One of the more memorable stories I read as a child was "A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy" by Raymond F. Jones. In it, the intelligent, scientific teen wit

One of the more memorable stories I read as a child was "A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy" by Raymond F. Jones. In it, the intelligent, scientific teen with an aptitude for chemistry discovers the government is lacing breakfast cereals with drugs to quell the populace. The boy discovers it, weans himself off the drug, and then eats mostly from the health food store to avoid it. But the government uses that store to round up anyone who discovers the truth, because it's a sign plain as day you have. Stuff like this makes me think of that story. If anything, a motivated government could just train policeman on what patterns or clothing break camera recognition and stop people based on it. Or if you have an obscured plate, they don't need the camera if it's the law not to have it. This really only works if we have pervasive but more or less harmless surveillance by benign or robotic actors. But this is kind of like that health food store in that all the technical solutions in the world can't stop a motivated agent. You have to eat somewhere, and you have to exist in more than just image recognition databases.