Adam Heimerman kept seeing the surveillance cameras on his way to work as a river guide in East Tennessee, and the sight rankled him.
More than 130,000 of the automatic license-plate readers now dot the country, according to the crowdsourced tracker DeFlock.org. The artificial intelligence-assisted devices have been embraced by law enforcement as powerful investigative tools but widely denounced by the public over privacy concerns.
For Heimerman, who’s 37 and running as an independent candidate for Congress, the cameras were one more sign that the United States was becoming a police state, he said in an interview. Then in July, the Blount County Sheriff’s Office alleges, Heimerman shot four of the cameras — including one near a church where worshipers sat inside.
Heimerman declined to discuss specifics of his case, but he said he believes there’s widespread frustration over local governments that keep using the cameras despite community pushback. That has fueled a wave of recent vandalism across the country, he said.
“When people act out in a manner that we’re witnessing, things have gotten bad and they no longer feel like they’re being heard,” Heimerman said. “People are tired of being told to sit down and be quiet and write a letter.”
“How-to” videos have spread online that demonstrate how to disable the cameras from collecting footage using wire cutters and heavy gloves. People from an array of backgrounds — college students, computer engineers, a U.S. Air Force engineer — have been accused of vandalizing the devices.
Cameras were recently damaged in communities around Detroit. In Winona, Minnesota, all eight of the city’s readers were cut down and stolen.
Flock Safety, one of the largest players in technological surveillance, is often the target of the ire. The company operates cameras in more than 6,000 communities across the country that record 20 billion plate scans a month. Critics concerned about the information the devices collect and store say the cameras aren’t just tracking license plates, but people’s personal movements as they visit places like gun ranges, doctor’s offices or marijuana purveyors.
That criticism cuts “across partisan lines,” said Eleni Manis, the research director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that fights government surveillance.
“As Americans we drive where we want and when we want,” Manis said. “Tracking ruins that for all of us. And that’s partly why this has gotten under everyone’s skin.”
Flock, which did not return requests for comment, has defended its product and said that it has been used to solve countless crimes, including helping to uncover the identity of the mass shooter at Brown University last year.
But misuse is rampant, a Washington Post report this month found. Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their exes without their knowledge or consent. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have also accessed Flock’s nationwide database through local partners to conduct immigration searches.
Last week, the company announced it was enacting major changes to prevent abuse by law enforcement, including requiring officers to label searches with criminal case numbers and reducing the amount of days data is stored from 30 to seven.
Community backlash against the cameras has been fierce, with 100 jurisdictions around the county pausing or canceling contracts in recent months, according to data compiled by DeFlock.org.
Despite that, some have turned to vigilantism — spray painting the devices red, ramming their pole mounts with pickup trucks and slapping on stickers to block the camera lenses.
Online videos even suggest the tools one might need to need to rip down cameras or disrupt their feeds with green laser pointers.
A number of prominent influencers have applauded the vandalism, including right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson.
Rick Wilson, the co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project political action committee, recently described in detail on a podcast the kind of “cheap green laser pointer” that can easily be purchased online to interfere with devices.
“There are a lot of tools for citizens to express their discomfort of these things that are knowable and available,” Wilson said in an interview. “I’m not suggesting that people break the law. I’m suggesting that you are not helpless against a surveillance state that does not have your best interests in mind.”
Carlson has portrayed the vandals as grassroots heroes fighting back against government overreach.
“It’s not drug-addicted kids,” Carlson said on his podcast recently. “It’s sober, decent patriot Americans who believe the promises of their country. Flock was not part of the country they signed up for. No one asked their permission to steal their images and to spy on their conversations. They don’t think that makes them safer. They understand that it’s to strip them of their most basic humanity.”
Last month, when a 20-year-old from West Virginia was arrested and charged with defacing Flock cameras, a host of Facebook commenters rushed to his defense, offering fake alibis.
“He was saving my neighbors dog from a fire all day couldn’t be him,” one Facebook user wrote.
“That man is innocent,” wrote another. “I saw him serving at a soup kitchen at the time of the incident.”
In that case and others, images of the alleged vandals were captured on the very cameras they sought to deface, a fact law enforcement has been quick to point out.
In a February news release announcing destruction of property charges against a 24-year-old in Michigan, the Waterford Police department noted, “Ironically, Detectives discovered one of the [cameras] had captured an image of the vehicle and license plate driven by the suspect at the time the cameras were damaged.”
“[No] one is entitled to maliciously destroy property of another, including that of the Waterford Police Department,” the statement said.
Heimerman, the congressional candidate and lifelong East Tennessee resident, said he’s running to represent the state’s 2nd District because he is worried that the needs of ordinary citizens are getting lost amid rampant corporate greed. His Republican opponent, Rep. Tim Burchett, earlier this month introduced legislation to ban federal money from being spent on the cameras.
Heimerman, who vaguely recalls voting for Barack Obama, said he has written his own name in for president on the ballot for decades. A GoFundMe organized for his legal defense has raised over $13,000.
Heimerman says he’s grateful for the attention his case has received, hoping it means that people are “waking up” to the need to pay attention to what local government is doing, not just those at the federal level.
“It kind of brings a highlight to how much a boiling point we are at,” he said. “People are fed up.”
Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
The post Vandals are destroying license-plate cameras as anger over surveillance rises appeared first on Washington Post.
