A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
Fascists don’t particularly care about false positives. The cameras are operating as intended.
Absolutely this, and why they’re fine with executing innocent people on death row, cops killing people who were running away or complying and not a threat, or some DA imprisoning someone for decades on crappy evidence only to be found innocent after half their life is gone.
They drove up and didn’t check/verify the plate before engaging? That seems stupid and lacking responsibility.
What was it, two cop cars? Then I assume four cops? Always makes me wonder if the engagement is in a warranted amount. I assume it’s the norm in the US, maybe it’s necessary for “stolen car”, although I’m skeptical, and it certainly makes it worse for the falsely accused exposed to it. And it makes the lack of verification, making it not just a flock false positive but an engagement false positive, victimizing civilians, worse.
It is not uncommon for cops to obtain warrants for the wrong house and tear that place apart looking for drugs or someone who was never there. The departments have no financial responsibility for the damage and personal injuries they cause. Why would they bother reading the plate?
Always makes me wonder if the engagement is in a warranted amount.
We’ve hired so many cops and they’ve all got nothing (practical) to do. So it’s not unusual to see cops piling up around any kind of dispatch.
and then bragged ‘you’re lucky we didn’t come out with guns drawn’
fucking yokel shitbags
I suppose boxing in a car requires a car each in front and behind?
False positives are your problem, not the cops. You should try not being unlucky next time.
Also - I’m so sorry you had to go through that, fuck flock.Lol no, cops are definitely part of the problem. This reaction over fake plates is not sane
time for some target practice. sorry if they get in my bullets way while it’s headed towards the practice target.
👉 The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed
A- USA doesn’t have standardised plates? Not even 1 per state, but 8000?!
2- Fuck mass survalance, fuck armed cops, fuck Flock.A, but then 2? You monster! :)
A - The USA is 50 countries in a trench coat
2 - Correct
Tribal nations also have their own plates in some cases. Mine does.
Each state has different levels of customization with different background images. I like plate customization, its a form of self expression.
You have bigger problems if you’re relying on a custom license plate to express a personality…
Risk isn’t worth “reward’, especially when you hear things like certain backwards states trying to mandate a default " in god we trust” of other biblical theme so that people then need to opt out intentionally, in turn their vehicles becoming potential targets for zealots and cops to harass.
Just mandate national design with black text on white background
But in 1928, the secretary of state in Idaho had an epiphany. He realized that the license plate was the perfect place to advertise a home-grown product, and that product was… a potato.
As a Jehovah’s Witness, Maynard actually believed that God-given life was more important than freedom and he didn’t appreciate the government telling him what to die over. So Maynard covered the slogan up with some tape…
Covering up the slogan was a violation of state law…Finally, his consistent refusal to pay them landed him in court. The judge ended up putting him in jail for fifteen days, “And so if you don’t want to live free or die, you go to jail in New Hampshire,” says Maynard.
The state court agreed but unfortunately for Maynard, Meldrim “Live-free-or-die” Thomson, had become governor by then, and he appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court…[They] ultimately ended up siding with Maynard. “The First Amendment protects “you against government censorship. But the free speech clause also protects your right not to speak,” says Caroline Mala Corbin, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Miami, “So it protects you against the government, forcing you to say an ideological message that you disagree with. And that was what the problem was here.”
The story goes on to talk about specialty plates and designs with confederate flags.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/434-artistic-license/
Customized images, yes. Overlapping alphanumeric codes (two vehicles with the same sequence?) NO. Maybe it was necessary in the 1960s, but it is long since past time for issuance of alpha-numeric unique identifiers to become… unique throughout the states.
How many digits to we need for 297,500,000 plates (as of 2026).
Plus we should probably include Canada and Mexico, since they have the same sized plates and cross the borders regularly.
Canada also has custom plates and different designs in each province too.
Also unless I’m mistaken, when Britain was in the EU, it didn’t use standardized plates like the rest of the member states, right?
A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That’s over a billion combinations.
There are no standard plates in the EU. The only matching thing is the country code on the left side.
That’s a lot closer to standardized than the Canada or the US.
Well, that’s true.
But one fun quirk is that (at least here in Finland) the EU plate isn’t mandatory, you can get a clean one with no country code but then if you leave the country you are required to indicate your country of origin with a bumper sticker. So the automated license plate reader might need to be able to figure out from what country this is, and often that sticker will be stuck to the corner of the rear window.
Also a reminder - there will be no sticker on the front :)
Just in Minnesota, and I don’t even think that’s all of them
Colorado has a ton. I couldn’t find any images showing all of them though, just a couple collections of older plates.
6 characters (A-Z 0-9) gives you 2,176,782,336 combinations.
Even if you take out some confusing combos like O0, 1I, 5S, 8B … 6 characters of 31 different kinds gives you 887,503,681
The number drops even more when offensive words or phrases are removed. Nobody’s getting a license plate that reads P00 A55 or a bad word for black people.
Then make it 7 or 8 characters like most countries have. Its not like that wouldn’t fit on plates. With 8 chars you could remove 2/3 of all combinations and still have an order of magnitude in reserve.
Ewwww I’m not reading anything on Reddit
What about 7 characters?
You wouldn’t believe it. Even more!
- 31^6=887.503.681
- 31^7=27.512.614.111
the formula is number of possible symbols (letters, numbers) S to the power of the number of characters on the plate N, or S^N, so if you add one more character out of 31 possible symbols, then you multiply by (another) 31 available combinations.
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Plates should be standardized. Bumper stickers and other things can be used for personalization.
Says who, you?
I wrote the words, so yes.
Oh, well you’re nobody. They don’t need to be standardized and will remain as they are lol.
The American freedom!
To choose the license plate…
The day is saved
Not the guy you replied to, but plates have a purpose that are not necessarily compatible with Art and personalization. Not defending a broken society, just pointing it out.
They work perfectly fine. I’d argue these custom ones are easier to read and remember.
Honestly there’s no issues if you’re not a flock camera
If the same combination is issued multiple times then no, they don’t work as intended.
The issue here wasn’t that the license plate was too colorful, it was that the missing national standardisation allows for over a thousand cars with the same plate.
If the same combination is issued multiple times
Which is why they don’t do that. 1 combination per state
So theoretically you can have the same combo 50 times, but it would be on 50 different state plates which are labeled as such.
You’ve made up a fake scenario that does not occur. There are not thousands of cars with the same plate.
Their purpose is perfectly compatible with art and personalization.
That’s like embellishing a prison camp number with a fun design. That’s not self-expression that’s morbid.
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What the actual fuck is this comparison? I’m extremely anti-car, and even I’m wondering what has to be wrong with you.
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Incidentally got a chuckle out of me that you’re saying this about what’s often effectively a social green-beard (e.g. plates for sports teams, hobbies, causes, etc.).
Look, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be registering cars I’m just saying a licence plate is intended as a vehicle tracking ID. That’s the whole point. I always considered licence plate customization at best tacky. If I want to add some decals and bumper stickers and such, I’m not going to put it on a state issued ID tag.
For the record, I think customized graphics on your credit/debit cards, check designs, etc. is just as morbid. You don’t “own” these things, they’re not part of your identity, and letting them trick your brain into pretending that they belong to you and are an extension of your “self” by adding fancy designs is kind of gross. They are symbols that reference you, they are not a part of you.
I just think it’s a stupid waste of money. Why would spend 50 bucks yearly on a personalized plate how stupid
I mean it’s not a wrong take, it doesn’t make financial sense.
I’m just saying a licence plate is intended as a vehicle tracking ID
Everyone here and everyone who gets them knows and understands that.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be registering cars
I didn’t say or even imply you were, and the fact you clarified that anyway is bizarre – because it’d be completely batshit.
letting them trick your brain into pretending that they belong to you and are an extension of your “self” by adding fancy designs is kind of gross.
Brother, my god, it is a fucking identifier plate on your car; no one’s getting “tricked”, and I don’t know if you can believe this, but people can enjoy making objects into extensions of themselves without becoming slaves to The Man – if you can apprehend that someone in Kentucky who pays $25/year or some shit to signal that they’re into amateur radio isn’t offering up their soul in a plate-shaped vessel on the altar of Rebecca Goodman.
Even if you want to bring ALPRs into this, custom plates existed long, long before we had the technology to turn plates into mass-surveillance tools.
This is so goddamn snobby that it’s painful.
I’m not really concerned what your opinion of me is. You think it’s snobby to not waste money on a stylized government ID? Because that makes sense. If you want to plaster your car in your favourite things, go for it. Live your best life. If you want to paint your car like Lisa Frank exploded in a mist of glitter on it, I’m totally down. But the plate, that’s not ever an extension of you. It isn’t yours and it never was, and the illusion that it is, is kind of sad. But clearly, my opinion isn’t a popular one, so I’ll leave off. We’re clearly not going to agree on this.
You think it’s snobby to not waste money on a stylized government ID?
If you could read, you’d know I think that it’s fine one way or another and that what’s snobby is your obnoxious attitude toward people who do get one. The difference between you and I is that I see it as a waste of money for me and leave it at that because I don’t pretend to be superior and enlightened when my level of insight that the unwashed masses surely lack is “um, didn’t you know that license plates are tracking IDs?? by the government??? Fucking idiot, Sandra, with your stupid fucking ‘museums are for everyone’ plate with Snoopy on it.”
I’m kind of in agreement with him, in that I don’t see the point in paying extra to have an ID on my car that tells The Man more about me than I think they need to know, but I don’t think it makes me a shill or (much of) a sucker if I get them. Everyone, including me, makes less than ideal choices. This poor choice is less egregious than most.
I don’t see the point in paying extra to have an ID on my car that tells The Man more about me than I think they need to know
Literally what on Earth are you doing to your license plate that tells The Man more about you in a way that realistically matters? You don’t need your Ashley Madison credentials to create a custom plate.
If you’re worried about dragnet surveillance, I guess it’ll help them when they divide the prison camps by baseball team. If you’re worried about automated surveillance like by ALPRs then, uh, pretty sure the model whose literal entire purpose is to create its own features for classification will find abundant other ways to uniquely fingerprint and extract actual, pertinent information about you. And if you’re worried about targeted surveillance by humans scrutinizing you down to what your custom plate says about you, then god help you, and viva México.
You’re about the whole “fake choice” people get in society thing?
I understand that, but I think you went overboard a little 😅
Sort of, but this is slightly different. It’s an active obfuscation of an externally imposed identity element. A justifiable one in this case, but an external imposition in the first place, and external identity elements should always be held at arm’s length because they tend to get abused.
Incorporating it into your material identity dulls your awareness of the fact this representation of you, isn’t “you”, and how it’s used isn’t up to you. Creating an attachment to it has risks, risks you are inclined to ignore if mentally it’s just another personalized bumper sticker in your perception.
Nike’s new IrisNet profit-sharing plan nicely puts a stylish glow on my shoe logos when the fashionably discreet LaceCam notices the right eyes noticing my shoes, and at this rate I will pay the shoes off in 54 months!
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No. Just no.
As bbbbbbbbbbb said, every state not only has their own plates, but multiple plate designs. Some states, the variations will be completely different colors and number length. Absolutely no consistency.
Many states also don’t (usually) require old plates to be turned in when designs change. My state’s gone through two design changes since I started driving in 2010 and I still have my original plates. I’ve seen people driving with plates from the 80s.
Yes, the Flock system is working correctly, as a tool for police to stalk and harass innocent people.
It is working perfectly as intended. It is intended to facilitate fascist authority, siphon wealth from municipalities, and help make cops feel tough so they can more efficiently lord over their communities.
They always claim everything they do is correct and working. To admit otherwise means opening the department up to a lawsuit they may actually lose their jobs over.
For comparison, if you were hosting some kind of platform or service that only has a 99% uptime, you’d have to pay people to use it.
Yep, even 0.01% error rate looks great, until you run the numbers and it’s 100 fuck ups per day… percentages stop being intuitive at mass scale like this
Same for Google search and their AI scanning every file that gets uploaded. Their AI, even with a 1% error rate means like millions of incorrect query responses daily or probably less than daily. Same goes for false positives from scanning people family photos or data. Hundreds or thousands of false positives each week in that case. I don’t quite get why people still use Google services, but that’s another topic. I dislike Google as much as Flock or any corporate run tech that spies on citizens for government agencies. It should be that they are hesitant to turn over information rather than proactively turning over information. Break up Google and shutter Flock.
Well, at least we know this can only happen 98 times, by mistake.
Of course. Flock always works correctly, even when it causes innocent people to get harmed.
Its a spying tool first and foremost, the crime solving part is just a half-arsed afterthought justification.
Lucky he’s white.
I wonder how many people that are “gangstalked” are really being gangstalked.
I don’t understand why people put so much faith in their government.
Who? At this point, aside from Wacko fanatics who suck orange cock, who has so much faith in their government?
Police always love their oligarch masters…
People who wear masks over beards and go for their fourth booster?
I like license plates as I think some degree of accountability is important when you are controlling a highly deadly machine. If you make moves that endanger people they should have a way to identify you. I’ve always felt those tinted plate covers were the sign of being a real asshole driver. Now I think if there is anyway to block your plate from flock cameras you should try to do it. Has any coating been effective for this?
Doesn’t matter, they don’t rely on just the plates. They match on make/model, color, condition (specific dents, scratches, damage, repairs, etc), bumper stickers, face matching on the driver and/or passengers, sound, bluetooth and/or radio IDs, and more.
You can make things that fool it, Benn Jordan demonstrates doing this with something that is hard to even notice as a human. But all that’s going to do is draw extra attention to you. In a surveillance state anyone trying to maintain privacy is clearly guilty after all.
Oh I live in MN too very close to Plymouth this stinks. MN cops can be so mean
