Security News for Activists 22 Dec 2025
This newsletter is a free publication by the Institute for Secure Activism (ISA), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting personal security for civil rights, human rights, and social justice activists. We believe that technology should work for activists, and that we can actively limit governments from using technology to suppress activism. We focus on individuals who advocate for LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, immigrant and other marginalized communities. We provide hands-on training, instructional guides, and direct consultations to help people in civil society organizations protect themselves and their connections. Please consider making a tax-exempt donation to support our mission.
Call To Action: Practice Navigation Without the “Blue Dot”
Your phone is one of the most effective ways the surveillance state has to track your activities. One way your phone betrays your location is by making a two-way radio connection with the nearest cell tower. The cellular network records your general location based on this tower data. The government can easily procure that tower data. Another way your phone betrays your location is by asking GPS satellites for its exact location. Your apps (and often the operating system itself) often report this location to various online services. Most of us use our phones to navigate every single day and don’t give these processes a second thought. When we exercise our right to disagree with the government, we risk becoming the target of authoritarian surveillance. Being aware of our phone’s actual behavior becomes very important.
The Call to Action in today’s newsletter is to learn to navigate with your phone without network connections or GPS. If you can navigate without a phone at all that’s certainly best, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. For those difficult moments, there are offline mapping apps like OsmAND. Take a moment to download the free OsmAND app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Install the app and download its offline map of your local area. Then put your phone into Airplane Mode. That disconnects it from the cell towers and WiFi. Now turn off Location Services so the phone will stop asking GPS for its own position. Now practice navigating just by looking at the offline map.
You won’t have that “blue dot” showing you exactly where you are, because you’ve turned off Location Services. Unfortunately Location Services keeps a record on your phone of where you go, even when you’re in Airplane Mode. At some point later you’ll eventually turn off Airplane Mode and reconnect to the cellular network or to WiFi. At that moment Location Services will transmit a list of all the places you went while you were offline. So keep Location Services off while you’re navigating to a sensitive location.
Location Services will transmit a list of all the places you went while you were offline.
Call to Action: practice navigating without the blue dot!
Tracking Beyond The Phone: Automated License Plate Readers
I’ve spoken with many activists over the last year about government tracking. Activists are concerned about being identified at an action, surveilled as they go about their daily lives, or virtually followed as they travel. We often talk about the ways our phones act as tracking devices. We all certainly should already be aware that our phones can be used to track us in a number of different ways. However, phones aren’t the only tracking technology we need to keep in mind.
Let’s consider a scenario many of our communities have encountered recently: providing mutual aid for an immigrant family at risk of kidnapping and deportation. You, a volunteer, leave your home and drive to pick up diapers, clothes, and formula from another volunteer’s house. Then you drive to the house where the family is staying. It’s not their home: they fled their rental apartment after agents grabbed their undocumented neighbor in a raid. You’ve decided to leave your phone at home for the entire trip. You know that carrying your phone might reveal the family’s location. That’s good thinking, but it’s based on an incomplete risk assessment. How else could your movements be tracked?
In this kind of situation the movements of your car could compromise someone else’s security. Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) are one of a few technologies which you should consider in your planning. You may have heard of one of the fastest-growing ALPR companies in the US: Flock Safety. Flock isn’t the only prolific ALPR company, but it’s been involved in some of the most high-profile abuses of ALPR. Flock has tens of thousands of cameras deployed alongside roads throughout the US. These cameras automatically record the license plates and distinctive features of every passing vehicle. Flock cameras constantly upload these details to a central database. Many law enforcement agencies across the country then pay to access Flock’s system.
ALPR: Rife With Abuse
We’ve already seen flagrant abuses of ALPR databases at all levels of government. Flock and other ALPR companies don’t limit these problems to just law enforcement. For example, many homeowners associations (HOAs) pay to have ALPRs installed in their own neighborhoods. HOAs ostensibly do this to deter crime, but the effect is multi-layered. HOAs can now enforce draconian rules through continuous surveillance. Meanwhile, the HOA-installed cameras give law enforcement access to even more data.
Beyond the privacy implications of overzealous HOAs, law enforcement abuses are rampant. A small-town Virginia police officer used ALPR to stalk his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. Texas sheriff’s deputies tracked a Texas resident outside of the state via ALPR as she sought legal abortion care. ICE officers with no legal access to Flock’s records asked local police officers to run their search requests. When officers aren’t actively misusing the data, ALPR systems still regularly make potentially fatal mistakes. Families have been pulled out of their car at gunpoint by officers acting on erroneous alerts from ALPR systems.
Even when ALPR systems are working as designed they still present a serious surveillance concern for everyone on US roads. From an activist’s perspective ALPRs are an affront to your exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. This is particularly true in our current legal environment. The administration is making lists of people who disagree with their authoritarian policies. It’s only a matter of time before the regime turns ALPR databases against alleged “antifa” members and other imagined threats to the regime.
Deny and Defeat ALPR
What can we do in the face of a pervasive surveillance technology like ALPR? First of all, you can protest the presence of ALPR in your community. While we work to eradicate these intrusive technologies in our society, we still have to deal with their presence at the moment. As with any surveillance, the best approach is one that exploits the system’s weaknesses. One weakness of ALPR is incomplete coverage. Some web sites track the locations of fixed ALPR cameras. With that information you might be able to plan your route to avoid known cameras.
Another ALPR weakness is the assumption that tracking your car is the same thing as tracking you. That’s a poor assumption if you’re able to change your mode of travel. Take public transit (pay cash!); ride a bike or scooter (even if it’s a rental in your name, more on that in the next paragraph); borrow a car not registered to you; or walk!
Certainly each of these alternative modes of travel can also be surveilled. It’s important to understand, however, that the ubiquitous surveillance state relies on the ability to easily identify predictable patterns. An oppressive regime uses systems like ALPR to cast wide nets and identify the “low hanging fruit.” If you can manage to split your surveillance data across multiple systems, you’ve created a barrier to analysis. Either a human analyst or an algorithm must connect the ALPR data from your car with Uber records, or eBike rental info, or bus cameras. This kind of correlation is technically possible. Similar analysis is already being done at scale, automatically, against huge populations elsewhere in the world. While we’re seeing the beginnings of widespread surveillance analysis in the US, that level of technological oppression isn’t here yet. We still have room to maneuver and to exercise our rights as free citizens.
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