LPR guys and you think you have IR and you use the 850 if I was l-sag I don't know if they do I'd put the I put the same blocker that you put on your plate to block the 850 and I won't even see your LEDs because seven seven forties are kind of uncommon oh sure wait wait it's coming thank you you stated the toll collection is shared with NSA does that also apply to LPR's I don't know that the only reason I know it was shared is because New York Times said in one of the articles that right after Snowden that they's that the NSA did get easy pass data they didn't say that the easy passers collected everywhere most people when they see that say oh it's at the tolls big deal but it's it's much more than that but LPR data tends to be government data so I wouldn't see why not especially since FEMA is funding it is probably part of their hey you have to for this money we want we want your data to I have no no documents saying that how about for nail lenses or dust covers well all these things every every every every jurisdiction has an obscure plate law so if you obscure your plate you to it depends on the jurisdiction most of them like it like if it's if the red light camera can't get it one of us Pennsylvania that's the one I knew well because it actually says basically so broad anything you do to defeat a red light camera is a legal and it's a misdemeanor and you but you it's more it's more than the moving violation it's a you know it's a crime so that that would fall under to that I think California has the same has the same law too but don't quote me on that I read a lot of state laws and they all start to blur together you know hey I would suggest you check your sources on the New York Times article as far as the availability of the total tag reader ID to NSA I know the people built the system yeah the data we don't keep any of those data is that New York City dot or New York New York City dot with another system the DOT the last thing they want to do is to know who the hell's driving that car okay so the New York Times to publish that but I when they said they just said easy past data they didn't say if it was New York data or toll actually actually toll auto attack data's a scrap so I would double check that source on New York Times I can also with the index data you might want double check that source too because I challenge you to find anyone in rex that can pinpoint a vehicle I'm not saying they can't but I'm saying they're only you know is that it's being tracked at this point you're being tracking your Android phone but I think Google probably has a better chance of identifying you done in rex I was just wondering if you've done any experiments with putting like a coat of like clear coat paint over a layer of salt just to stabilize it so it doesn't wash off no I actually want it to wash off because let's say you need to go through a car inspection you have to wash it off but yeah these are up to I'm not I'm not saying to do any of this actually this is just ideas yeah I'm not and I'm not sure how they if that's even how they even detect if it's reflective or not right is it just you know you know a little laser beam it says I get enough back it's fine at a corner you know all I know is that's part of their inspection criteria Massachusetts is there any state law that says you must keep your license license plate clean like what if there's mud or yeah actually that's that's the same as the obscured plate law every state has an obscured plate law you cannot put mud or stuff on it has to typically have to be visible that's why I kind of like the salt because it visibly it doesn't look like it and in states that have winters it's kind of common to have salted plates not probably very common out here yeah okay so my question is how did you salt your plates to maintain deniability just water salt super saturated poured on the plate off the car let it dry hi thanks for coming up and speaking with us I said a quick question about the data and how it's available if we can contact our local counties or and get this information free as far as when our plates were read I don't know how they typically will not give this data out Minneapolis I only know they did it briefly and then they recanted and said no we're not going to provide this anymore okay so I know of no other place that it was actually providing the data available to people but the company that TLO.com you can purchase it but that's that's not that's not government data that's privately collected data which there is no laws against any of that okay thank you you put a lot of effort into investigating state by state the rules for changing license plates when I appreciate that but I was wondering what the perceived advantages how's it any better than a dynamic you just you have less of a history you could still if people have a routine that's every day of the week you're detected very quickly but they could go back and say well you know he's only done this for a week if you change your plates every week but then I but they also have all your previous plates but I don't think that's a common practice to change your plates a lot so they might not say oh let's go back and look for all his old plates but it would be trivial to once it's figured out if that's what's happening to do that query oh here's his 10 plates just run them all do you know of any kind of paint that you can use on the infrared spectrum that would be transparent on the on the visible spectrum so yeah mythbusters did this and busted it so I I didn't go down that that road because they said they had a bunch of things for a red light camera thing they had some sort of spray that did not work so and I saw it advertised I did not purchase it or try it that's usually for speeders trying to detect they're trying to avoid the laser detectors a lot of the questions here are focused on trying to prevent reading of your plate and as you mentioned every state has an obscure license plate law what about a different approach what about feeding it bad data lots and lots of data yeah so that's one of the things yeah I had things so it the detector is trying to find your plate so if you get some reflective material with non-reflective numbers on it it will probably still find your plate and but we'll read all the other bad data along with it so your plate what you will still probably be captured so but as well as you know your bumper sticker that you know you know your that you try to say semi-colon one equals one to try and dumps on it but you got to do that in like eight characters um my question is about uh sanding license plates I have a bunch of people in Arizona that sand them down all everything around the uh yeah what's that about they say well they leave the sand on it or they actually like sanding it to remove sanding the plate will remove the reflectivity yeah that has the numbers though on it right visibly yeah one of the ways the detectors are looking to find the plate on the back of the car because let's say you have a hundred bumper stickers it needs to find your plate and all the noise and the one of the ways it does that is by the reflectivity