Camover 2025: Coordinated Anti-Surveillance Vandalism Campaign Spreads Across U.S. Cities
Executive Summary
A decentralized anarchist campaign dubbed “Camover 2025” is encouraging activists across North America to sabotage and destroy surveillance infrastructure, especially CCTV and license plate reader systems. Active nodes have been confirmed in Philadelphia, Montreal, New Jersey, and Atlanta, with calls to escalate the campaign through August.
Analysis
The “Camover 2025” campaign marks a resurgence and tactical evolution of earlier anti-surveillance efforts that originated in Berlin in 2013. The updated version, distributed through anarchist platforms like Unravel and Philly Anti-Cap, urges activists to destroy surveillance cameras as a direct action response to state surveillance, policing, and data aggregation via AI. Unlike its predecessor, Camover 2025 explicitly discourages documentation of vandalism due to operational security concerns, instead focusing on sabotage, anonymity, and local propagation.
The campaign’s rules are minimal and ideological: destroy surveillance tech, don’t get caught, and share tactical insight when safe. Participants in Philadelphia describe targeting ALPR systems like Flock and pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras with tools ranging from spray paint and adhesives to physical removal or destruction. The campaign is presented as both a protest and a game—one with no winners, no rewards, and a shared mission of disrupting surveillance infrastructure in defense of radical networks.
A submission from “East Coast transsexual anarchists” reports that Camover actions have already occurred in Montreal, Philadelphia, and New Jersey. The tone is casual but defiant, invoking community defense, queer militancy, and solidarity with the dead as motivating forces. The movement rejects surveillance not merely as an invasion of privacy, but as a mechanism of counterinsurgency targeting radical, racialized, and queer communities.
Concurrently, a separate submission from Atlanta shows how tactical intelligence-gathering supports this campaign. Activists mapped over 3,600 surveillance devices—including Flock, Motorola, and city-owned cameras—across Fulton and DeKalb counties. The mapping data, along with guides for replication, has been published in accessible formats (.kml/.csv), designed for integration with navigation tools like Organic Maps or OpenStreetMap. The language framing this effort reveals explicitly abolitionist and anti-colonial aims: “destruction of the entire panopticon and all colonial infrastructure.”
From an intelligence and security perspective, Camover 2025 represents a technically literate, ideologically committed, and geographically diffuse threat to critical surveillance infrastructure. Though largely symbolic in its early stages, the campaign demonstrates the operational discipline and adaptability learned from post-2020 uprisings. Its anonymity, ease of replication, and shared tactical libraries make it inherently difficult to suppress.
If the movement continues to grow—especially in the lead-up to national elections or civil unrest—municipalities and private contractors could face increased costs from vandalism, outages, and defensive hardening of camera systems. Moreover, law enforcement’s reliance on these technologies to investigate protests, civil disobedience, and crimes could be weakened in areas of sustained sabotage.
