Adversarial Fashion

Adversarial Fashion was a clothing line printed with fake license plates, intended to inject junk data into Automated License Plate Readers.

Automated license plate readers sit on police cruisers, tow trucks and street poles. They scan whatever is in front of them and try to find a plate in it. They are not especially good at this. Left alone, they already log fences, billboards and the lettering on the side of a van.

The clothes gave them something to find. Each garment carries dozens of plates that hold up well enough to a reader working at highway speed. The reader captures them, stamps each one with a time and a location, and drops them into the same database as actual cars.

Do they really work?

These shirts were developed and tested in the field on APIs like OpenALPR and mobile ALPR products, both static image and live video. After all these years, they still work! A surprising result in a time when computer vision models are continuously updated. I don’t (yet) have access to the models that Flock or Axon use to try them out. If you do, let me know.

Are shirts really going to make a difference against Flock or other ALPRs?

One shirt is not going to bring down a surveillance network, and I have never claimed otherwise. What the shirts show is that nobody is watching the front door of these systems. They take what they are handed, there is no meaningful check on the way in, and a dataset is a great deal cheaper to pollute than to clean. We see time and again that a system that will read a tshirt in as a car can and often does misread real plates, resulting in cases of mistaken identity that have already put people’s lives in danger.

In this way, anti-surveillance art projects like Adversarial Fashion are best at helping us tackle large unwieldy ideas like AI-enabled mass surveillance and making them digestible for the average person. They form concrete examples that let us better understand and talk about how these systems work, and figure out together the place they should or should not have in our lives.

The DEFCON Demo

I brought the clothes to the Crypto and Privacy Village at DEF CON 27 in 2019, walked through how the plates were designed, and showed what a reader did with them.

Watch: Adversarial Fashion, Sartorial Hacking to Combat Surveillance States https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVcGZ_Ak4NI

Press

A new clothing line confuses automated license plate readers, MIT Technology Review, 2019 https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/15/65421/a-new-clothing-line-confuses-automated-license-plate-readers/

This hacker made clothes that can confuse automatic license plate readers, Vice, 2019 https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgpvv/adversarial-fashion-clothes-that-confuse-automatic-license-plate-readers

Dressing for the Surveillance Age, The New Yorker, 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/16/dressing-for-the-surveillance-age

Meet the activists perfecting the craft of anti-surveillance, Financial Times, 2021 https://www.ft.com/content/a0f8d8c5-ee5c-4618-bfbd-6bfb383b803e

How fashion designers are thwarting facial recognition surveillance, Reason, 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpu2MSmZkmU

Cow-nter Surveillance: A DIY guide to messing with surveillance systems, Broken Pencil, 2021 https://brokenpencil.com/features/cow-nter-surveillance-a-diy-guide-to-messing-with-surveillance-systems/

Face Off, Ashes Ashes, episode 107, 2020 https://ashesashes.org/blog/episodea-107-face-off

A hacker's fall fashion line features faux license plates. Here's why, The Parallax, 2019 https://the-parallax.com/2019/08/10/defcon-license-plate-fashion/

This hacker fools license plate readers with fashion, Tom's Guide, 2019 https://www.tomsguide.com/news/this-hacker-fools-license-plate-readers-with-fashion

What’s next?

These clothes were for sale until about 2023. Stay tuned for a re-release! Until then, check out RuralPrivacy.org to learn about how you and your community can take this work into your own hands.