Sometimes direct action is the only path to push politicians to take civil liberties seriously.
Public officials who wield authority don’t share the same incentives or concerns as the people they govern. On occasion, grabbing officials’ attention requires something a bit out of the ordinary—creative demonstrations involving signs, paint, saws, or other novel techniques. That has been the pattern with automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—often called “Flock cameras” after the leading provider—across the country. Faced with increasing encroachments on privacy, some individuals respond by compromising the cameras’ all-seeing gaze.
The Expanding Threat of Surveillance Cameras
ALPRs are devices that scan traffic and automatically log and identify license plates on passing vehicles. Without warrants, law enforcement can use them to determine who drove through a location where a crime occurred. They can also be employed to monitor the movements of anyone who comes into the cameras’ field of view. ALPRs are frequently connected to shared data repositories; in the case of Flock Safety, the largest company in the field, the database spans the nation and is accessible by any subscribing agency. With a dense network of cameras, a person’s trips to political gatherings, religious services, shopping, leisure activities, and road trips can be tracked and mapped for officials scrutinizing “suspicious” behavior.
That’s if ALPRs are used as intended. The Institute for Justice (I.J.) has documented “well over 100 incidents of ALPR abuse, including romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct.” The organization continues to record abusive uses of the technology.
ALPRs are also prone to mistakes. “In Española, New Mexico, a 12-year-old was handcuffed after an ALPR camera misread the last digit of a license plate on a vehicle driven by her older sister as a ‘7’ instead of the ‘2’ it really ended with,” CBS News reported last year. A Vallejo, California, Police Department trial found that “35 percent of all hits were misreads for the mobile readers, with a similar number (37 percent) for the fixed readers,” meaning license plates were misidentified with potentially serious consequences for those wrongly identified as suspects.
Privacy and accuracy concerns raise red flags for wary Americans, yet in many places officials continue to sign deals with ALPR vendors and install surveillance systems because they offer a low-effort way to gather data that might help solve crimes—or to stalk ex-spouses and political adversaries. This has driven part of the population to pursue do-it-yourself countermeasures.
Cameras Targeted by Widespread Sabotage
In De Soto, Missouri, a camera near the De Soto Athletic Complex was deliberately damaged. The camera pole was toppled, and the solar panel appeared to have been struck multiple times by projectiles, according to KMOV. Three ALPRs in Grand Junction, Colorado, were shot with a .22 rifle. Nine cameras were toppled in Summit County, Colorado. South Carolina’s WIS reported that “at least two Flock safety cameras in Irmo have been spray-coated with foam sealant.” Spray-painting camera lenses became the tactic of choice in Florida’s Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and Jacksonville Beach.
“Flock cameras have been vandalized in at least 36 states,” NPR’s Meg Anderson reported last week. “They’ve been stolen, sawed down, crashed into, covered in paint and stickers, even shot at with guns.”
FlockStats, which tracks anti-ALPR activity, records a minimum of 194 cameras disabled nationwide through sabotage, as of now.
The sabotage efforts carry risks since they are illegal acts of vandalism against public property, even if some view them as morally defensible. Several individuals who targeted ALPRs have faced arrest. Some departments, like Oviedo Police in Florida, have started placing decoy “bait” cameras that are themselves monitored to trap vandals.
Decoy schemes raise the stakes for saboteurs; Oviedo charged a suspect with three felony counts for striking a decoy camera. Yet these efforts show that sabotage has drawn the attention of the people who install the real ALPRs, and that attention appears to have made an impact.
Public Opposition Captures Officials’ Attention
DeFlock, another anti-ALPR resource, documents at least 135 communities that have “rejected” ALPRs. Many of them have canceled contracts with camera vendors (primarily Flock, but also Motorola and other companies). The reasons cited often reflect privacy advocates’ concerns that people’s movements should not be tracked by the government without a warrant.
In Arizona, “Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple announced the cancellation of the Sheriff’s Office contract with Flock Safety, citing Fourth Amendment concerns with the company’s ALPR cameras,” the sheriff’s office announced earlier this month.
When a county sheriff acknowledges that surveillance technology carries serious civil-liberties implications, it’s clear that camera vandalism taps into a broad public opposition to pervasive surveillance that extends beyond the saboteurs themselves.
People worried about surveillance but unwilling to face felony charges may explore countermeasures to ALPRs. Just as some apparel companies have introduced high-tech patterns designed to thwart facial recognition, entrepreneurs offer car add-ons intended to confuse license-plate readers.
Without detailing specific products or their effectiveness—which is debated—some firms sell license-plate covers marketed as obscuring characters (these are illegal in some states). Others market infrared LED light frames intended to wash out images.
A bolder approach is Bill Swearingen’s noRecognition project, which has produced a car wrap that overwhelms cameras with busy imagery. According to a profile in TechCrunch, “Swearingen’s computer-generated patterns do not block surveillance cameras from recording video footage. Instead, they scramble the camera’s ability to identify objects, people, or faces so that the cameras do not trigger any detection alerts.” He asserts that his patterns work with software used by Flock ALPRs.
A pattern dense enough to confuse surveillance cameras will inevitably draw attention. The question is whether that attention will prove as effective as the attention generated by ALPR saboteurs. For now, individuals willing to take legal risks to disable surveillance cameras are gaining public support and persuading at least some public officials to consider civil-liberties concerns.
