Section:GDN 1N PaGe:30 Edition Date:190815 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/8/2019 17:06 cYanmaGentaYellowb
- The Guardian Thursday 15 Aug ust 2019
(^30) World
▼ Kate Rose’s dress has a collage of
camera-readable US licence plates
on it spelling out the text of the fourth
amendment regarding privacy
Camera-ready fashion:
the clothes designed to
fool traffi c surveillance
Alex Hern
Las Vegas
An American hacker and fashion
designer has struck an unlikely blow
against the surveillance state by
releasing a range of clothes designed
to bamboozle US licence plate readers.
Automatic licence plate readers –
which can be mounted on police cars or
on objects like road signs and bridges
- use small, high-speed cameras to
photograph thousands of number
plates on vehicles per minute. The
information captured is then collected
and sometimes stored in databases,
prompting widespread concerns in the
US over drivers’ privacy.
Clothes from the inaugural
collection of Kate Rose ’s Adversarial
Fashion line contain words from the
fourth amendment to the US constit-
ution, which is often invoked as an
important defence against surveil-
lance. The words are arranged to look
like a collage of US car number plates,
so every time a wearer passes an auto-
matic licence plate reader, they get
added to a database.
The intention is to make deploying
that sort of surveillance less eff ective,
more expensive, and harder to use
without human oversight.
The range was unveiled in Las Vegas
at the Defcon cybersecurity confer-
ence, which bills itself as the world’s
longest-running and largest under-
ground hacking conference.
America’s licence plate reader
system is “a highly invasive mass
surveillance system that invades every
part of our lives, collecting thousands
of plates a minute”, Rose said. She
credits the idea for her clothing range
to a friend who told her that the read-
ers themselves were not particularly
good a distinguishing actual number
plates from similar-looking objects.
“They already read in things like
picket fences and other junk,” she
said. “I thought that if they’re fooled
by a fence, then maybe I could take a
crack at it. If the system can be fooledby fabric, then maybe we shouldn’t
have a system that hangs things of
great importance on it .”
Rose likens her work to that of other
security researchers at Defcon. “If a
phone is discovered to have a vulner-
ability, we don’t throw our phones
away. This is like that – disclosing a
vulnerability. I was shocked it was so
easy, and I would call on people who
think these systems are critical to fi nd
better ways to do that verifi cation.”
Elsewhere at the convention,
Droogie, a hacker, described a rather
less successful way of testing the cyber-
security of licence plates: registering
a custom licence plate with the Cali-
fornia department of motor vehicles
that read “NULL”, the code used in a
number of common database systems
used to represent an empty entry.
Rather than giving him invisibility,
Droogie experienced almost exactly
the opposite , receiving more than
$12,000 in driving tickets. Every sin-
gle speeding ticket for which no valid
licence plate could be found was
assigned to his car. The Los Ange-
les police department eventually
scrapped the tickets but advised him
to change his plates.
In 2016, the Berlin-based artist and
technologist Adam Harvey worked
with international interaction studio
Hyphen-Labs to produce the Hyper-
face textile, fabric printed with a
seemingly abstract pattern designed
to trigger facial recognition systems.РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS