Surveillance Fashion… for Cars

Remember when we wrote about the surveillance cameras tracking pretty much every car? Remember when we wrote about the anti-surveillance fashion that makes ugly sweaters diverting cameras? Now imagine both at the same time.

Anti-Surveillance Wraps for Cars

Here on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR), we’re not fans of fashion. (It’s a Nerd Tribe thing.) But then again, we’re really not fans of warrantless dragnet surveillance. So we’ve previously written approvingly ^{[1] [2]} of some ‘fashion’ designs that avoid surveillance using what are called ‘adversarial patterns’ that confuse the AIs behind the cameras. The aesthetics are dubious, but we applaud the spirit of the thing.

More recently, we’ve written on this CLBTNR somewhat dyspeptically on the automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that seem to be everywhere, tracking every car without warrant, building travel dossiers on more or less everybody. ^[3]

At a recent DEF CON (the annual computer security conference), Bill Swearingen gave a talk on wrappers for cars that amount to adversarial patterns to confuse the AI behind multiple different surveillance cameras, including Flock. ^[4]

Here’s an example wrapped around a car that, he claims, makes it more or less invisible to ALPRs though quite conspicuous to human beings. Any cop who knows about this stuff will immediately wonder, “Why is that guy evading cameras? Maybe I better follow him.”

So, yeah: like the anti-surveillance fashion, it’s conspicuous. Surveillance companies like Flock would probably love to get their hands on samples to train their AIs to look through it. If that turns out to be too difficult, they’ll push hard to have it made illegal, as in “felony illegal”. (Whether that will happen depends on ejecting fascists from the US government, and the jury — that is, the electorate — is still out.) ^[5]

Swearingen has similar patterns for clothing, but is keeping his “best” patterns secrete so surveillance companies can’t train on them. That will put a kink in our ability to use them!

Honestly, the whole episode reminds me of the WWI “dazzle camouflage” ^[6] that made ships conspicuous in some ways, but hard to figure out range, bearing, and heading. That, of course, made them harder to target with the elementary torpedoes and artillery of the day.

The example shown here is the USS West Mahomet, a WWI ship. It’s… well, obvious that there’s a ship there, but it’s less obvious exactly where the bow is and where it might go if the props were turning.

In the end, the statistics in WWI were uninformative. Dazzle camouflage may have helped a bit: you get shot at more often because you’re conspicuous, but more of those shots miss because the enemy can’t get a good firing solution.

The Weekend Conclusion

The dazzle camouflage resonance is as informative as it is unfortunate. The original was a response to hostile militaries trying to kill ships. Camouflage is a race between adversaries, to hide from people trying to harm you. Now, alas, US law enforcement frequently behaves like a violent occupying army. Many citizens seek ways to defend themselves against law enforcement.

Can’t say I blame them.

Time to vote soon, in the US. If you’re eligible, check your voter registration now.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

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Notes & References

1: Weekend Editor, “Anti-Surveillance Fashion Tips”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2023-Oct-10. ↩

2: Weekend Editor, “More Anti-Surveillance Fashion”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2024-Jul-18. ↩

3: Weekend Editor, “The Flocks of License Plate Readers”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2026-Jul-23. ↩

4: BigGo Finance Staff, “Cybersecurity Researcher Uses AI-Generated Wrap to Defeat Flock Surveillance Cameras at Def Con”, BigGo Finance, 2026-Aug-10.

Yes, this is a minor media outlet. Since the event was at DEF CON, mainstream media is avoiding it, or even suppressing the news of it. Other media than BigGo Finance have it, but all minor players and all say approximately the same things. ↩

5: One notes, à propos of nothing in particular, that modern digital projectors work using an array of many tiny steerable mirrors. A laser pointed at such a mirror array might paint the adversarial pattern on the lens of a surveillance camera, if you had your own camera to spot theirs first, or used a database of surveillance cameras known in advance. Purely theoretically; I’m not a hardware guy who could do anything like that. ↩

6: Wikipedia Editors, “Dazzle Camouflage”, Wikipedia, retrieved 2026-Aug-22. ↩