American workers are sick of being spied on. From Suffolk, VA to Southern California, AI surveillance cameras are being sawed down, smashed, and snatched off the streets.
For 25 years, the ruling class has taken every opportunity to worm its way into workers’ private lives. The Patriot Act enabled the federal government to track phone and travel records for any reason they saw fit. “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it,” said Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy in 1999, prophesying what would soon come.
Today, multibillion dollar companies track and predict workers’ every move through data harvested on social media and facial and vehicle recognition–equipped cameras on nearly every city block. The only thing that’s private in the US are their profits.
Collusion with the state
Flock Safety, manufacturer and operator of one of the largest networks of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, maintains cameras in over 6,000 communities nationwide. It boasts a network of 100,000 ALPR cameras that read and record license plates 20 billion times every month. Flock provides open access of its surveillance databases to ICE and more than 4,000 other governmental agencies, including police departments, who in turn share their access with an even greater number of entities.
In addition to street cameras, nearly 40% of households in the US own a video-equipped doorbell like the popular Amazon-owned Ring model. A partnership between Ring and Flock has provided law enforcement agencies access to video feeds from the front doors of some 1,000 homes, often without notifying their owners.
One woman was hunted down by a Texas Sheriff’s Department with the help of more than 83,000 Flock cameras in multiple states, after receiving an abortion in a state where the procedure remains legal. In another instance, a man was wrongfully stopped and surrounded at gunpoint while test driving a vehicle with his wife after police mistook it for a stolen Range Rover. AI-equipped cameras had misread its license plate and the cops went in for the arrest without further investigation.
Attacks on free speech
The feeling that we are being stalked by Big Brother is reinforced in other ways. After ICE murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a man named David Streever of Rochester, NY wrote an angry letter to the then-acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons. Streever called him a “monstrous human being” whose conscience would torment him for the rest of his life. Months later, DHS agents showed up at his front door and served his wife with a notice charging Streever with violating federal law for threatening Lyons’s life. He was out of the country on vacation with his seven-year-old daughter at the time. Federal agents tracked down his hotel room and confronted him on the night he landed back in the US. Streever’s letter contained nothing resembling a threat. Yet untold public resources were spent tracking him down for exercising free speech “protected” by the First Amendment.
Around the same time, a pollworker in Syracuse, NY made a social media post that said “Today is a great day for Jonathan Ross to be indicted,” referring to Renee Good’s murderer. She was served a similar notice at her place of work by feds demanding she sign an acknowledgment of her guilt. These brazen intimidation tactics show the great lengths to which the state is willing to go to curb dissent after the heroic mass movement in Minneapolis forced ICE terrorists to retreat.
A class-struggle response is necessary
Individual activists have taken the fight against surveillance into their own hands. Jeffrey Sovern, an Air Force mechanic and engineer, is facing a barrage of charges for taking down thirteen Flock cameras in Virginia. While pleading not guilty, he has maintained that the use of these cameras is “unconstitutional and a violation of his and others’ Fourth Amendment rights,” and that companies like Flock are building “an unhealthy surveillance state.”
City streets abound with anti-surveillance propaganda posters. Instagram reels offer cash bounties for disabling or destroying AI cameras, with dozens of comments offering practical recommendations on how to do so. For Sovern and every person who takes a similar action, hundreds of others are cheering them on.
These actions reveal the mood of opposition to mass surveillance. But tens of thousands of ALPR cameras will not be taken down by sporadic individual efforts. To fight back against the violation of our rights, we must fight as a class. The state’s rampant spying and repression show that our rights mean nothing unless we collectively struggle to defend them.
City, road maintenance, and utility company workers could strike, refusing to return to work until every Flock camera in their cities is removed—or they could take them down themselves. Tech workers could disable them on the backend. Organized labor has the power—and the responsibility—to lead a nationwide campaign against ALPR cameras, which would deal a blow to the capitalists and their state in one go.
Just as the Minneapolis workers kicked ICE out of their city, the American working class has the power to shut down the spy cameras that litter our streets and end the stalking by the billionaires’ state.