[danso]

This is a good point...when discussing the controversies behind surveillance and privacy, a frequent issue is that most people have no idea what's possible, even though it should be as clear as day. An obvious example is back when Facebook's API was more publicly accessible, youropenbook [1]

But there are other things to be mindful of...when publicizing how easy it is to be surveilled/attacked, how easy is it to for a mischievous person to make use of that information versus how long would it take to fix? I'd have mixed feelings about anyone publishing a user-friendly one-button-SWATter, even if it would most certainly spur some kind of movement to strengthen our emergency response systems (eventually).

But something that is basically an object detector plus OCR? No doubt that if many people run this software, and then feed into a system that makes it as easy (and ubiquitous) as Google to look up any license plate and see instantly all locations where it has been photographed, we would have a situation that would make most people a bit unhappy...but without those network effects, the personal use of this software would seem to be relatively benign, while at the same time educating people how easy it is to be tracked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openbook_(website)

[smartbit]

On remote locations collected data could be transmitted into this public LPR system over free LoRaWAN networks like The Things Network https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10438352