Blocking cameras that catch you speeding

Scripps Howard News Service ^ | July 2, 2003 | GREG AVERY

[HAL9000]

Hate the idea of impersonal cameras ticketing you for running a red light or driving 36 mph in a 25 mph zone? The antidote might be in a red aerosol can.

A Harrisburg, Pa., company sells a spray to stop camera-generated tickets by making your license plates so reflective it blinds the spying cameras when their flash goes off.

Tests show that "Photo Blocker," a product sold over the Internet by Phantom Plate, can help drivers beat traffic-enforcement camera tickets by coating their license plates with a spray.

Phantom Plate started selling the product three years ago. The company was born primarily out of anger over the growing number of places on the East Coast that were using cameras to enforce traffic laws.

"We had a lot of family members and friends who were getting tickets right and left," said Joe Scott, marketing director for Phantom Plate.

Knowing that a mirror reflecting a camera flash ruins a photograph, Phantom Plate founders experimented with ways to make license plates hyper-reflective, Scott said. After much testing, they struck upon the spray.

Since then, the company has sold thousands of the $29.99 cans that can cover up to six license plates, Scott said.

Other companies make similar products, and, like Phantom Plate, also sell clear-plastic license-plate covers that obscure the numbers when viewed at an angle.

Capt. John Lamb, a Denver traffic officer, participated in a Denver television station's test of the Phantom Plate product. The test replicated a car driving 30 mph through a 20 mph school zone.

The spray successfully obscured the license plate numbers, and the pictures showed the license plate on the test car to be a glowing white blob, Lamb said.

"From a police perspective, I think it's irresponsible for anyone to use a device that would defeat our system so they could essentially speed in residential areas and school zones," Lamb said.

To the people behind Photo Blocker, the spray represents a small way of fighting back. Scott envisions a day when cameras are everywhere on America's roads and all drivers are treated as criminals to be ticketed when their speedometers creep over the limit.

"I agree with making roads safer, but when it starts costing you money as a regular person, that's different. ... Then it's personal," Scott said.

[Hunble]

Personally, spray-paint at 2:00 AM works much better.

[Dan from Michigan]

Personally, spray-paint at 2:00 AM works much better.

Don't know anything about that......

[pogo101]

To quote from Jim Carrey's character in "Liar, Liar,"

QUIT BREAKING THE LAW, A**HOLE!

[Hunble]

Any violation of a law, that does not have a victim, has harmed nobody.

Sorry, unless another person has been harmed, this is just another method of extorting money from the citizens to fund city programs.

For situations like this, I love to see citizens fight back!

[longtermmemmory]

class 4?

["da wabbit hunter"]

Try this: www.phantomplate.com

[soundbits]

How about paint-ball guns?

[roadcat]

"A good portion of the local cops take the front license plates off of their personal cars."

Oh my gosh! Cops are normal people too?

I have an alternate solution. Rust. Lots of it on the front license plate of my daily driver. Plus it helps to hammer the numbers flat and bend the plate under the bumper.

[nevergiveup]

A year or so ago I came up with a few ways to beat these cameras so I researched the law in CA. Since it is past my bed time, I won't take the time to go find the files and post them. It suffices to say that the law explicitly prohibits any actions that interferes with reading a license plate by either a person or any form of mechanism or instrumentation. In other words, if it works and they catch you with it, you loose big time.

[Russian Sage]

A polarized filter over the camera lens will defeat this.

Probably not. Glare is not stronly polarized unless it glances off a surface at an angle. Light that reflects normal to a surface is not polarized. I assume that the camera is pointed nearly straight on (10 deg. or so) and is located near the flash.

But, even if the light were blocked, the light blocked by the filter is just light that came from the flash which was used to illuminate the plate. If you block that light to get a good exposure of the treated plate, you get too little exposure of the many untreated plates.

[danmar]

Yep, the UV wave length covering your licence plate, is not in sync with the camera's "flash", therefore the camera can not "see" your licence plate.
Very simple, but effective.

[non-anonymous]

When I lived in Boston, my neighbor received a pile of nearly a dozen citations in one single day. He recalled driving home at 3 or 4am a few weeks earlier, and since there wasn't any traffic, he decided to just roll through the red lights.

Don't break traffic law in Boston... Too bad all the lenient liberal judges work in the criminal courts.

[HAL9000]

According to the manufacturer's web site (www.phantomplate.com), the fine for obstructing a license plate is much less than the fine for speeding.

[eno_]

A slave flash is a flash with a photocel that detects a flash and fires. It is used in photography to provide an additional angle of lighting. The benefit is that you don't have wires running all over to fire the flashguns.

There is no practically detectable delay in firing a slave flash - your eye, nor any still-image camera, could never see the "sequence" of flashes. It is just as closely synchronized as if it were a hardwired connection. So there is no way a traffic camera could avoid being temporarily blinded by a slave flash.

Someone fairly clever could build a flash bulb into a license plate light fixture, and cannibalize a cheap used slave flash for the other circuitry and photocel. The flash bulbs in those pocket digital cameras are very tiny, and would fit next to the ordinary license plate light.

[eno_]

Excellent, and elegant! defeatable with filters, which slave fhash cannot be, but very nice.

High output IR LEDS will also defeat laser speed detectors, as will IR (pass) filters on high intensity halogen lights (which put out tons of IR).

[eno_]

Who is crying or whining? We're shooting back.

[mewzilla]

I'd be welling to bet that all the folks here who think this is a spiffy idea have never had a loved one die in an MVA. Gives one a really dim view of people who break traffic laws.

[eno_]

I'd bet the roads would be safer if the cops didn't treat traffic enforement as a revenue generator.

[Cultural Jihad]

I'd bet the roads would be safer if the cops didn't treat traffic enforement as a revenue generator.

Spoken like a true anarcho-ideologue whose mindset has been long divorced from Reality.

[AppyPappy]

Most accidents aren't caused by people trying to beat a red light. Almost all intersection accidents are people blowing through the light because they don't see it or they do an illegal turn on red. Cameras would have no effect on these.