Tricking License Plate Readers

Hackers designed this skirt, which is covered in license plates with parts of the Fourth Amendment (the one that deals with unreasonable searches and seizures), to trip up surveillance systems. You can snag similarly designed hoodies, T-shirts, and tanks at Adversarial Fashion's online store.



"The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations," writes Kate Rose, founder of Adversarial Fashion, on the company's website.

That, in turn, makes those plate readers less effective.

While this kind of technology can be used in positive ways, like finding missing people, recovering stolen cars, or identifying suspects in criminal cases, there are also pitfalls: It's possible for authorities to track a person in real time with nothing but their scanned license plate number. That concerns Rose, who says the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses the tech to find and detain undocumented immigrants.

License plate readers use infrared light to take images of a plate. Then, software examines these photos to extract and store the pertinent data. The technology can collect thousands of plate numbers per minute.

At the long-running DEFCON cybersecurity conference held in Las Vegas this year, Rose explained how her clothing creations work.

First, she tested a mind-blowing number of modified license plate images (as in, ones that don't exist yet) to find the right samples. Then, she created aesthetically pleasing fabric patterns that are read by scanning devices exactly as though they were real license plates—and cluttering the systems with crap data.

Want to create your own license plate clothing? Click here.