I didn't read every post, so I'm gonna try a blanket answer.
Lidar is regulated by the FDA, and as such, is not subject to the FCC guidelines that concern police radar. Those are the guidelines that make it a federal no-no to use an active radar jammer against police radar.
As far as the US goes, detectors are illegal only in Washington, D.C.; Virginia; commercial vehicles; and on military bases.
The phone-channel analogy: lidar operates on a wavelength of around 904 nm, since it uses light rather than radio waves. Radar is used on three bands - X (center, 10.525 GHz); K (center, 24.150 GHz), and Ka (33.4 - 36.0 GHz).
Escort and Lidatek are both supposedly quite good; try websites like
www.speedzones.com /
www.radartest.com / (...) for others, since I'm not all up-to-date on the laser part of speed enforcement.
Ignore RMR (Rocky Mountain Radar). For Ka and supposed "jamming capability", they're generally considered useless.
Your tinted plate thing - I can see how it might reduce the effective range to your car from a police unit, but it's not going to do much of anything significant. Even jammers have that problem - they often aren't foolproof, and they surely aren't perfect, but they can buy you quite a bit of time to get down from extra-legal speeds. I think I read a report saying that what many of them did was cut the distance you could be clocked at by a large percentage. As far as complete jamming, I don't know, but I wouldn't count on it.