If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.

One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"

Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.

I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens

But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway."

Flock cameras are roughly that secure.

Characterizing vehicles based on stickers (which easily can indicate political leanings) is absolutely problematic. It's just not considered problematic by conservatives, given police in the US are overwhelmingly conservative.

And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.

Privacy laws now.

That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.

The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

- Benito Mussolini

What's an iffy data center?