One man. One 12-foot sign. One peaceful protest. 🇺🇸#Surveillance #BoostYourMind

Our Take

Credit to Boostyourmind for putting a face on what usually feels like an invisible dragnet. Carl Gunn didn't file a lawsuit or write a strongly worded letter — he just stood there for hours with a giant sign, doing manually what city council members refuse to even consider: giving drivers a way to opt out. That's the whole scandal in one image. A private company's cameras are logging every plate that passes, building searchable profiles across jurisdictions, and the only "consent" mechanism a citizen has is holding up plywood.

Cities keep leaning on the murder-case anecdotes to justify blanket coverage, but that argument does a lot of work to avoid the actual question: why is a for-profit vendor allowed to track law-abiding people by default, with no meaningful opt-out, and often little public oversight over how long data is kept or who else gets to query it? Gunn calling this a violation of his constitutional privacy rights isn't hyperbole — it's the plain-language version of what courts are still catching up to.

One retiree with a sign can't cover every intersection, and that's exactly the point. If you want to see how many of these cameras are already watching your own routes, check our map, and if you'd rather push back through your city council than stand roadside all day, our take-action page has the tools to do it.