alpr.watch

Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.

This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for.

Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code.

Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage.

You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect.

[1] https://0x.co

I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself.

Any examples for what you speak of?

Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.

I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.

All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)

We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.

I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.

It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).

The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.

FWIW, what I want is the non-IME/PSP "¡hecho en Paraguay!" chips from the book.

You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go.

Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.

And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html

Few questions:

- is the stack to index those open source?

- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?

- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)

We track City Councils, Boards of Supervisors, really any municipality we can get our hands on. I'm very open to how to make this better!

I noticed recently that the city installed a flock camera pointed directly at this crosswalk, and while I'm generally opposed to this kind of surveillance, and I wish they would implement other measures to make this safer, I really would love nothing more than for drivers speeding through here and not stopping for pedestrians to get ticketed. It's unclear still whether that's actually happening (and not that it matters once you're dead), but I'm finding myself empathizing with the argument for more surveillance for the first time in my life.

This isn't a question of ideals; it's addressing the uptick in illegal actions by immigration officials during the current US administration. It's addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas.

Yes, some immigration enforcement is legal. Congratulations.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/apr/16/keeping-l...

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/mar/27/automatin...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pX_xcj-p0vA

https://documentcloud.org/add-ons/MuckRock/Klaxon/

https://documentcloud.org/

https://muckrock.com/

During our last election cycle, I did this for all our board meetings going back to the mid-aughts, using 'simonw's LLM tool to pass each agenda item to GPT 4o to classify them into topical buckets ("safety", "racial equity", "pensions", &c), tying them back to votes, and then doing a time breakdown of the topics (political opponents were claiming our board, which I support, was spending too much time on frivolous stuff).

That's a pretty silly use case, but also a data-intensive one; the things you'd actually want to do across municipalities are much simpler.

You could probably have Claude one-shot a municipal meetings notification service for you.

I do not believe you will be able to force overexposure of lettered areas using IR diodes alone. License plates are designed with intentionally high reflective contrast in the offset areas.

Even if you could put enough energy into that area, these cameras have switchable IR cutoff filters that are used during the daytime (making this approach only viable at night.)

Another idea: a visible-spectrum laser + camera on a tracking gimbal? Absolutely could block (or even destroy!) these types of imaging efforts on a small scale.

4D AI speed/behaviour cameras (Redspeed Centio): multi-lane radar + high-res imaging; flags speeding, phone use, no seatbelt, and can check plates against DVLA/insurance databases.

AI “Heads-Up” camera units (Acusensus): elevated/overhead infrared cameras (often on trailers/vans) to spot phone use and seatbelt/non-restrained occupants.

New digital fixed cameras (Vector SR): slimmer, more discreet spot-speed cameras (sometimes with potential add-on behaviour detection, depending on setup).

Smart motorway gantry cameras (HADECS): enforce variable speed limits on motorways from gantries.

AI-assisted litter cameras: council enforcement for objects/litter thrown from vehicles

Our definitions of mass surveillance must differ for you to ask this. Flock cameras are marketed and purchases for mass surveillance expressly.

Its always defensible - think of the children!/terrorists! - and always in the same dystopian direction. Just believing yourself to be being tracked, changes behaviour. Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour.

What for? I don't understand why you want to record some stranger jogging, drinking coffee, smoking, eating or simply walking and minding their own business. What am I missing?

I'm certain that had the 2024 election gone a different way, we'd still have our Flock cameras.

Apparently there is scraping of public data + keyword matching + moderators filtering the matches.

An example that he shows a bit earlier in the video comes from this page, which has an RSS feed: https://www.cityofsanbenito.com/AgendaCenter/City-Commission...

The video says it's open source but I can't find the source.

I also gave a talk on this concept that walks through the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWzNnZvQ6w

The short answer is: there's no common API for any of these sites, and even the ones that do have an API are sometimes misconfigured. It's why I wrote all the scrapers by hand.

I do agree that we have heavy crime (though HN will say it's all anecdotal and the stats show we're in a period of remarkable peace).

I just don't know that greater enforcement around vehicle use will have the outsized effect that you're claiming.

Have you tried electing moderate prosecutors who don't drop charges just because the habitual offender has a heartbleed sob story?

False premise

Drive around Kansas City sometime, particularly on the Missouri side. Tons of temporary paper license plates that are a year past expiration. Any member of law enforcement could pull the person over and enforce a penalty for it.

They just... don't. I don't know exactly why that is. Are they afraid that doing so opens them up to the chance of being shot or engaging in a high-speed pursuit? The former definitely happened in North Kansas City a few years ago (not to be confused with KC North) but having a massive network of cameras tracking license plates and how they move across town doesn't help. At the end of the day, you have to send someone a fine, and if they don't pay it and don't show up for court, you are again faced with having a police officer try to interact with them one-on-one, this time to enforce a bench warrant for their arrest.

In the meantime, you now have an absolutely massive data set of citizen movements being collected without a warrant by an increasingly authoritarian American government.

You have fallen for political talking points.

I also track Puerto Rico, but only at the Senate level: https://senado.pr.civic.band/

As an example, see the recent case of the woman who was arrested simply for driving through a town at the same time as a robbery occurred. That sort of thing is why people care.

If the data collection is performed by a private entity and then sold to the government, that is government surveillance. I agree that this is more widespread than Flock and other big names. However, Flock and its ilk currently stand to do far more damage in practice. They offer integrated turnkey solutions that are available to practically any law enforcement, from shithead chud officers in tiny shithole towns to the NYPD and all its grand history of institutionalized misconduct, and we are already seeing the effects of that.

See, also, the recent case of a teenager who was arrested because a Flock camera or similar thought a Doritos bag in his pocket was a gun. I'll let you guess what color his skin was.

We do need to restrict the franchise drastically. I don't know if this is where I'd draw the line, but it is actually one of the better ideas.

Other ideas: net tax payers, veterans, citizens

Does that imply that Android settings lie about which apps have accessed location data?

2. Consent

3. Accountability (e.g. A government agency needs a warrant to use your cell phone location data against you).

We're living constantly in the scene from Fahrenheit 451 where the government asks everybody to go outside at once and report any suspicious activity. We have made it potentially not OK for kids to push boundaries or make mistakes.

That's about the worst, most inflammatory way possible to make your point. I agree with you 100%, but I am begging you to learn to frame your ideas better, in order to get people on your side. If you say that to any voters you will lose them instantly

It's also not uncommon for police officers to use their tools to stalk women.

Now we're given the same untrustworthy officers full profiles of an individuals travel history without a "need to know". If you can't see how that's dangerous, I don't know what to tell you. In the US if someone is threatening your life, you can typically shoot them if you're out of options. You usually can't do that with an officer, even if they're off duty. The rest of the cops will stand behind that thin blue line and harass you.

When nazis kill jews that is bad.

When jews kill nazis that is good (arguably (it used to be obvious but now it is only arguable)).

Symmetric situations are not equivalent.

Judging by the downvotes, there are a lot of surveillance state apologists/quislings in here! Oops, I mean "founders".

Not the camera, no, just the eyes behind it -- namely police officers who have been caught stalking exes via Flock.

> Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).

In many jurisdictions in the US, police must personally witness the events to intervene. /Traffic/ cameras are one thing -- they only record those who violate the laws (red light, speeding). But continual monitoring of all persons passing falls into another bucket, like a Stringray device would.

> The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.

The abuse of this data is already happening. It's not a hypothetical.

Privacy is a human right. Sacrificing your human rights just for a bit of "safety" is just short sighted.

The system you’re defending is a list of flagged plate numbers and a way of comparing seen plates against that list, and a way of reporting matches to the local police.

The actual system logs all cars seen, saves the information forever, and reports the data to a third party who can share it with anyone they want.

The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.

I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.

The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).

I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.

Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.