Not sure if anyone's thought of this before, but here's my idea:

Point a camera at a remote control, hit some buttons on it and take a picture of the IR transmitter. It looks like this:


Now imagine that, but a higher output bulb, hooked up to your car. Perhaps hooked up to the rear license plate bulbs. Perhaps enough that any digital camera 'film' which tend to be hypersensitive to excessive IR (hence what makes night vision possible), would be unable to see past the localized area of IR LED. So now, unless they're working with actual film, no one can take a picture of my license plate. Don't ask why, just go with it.

Well I own 4 of these LEDs now.
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/0-5w-ir...0mm-board-4669

And a friend of mine who does some electrical engineering made me the PDF diagram as attached. Now the question is, how do I make this concept a reality, hopefully without too much ripping the car apart, and to have a driver's on/off switch?

 

Night time sounds like a no brainer, have them come on with the parking lights. Daytime, I doubt there's anything that can be done, they won't be bright enough. If it weren't illegal to modify the plate, having an LED poking through the plate itself would be the best bet of "blinding" the camera but that's asking for lots of trouble. Just about every vehicle sold has a reverse camera, I'm sure any LEDs in the license plate area would be mistaken for a camera or reverse sensor.

However, successfully get out of a couple redlight camera pictures and you will have law enforcement finding you. I would look at this as a one time get out of jail free ticket. You probably know the consequences of purposely hiding the plate and it's not nice.

 

I'm not sure if I could or could not drill a small hole in the NJ plate I have, in the small State silhouette in the center - you're suggesting perhaps not, as it's technically 'government property'?

(No not my plate)

And I'd prefer to have this on a switch so it's not on all the time. I'm very against running red lights, but can think of a few times when this could be invaluable. Obviously if it's on all the time and I ran lights, and eventually I was pulled over I think the fuzz might figure out that here's a car matching the description, no front plate, and the back has this weird glow on their dash-cam...

My question is more if anyone has a wiring diagram for our car at the back and how we might be able to hook up a switch. The more I think about it, maybe I could do this in conjunction with the reverse lights-anytime mod?