“A few nights ago we decided to challenge ourselves and wreck four camera towers in one night,” said an early-August post on a Portland anarchist message board.
Photos of the destroyed mobile camera towers — the type with flashing blue lights you see in parking lots — show the group succeeded not just at vandalizing the towers but also at smashing this summer’s known record for most towers destroyed in a single night.
“We found that (it) took us less than 30 seconds to climb the tower and smash all of the cameras, destroy the solar panels and write a message, and slash the tires of the trailer,” the anonymous post continued. “We got our inspiration for climbing the tower from another communique.”
The “communique” they referenced was posted just three days earlier and set the previous known record this year — three surveillance camera towers in one night.
“PS. Anyone want to try to beat our record of three camera towers in one night?” it concluded.
The attacks were part of a competition known as “CamOver Portland: 2026 Summer Games,” which is being promoted online and with zines. The competition includes an instruction zine and a bingo sheet of surveillance infrastructure for players to destroy. The website’s administrators did not respond to a request for comment.
Oregon law classifies vandalization like this as criminal mischief. People found guilty of minor incidents face up to 30 days in jail and/or a $1,250 fine. When the value of damage is more than $500, people found guilty face 364 days in jail and/or a $6,250 fine. More serious incidents, like when the value is more than $1,000, can result in up to 5 years in prison and/or a $125,000 fine.
The acts of vandalism come as the city has seen substantial increases in surveillance infrastructure in recent years — much of it with increasingly technologically impressive and personally invasive capabilities.
But it also comes as public frustration over the surveillance tech — and what it is used for — has boiled over into the general population around the country and across political party lines.
A May Gallup poll found 70% of Americans would oppose data center construction in their area. And Portlanders have fought battles over the issue and other technologies like gunshot detection.
Portland Police Bureau spokesperson Mike Benner said the agency wasn’t “aware of any sort of increase in vandalization incidents of surveillance infrastructure in recent months, and there’s really no easy or efficient way for us to look into that.”
‘We’re slowly boiling’
A 2020 Portland auditor’s office report found police collected information about protesters during 2020 racial justice protests, including those not suspected of engaging in any criminal activity.
That and widespread frustration about federal law enforcement’s actions during the period created momentum for the city to defeat secretive lobbying by Amazon and successfully ban facial recognition in Portland.
The city passed a 2023 surveillance resolution directing it to create a report of all the surveillance technology the city was using. The resulting report came out last fall.
It found the city, mostly through the police, uses 26 different technologies. They included basic tools like cameras and more advanced technologies like social media monitoring, drones, gunshot detectors, geolocation tools and cell site simulators to intercept calls.
The report said the city also uses automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to track drivers.
But the report has significant holes, according to Sean Patrick, PDX Privacy program director. For starters, it breaks down what bureaus use based on categories. So while it shows PPB has “biometric/genetic” monitoring tools such as “gait, DNA, Fingerprints, Face ID” — it’s not clear which. (“Gait” analysis identifies people based on their walk.)
It also doesn’t include what federal agencies, private citizens and businesses do within Portland, Patrick said.
“That’s a huge problem and a huge gap because we don’t know how or who could be surveilling us and with whom that data could be shared,” he said.
For example, an interactive map on deflock.org shows Portland has dozens of ALPRs — many controlled by businesses like Home Depot which use Flock brand cameras.
Oregon law bans ALPRs from being used to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But Portland-area immigrant workers told InvestigateWest they suspect the tech is being used to track them. A 2025 Associated Press investigation found U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is using a secret network of ALPRs to monitor “millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious.”
When Portland-based surveillance researcher and investigative reporter Kate Kaye started her work 25 years ago, she saw very few people were paying attention. That’s changing, she said.
“People just feel like, ‘My God, I’m being watched everywhere, and can’t government do something about it?’” she said. “We’re slowly boiling in this pot of surveillance tech and data.”
Part of what’s driving that new attention, she said, is how widespread the tech has become.
“You go up to your friend’s house and there’s a Ring doorbell. Not just that, but smart glasses,” she said. “There’s just so much of this stuff that is becoming more and more prevalent because it’s becoming more commodified and cheap.”
Some of those private cameras are in Portland’s camera registry, which does not give police real time access to cameras but does allow them easy access.
Portland has also seen an explosion of the mobile camera towers anarchists have been targeting. The towers can detect people from at least 200 feet away and the co-founder of the main company, LiveView Technologies, said they use artificial intelligence (large language models) to analyze footage and detect suspicious behavior.
Saira Hussain, Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney, said so-called AI supercharged the issue. Hussain focuses on government surveillance’s overlap with racial and immigrant justice.
“It doesn’t just make bulk collection more feasible,” she said. “It makes the ability to trawl through that data also much more feasible.”
‘Hammer for every single nail’
Hussain said much of this expansion is happening secretly, far outside of the public view.
That’s exactly what Kaye found in 2023 while reporting for Bloomberg’s CityLab and her outlet, redtailmedia.org.
“I was watching this video of a recent work meeting, something that PPB presented at, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re piloting a drone program,’ and I was like, ‘Oh!’ and nobody had reported on it,” she said.
Through public records, she found police were deploying the tech most in poorer communities with larger populations of people of color.
In addition to driving racial disparities in policing, experts told Street Roots the increasingly everpresent surveillance infrastructure has other negative impacts.
“The number one impact that we really have to look out for is the chilling effect,” Patrick of PDX Privacy said.
Research shows surveillance discourages First Amendment protected activities like speech and protesting, and causes people’s views to conform with mainstream beliefs.
Hussain said these surveillance technologies are also prone to “mission creep.”
“When the technology is adopted by law enforcement, it’s like ‘Okay, this is being done to identify homicide and stolen vehicles and things like that,’” she said. “But very quickly, you see that the system actually is being used for a bunch of other things.”
She said EFF has seen ALPRs used to determine school district residency requirements, track down noisy vehicles and to track people trying to get abortions.
Indeed, 404 Media found Texas police performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 ALPR cameras to look for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion. The search included cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois.
“We are in an era where surveillance technology is being used as the hammer for every single nail,” Hussain said.
An August report from the Institute for Justice found 146 incidents of primarily law enforcement abusing ALPRs around the country, including 39 instances of law enforcement personnel stalking people.
Tomorrow you’re a terrorist?
Patrick said the combination of ever-growing surveillance infrastructure and the Trump administration rapidly changing American legal norms could make events like the Texas case just the beginning.
“What could be deemed inappropriate? What could be suddenly inappropriately labeled as ‘terrorism’ — we have no idea,” he said. “And because that data trail exists, the reality of retroactive surveillance is a clear and present danger. It’s a threat to the future.”
Tech goliaths and police are staying on the offensive. The CEO of Flock called DeFlock a “terroristic organization.” Law enforcement agencies around the country have quickly created a new category to label supposed radicals, “anti-tech violent extremist,” and promptly began surveilling people viewed that way.
Patrick, Hussain and Kaye all strongly emphasized they do not support vandalization of surveillance infrastructure or criminal activity. But they also said they understood why it was happening.
“We understand why they feel that way,” Patrick said. “Of course, we don’t condone it. We can’t condone it, but we do certainly understand it.”
Kaye celebrated Portland’s work to be transparent. But she worried that isn’t enough.
“Transparency around surveillance tech use may serve to paper over the concerns, problems and harms that these systems create without really changing anything, without really fostering any meaningful agency or control over its use,” she said.
The second phase of the city’s Surveillance Technologies Inventory Project was supposed to publish an open data inventory in “early 2026.” A spokesperson did not answer when it would be published.
Meanwhile, frustrations with tech, surveillance and big data are growing.
Last month Los Angeles joined a growing list of cities to cancel or suspend contracts with Flock. And widespread opposition to the technologies has united groups across the political spectrum in previously unimaginable ways.
“We may have just reached a tipping point,” Hussain said. “People are saying, ‘What the heck? We have all of this money to throw at surveillance technology to put everybody into this cloud of suspicion, but we don’t have money for anything else?’”
DeFlock organized a National Week of Action Against ALPRs from Aug. 16 to 22, encouraging people to participate in a variety of public meetings, town halls and other events to raise awareness about the harms of ALPRs.
And out on the street, Portlanders are taking the issue into their own hands.
“Anyone can play, and everyone wins!” said the 2026 CamOver competition’s online instruction zine. “What are you waiting for?”
This article appears in August 19, 2026.
