When police showed up to Anthony Sistilli’s front door in September, it wasn’t to accuse him of a crime or take a witness statement, but to ask how he could have the nerve to turn AI-integrated surveillance cameras on the cops themselves.
A Canadian software engineer and YouTuber, Sistilli became interested in automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) following the explosion of outrage against surveillance company Flock Safety in the US, Tom’s Hardware reported. Though Canada lacks a centralized corporate surveillance regime like Flock in the US, the country’s police have been rapidly scaling a more decentralized ALPR network with cameras that function in much the same way.
Responding to the rise in government surveillance, Sistilli decided to homebrew his own ALPR — though instead of tracking random civilians, it was designed to track police cars.
“I started to wonder, how hard is it to actually make a company like Flock?” Sistilli explained in a YouTube video.
So Sistilli ordered a wall-mounted 4K surveillance camera online, plugged it into his laptop, and instructed his AI assistant to vibe-code tracking software that would only flag police cruisers. The end result was a prototype ALPR, which the software engineer mounted on his car’s dashboard to test in the real world.
“At first, the video footage was super laggy” Sistilli explained, “because I was trying to calculate the chance of every single car on the road being a police officer in full-4K while also distinguishing their license plates.”
But after lowering the resolution and instructing the AI-system to only attempt a license-plate read after a vehicle was confirmed to be a police car, the full prototype was up and running. Unfortunately, local police soon caught onto Sistilli’s handiwork, and paid him a visit in order to see what was going on.
“Two police officers walked up my driveway and knocked on my door to question me about it,” Sistilli explains in his video. “It did feel really weird that they were asking me what my ‘intentions were’… one of them took the time to specifically mention ‘how scary’ it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift, and what they were doing throughout the day.”
Sistilli’s response? “I think that’s the exact same concern that civilians have too,” he said.
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