Defense contractor Leonardo is promoting a new technology called SignalTrace that will package plate cameras with sensors that can scrape unique identifiers tied to your smart devices and make that data available to law enforcement.
Police, border security, and other government agencies already comprise Leonardo’s customer base, and with this technology, those clients seek to correlate footage from these cameras to phones, tablets, wearables, AirTags, and, naturally, the electronics inside cars themselves.
If SignalTrace can pick up your Bluetooth headphones, you can be sure it’ll also be looking out for your vehicle’s 5G hotspot, infotainment system, and even its tire pressure monitoring sensors. The company includes pet microchips as a potential entry point to tracking.
Just add water.
Mass surveillance by corporation
… pet microchips are passive, they have a readable range of maybe 15cm? Unless they’ve figured out some way to power them at distance (or they’re sticking UHF tags in your dogs) without frying the camera and giving everyone cancer, they’re inert. What weird marketing hype.
Industry researchers have managed to create directional antennas that read 125 kHz chips (the kind used in pets) from as far away as one meter. That’s most or all of the width of a sidewalk, if the reader is placed at ground level.
For unimplanted tags of unspecified size sure it’s technically possible to do, but I’ll let the article summarize why this is blatant marketing hype:
The ideal lab setup often fails miserably once you mount the reader near a gate or machine frame.
It’s worth saying: 1 meter is an ambitious goal for 125kHz. LF systems are intentionally short-range to prevent cross-talk. If you truly need 1-meter coverage, sometimes the real solution isn’t to push more current — it’s to rethink geometry, use multi-coil zones, or explore hybrid systems (LF for identity, HF/UHF for distance).
and then mention that the interference from the dermis vastly reduces the useful range of the tags, and that the article doesn’t actually specify what type of tag they’re designing for (or if it’s using a set orientation…).
ghost in the shell laughing man shit.
a couple years go by and they don’t know how to track people regularly anymore.
so if we bypass these sensors and algorithms, we become invisible in plain sight
Eventually you’ll be able to walk around invisibly simply by not carrying a phone.
They’ll still see you on camera and you’ll instantly be flagged as potential terrorist for not having a (tracking) device
Only if you’re facelesss
Mask/hood
Gait analysis. And no, a rock in your shoe doesn’t defeat it.
But a wheelchair does, checkmate atheists.
Wheel roll analysis?
If they track all that other stuff then they are not ‘license plate cameras’.
Maybe time to start creating devices that spam various Bluetooth MACs and just leave them around… Raise the noise floor a bit
Nah, too easy to filter. Make them clone MACs they’ve seen, and simulate trips around the city.
Is this concept viable? Interesting.
Small single board computer with a solar battery could spam fake bluetooth MACs all day and night. You would need additional hardware to fake the 4G signals (and this would be illegal) or things in the unlicensed bands like tire pressure monitor sensors.
Your setup would cost about as much as theirs and they have infinity money, so absent some rich sponsor you’d be limited to screwing with a few nodes. A more effective use of battery power would be an angle grinder (this would also be illegal).
License plate cameras will soon discover rapid unscheduled disassembly
Special resource acquisition operation
I hope for a horrible end for whatever piece of shit decided to track pets. A curb stomping would be too kind for that kind of trash.
looks like all those phones with physical shutoff switches are looking pretty fuckin good now.
Faraday bags for everything else
Soon? Oh boy do I have some bad news for this reporter
We have to quit these corporate electronics.
Could one build a device that could overload these with fake data?
Or should we just use cordless angle grinders?
Perhaps lasers could knock out the cameras.
Did we just initiate a kernel panic challenge?
I don’t know anything about jamming these but I do know that DeWalt makes a pretty good cordless angle grinder
Its funnier than that, jammers are not legal, but data poisioning is. Leave a device near by that just rotates through IDs of all the signal types you know its listening for and it protects everyone passing by because their UIDs get lost in the noise.
I have one. Good shit.
Enshittification of society itself
hide your devices in a faraday cageXDrive around with a machine with 20k reprogrammable-MAC bluetooth radios that randomize the MAC address every 10 seconds ✓
Ya know, thats a good idea. I would make the time frame shorter depending on what the range of the transmitter is. If you switch while in range of the camera would it pick you up as two vehicles?
Or buy cloned devices from China which all have the same MAC
