Congratulations to Ben McAdams!
And why I’ve got the blue wave blues

Comrades, I’m not sure about you, but I had a great night on November 3rd.

First off, I’d like to congratulate my comrade, Ben McAdams, on being elected to the Illinois Senate District 24. And I would like to thank every single member of WSIL DSA, campaign staff, and our community allies for their excellent work on this campaign. Roses for you, comrade.

We’d have no people power without you.

As a Senator, Ben will work to advance a socialist agenda in Springfield. He will fight to tax billionaires and corporations to fully fund SNAP, Medicaid, and other services working people need. He will fight to reign in healthcare corporations profiting from denying care. He will invest in public safety by funding restorative justice rather than mass incarceration. He supports WSILDSA’s endorsed bills: the POWER Act to regulate data centers and the Human Rights Advocacy Protection Act to end Illinois’ complicity in the Gaza genocide. In short: this is a massive victory for working people in SD-24 and all of Illinois.

It was so special to spend election night with my comrades. The energy that night was electric as friends and comrades watched results come in, not only from progressives in Illinois and Michigan but also democrats in Texas and Mississippi. But I can’t help but have mixed emotions about our blue wave.

I’m DSA because the Democratic Party isn’t enough.

It’s good for us to celebrate the win in SD24. We put in the elbow grease for it. But a blue wave in and of itself isn’t worth a toast. Seeing people celebrate the Democratic Party is why I’ve got the blue wave blues.

It’s been a tension over the last 10 years: as fascism advances in the USA, to what extent are bland, uninspiring centrist Democrats useful to stop the overt racism and the pedophilic-capitalist class character of the Republican party?

We want to both stop the worst injustices currently happening and win the world we need. In some sense, these two aims are not actually in conflict. Socialists with vision are the best candidates to defeat Republicans (SD-24 proves it). And while Republicans are responsible for some of the most drastic injustices (e.g. gutting of social safety nets, ICE terror, and the war with Iran), Democrats also have proven willing to serve corporate donors before constituents (e.g. Gaza, or the failure to pass Medicare for All and the PRO Act).

The ultimate issue is that the Democratic Party remains largely captured by the same capitalists who finance the Republicans. If you buy both parties, then you don’t need to be worried about vote totals.

Of course, you and I are sweating vote totals because I know there are some who are not bought. It’s easy to see the crest of the blue wave: anyone can google the new makeup of Congress, the Illinois General Assembly, county boards, etc. Working people are being carried by that wave too – Ben McAdams is just one example. But it’s much harder to see how far we rose.

In DSA, we take endorsements seriously. We are very aware of the challenges of being a socialist in a government that has been captured by corporate interest via lobbyists, bought politicians, or Democratic party bosses, and legislation hostile to democratized control of the economy. That’s why we show up with people-power to support our candidates so that they remember to pick up our calls and co-govern with us once elected. We call it “the DSA difference.” So let’s look at the results.

On Tuesday, the DSA elected 11 DSA-endorsed socialists to Congress. We elected Ben McAdams and 52 other DSA-endorsed socialists to state legislatures. We passed 29 DSA-endorsed statewide ballot initiatives and 10 DSA-endorsed local ballot initiatives. And we elected 45 DSA-endorsed candidates to local office.

DSA isn’t the only movement organization. A lot of progressives put blood, sweat, and tears into electing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, for instance. But the difference is that rather than being funded by big donors and led by staff, DSA is a bottom-up, democratic organization of working people. DSA knows that collective ownership of the economy is what we need and we’re not afraid to be called socialists. It’s what we are.

GOP and Democratic politicians are accountable to their donors. But when politicians are accountable to DSA, they are accountable to the working class itself! That may seem to be a bold claim, but DSA is this country’s largest organization truly and wholly owned by working people and explicitly socialist. Each time a member joins, we make good on the claim to represent the American working class.

Do it today at DSAusa.org/join

However, the issue is that the most visible divide in politics is between the old parties, which as we know is a false binary. In order to truly pave the way for legible, mass politics there must be a truly proletarian party wholly owned by working people. I believe DSA is the kernel of that party. But of course, the old parties jealously guard ballot access and benefit from first-past the post. Currently, DSA functions with one foot in and one foot out of the Democratic Party. We call this the “party surrogate.” We run on the Democratic ballot line. We use Democratic Party software (Votebuilder). We court Democratic voters.

However, we also function as an independent body. We allocate our resources according to the will of our members rather than the beck and call of party bosses. And we are developing our own base of voters, donors, staff, candidates, and organizers apart from the party apparatus. This process of slow independence-building is known to DSA sickos as “the dirty break.”

The question is: when? When can we be truly independent? My answer is that we must be confident that we will precipitate a national political realignment. One option some of my comrades favor is to realign the Democratic Party into a proletarian party. They say it is the path of least resistance: the Party already has a base of voters, organization, reputation, and expertise. On a practical level, let me point out: just as there is no lever to decisively remove the DSA from the Democratic Party, we have no lever to decisively remove corporate candidates from the Democratic Party. The Party might already have a structure, but the structure that exists is essentially a caucus of elected officials and their hangers-on organizing in their own interest to maintain their positions. That is precisely the opposite of what we need! The Party has a base of voters (and donors), but are they organized to want transformation of the economy and society? Not yet: it is the socialist movement’s work to show them what a transformed society could look like. And as for expertise, the Party has is the “wisdom” of the consultant telling Kamala Harris to campaign with Liz Cheney.

There is another piece of organizing jargon: the prefiguration thesis. Essentially, it’s the idea that the structure of the revolutionary organization must prefigure the structure of the state it aims to create. I aim to build a society owned by working people and controlled democratically, which is why I organize with a democratic organization of working people.

We can be an independent party once we’ve built enough power to be confident in our ability to eclipse one of the existing old parties. I think we will know it’s time when corporate Democrats accelerate reaching across the aisle or fleeing to the Republicans. It may have already begun with Haley Stevens’s flight, but it will take a lot of organizing to precipitate similar conditions nationwide.

Each member builds our pool of collective energy. Each door knocked gets us closer to an electoral win. Each leader developed brings our message to new communities. Each time ICE activity is monitored or a comrade is trained our street power grows. Each candidate elected gets us closer to a majority. And each reform passed chips away at the massive edifice the billionaire capitalist class has arrayed against us. We have a long way to go, but every day the lines of the people move forward.

Congratulations Ben. I’ll toast to the next one. And the next, and the next, and the next, until the world belongs to us. I’ll be seeing you, comrades.

A Critique of Centrist Politics Through the Lens of Disco Elysium

The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don’t really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change -- not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.

This is the text Disco Elysium presents its players with after they have spent nearly an hour-and-a-half of in-game time contemplating centrist politics. The grand end state of the centrist political projects is, as the game states, normalcy. Everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be and better things aren’t possible. Nothing sinister to see here.

Key Art from Disco Elysium from Aleksander Rostov of ZA/UM

Disco Elysium is a role-playing game known for its politics. The player must solve a murder set in a world much like our own, but set in a country that underwent a communist revolution before having its government overthrown by liberal foreign powers. The game can be comedic and over the top in its portrayal of politics and government, but, through those extremes and comedic jabs, we can look at our own world with a fresh perspective. We can take in the game’s critiques, jabs, and embraces of its political factions and use that to better understand our current political climate.

Thought Cabinet Art from Disco Elysium from Aleksander Rostov of ZA/UM

The four political affiliations represented in the game are the Communards, the Ultraliberals, the Fascists, and the Moral International (Moral-Intern for short, the centrists). The game has critiques of all these points of view, and includes optional side quests for all four paths in the Final Cut. Critics of the game’s politics come from across the political spectrum, but most argue that it is too far left, despite its critiques of the Communards, who are depicted in game as a book club that has managed to purity test itself down to two members. Fascists argue that the game’s portrayal of them is too cartoonishly racist, but what is Fascism if not the game’s portrayal of men fearful of competition in the sexual marketplace. Ultraliberals, the game’s stand-in for neoliberals, got their revenge on the game in the most free-market of ways: buying the rights to the game out from under its creators and pushing them out. “Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead,” as stated by the game’s most prominent Ultra, Joyce Messier. But Disco Elysium saves its sharpest sword for the Moral-Intern.

The Moral-Intern is an international organization that claims to uphold humanist values, believing themselves to be the inheritors of the legacy of one of the game’s key religious figures. Their stated values are the preservation of humanity, democracy, and incremental progress. It is the dominant political ideology, governing the game’s setting, Revachol, after having toppled the Communist government that formed there previously. They are the political center, composed of center-left and center-right parties. The Moral Intern are shown to value order, stability, and the status quo above all else. They are also portrayed as frustrating, obstinate, and evasive, much like their real-life counterparts. They are personified in-game by an exasperating bureaucrat known as The Sunday Friend. The Sunday Friend is a witness to key events surrounding the game’s central murder mystery, but only because he was engaging in sex tourism at the time (“The Sunday Friend” being a moniker given to him by a local). When a player asks him about his ideals, they run headfirst into a fortress of obfuscation and talking in circles as if they had asked the most polished real-world Democratic Party operative. Their only consistent beliefs are the rejection of all other factions and the maintenance of inflation at a stable two percent.

Screenshot from Disco Elysium from ZA/UM

So what does it look like when centrists govern? The Moralists came to power by toppling a communist power accused of human rights violations. They did so by indiscriminately bombing a city and invading. They carved the city up and handed zones of control to their member nations. Free market capitalism was imposed on the former commune, and the rich were once again allowed to prey on the poor, making record profits off of cheap labor. Stronger nations carving up the weaker and bourgeois exploitation of the poor are viewed as the natural way of things. Any improvement in conditions must come at a snail’s pace. A police force, the Revachol Citizen’s Militia, was established under the coalition government to keep order. Additionally, the Coalition Government maintains an airship that is constantly hovering over Revachol. “You see, in addition to being an airborne artillery platform, Coalition Warship Archer is also the linchpin of the Coalition’s surveillance and communications infrastructure in Revachol,” The Sunday Friend explains to the player as if a surveillance state with a gun to the head of every citizen were completely normal.

The game takes place in Martinaise, a slum district of Revachol. It was largely destroyed in the overthrow of the previous government and was left in that state as a cruel reminder of their misdeeds. Bullet holes and artillery craters scar the city four decades later. Its citizens are impoverished and regularly turn to drugs and alcohol to escape the harsh realities of their material conditions. The drug problem is so pervasive even the children are portrayed as using and attempting to sell them. Labor actions are met with mercenaries acting as armed strike breakers. The coalition government oversees this all, and even employs the Citizen’s Militia, the peace keeping force that acts as police, but to the centrists, this is all so…normal.

Art from Disco Elysium Mobile by MoonColony from ZA/UM

The player can choose to embrace this centrist worldview. Doing so allows players to internalize the aforementioned “Kingdom of Conscience” thought, which boosts the player’s morale for choosing centrist dialogue options, protecting the player’s frail psyche so long as they defend the politics of doing nothing about our problems. If you dismiss all other worldviews enough times, you earn the achievement “The World’s Most Laughable Centrist,” much to the chagrin of players and streamers that try to play the game without engaging in politics.

Through The Sunday Friend and the laughably centrist dialogue options available to the player, the game is yelling the same message the left has been saying for years: centrists have no values. They claim to be the extremely normal in the face of extremes. They claim the moral high ground by avoiding any moral argument. The status quo is put on a pedestal. They do occasionally pay lip service to their claimed humanist values, but reform comes only incrementally. Minor changes to tax code, toothless policies, and strongly worded letters are all that’s on offer for a struggling working class.

The centrists’ goal is ultimately the maintenance of the status quo, and it affects how they relate to other political ideologies in a variety of ways. Ultraliberals extracting wealth from the working class are perceived as normal, so Centrists give them free reign. Fascists trying to appeal to a sense of tradition, albeit one that never truly existed, are normal to centrists and therefore tolerated, so long as they don’t get too openly violent. The only true threat to the status quo is from the left. The left of the United States and the Communards of Revachol are united in their goal of upturning the status quo and shifting the balance of power—both economic power and political power—back to the workers, so centrists work to silence them and prevent their movements from ever getting off the ground.

Art from Disco Elysium Mobile by MoonColony from ZA/UM

Much like our situation here in the United States pre-Trump era, the workers of Revachol were governed by centrists and preyed upon by Ultra/Neoliberals. Wars, both militaristic and economic, were normalized, but only if it was the dominant power smashing the poor. Troop deployments and arms shipments were normal so long as the victims were poor nonwhites abroad. Economic disparities were normal so long as the victims were poor nonwhites at home, but once that poverty came for whites and nonwhites alike, the working class began clamoring for a solution. Here in the US the working class can’t even turn to labor organizing. Existing trade unions are entrenched in the existing power structures, and they will do nothing to upset the status quo. New labor unions are slow to form and get crushed before they get off the ground by Ultraliberals who refuse to even meet them at the negotiating table. The only solution allowed to develop under Centrist rule was fascism.

With the only existing labor movement firmly in their pocket, US Centrists, faced with no real opposition, have sat back to watch as the US descends into fascism. In the 2024 election, the Democrats tried to sell us normal. Inflation was coming down. The economic situation was fine, we just couldn’t see it. We just had to vote for normal, and normal things would continue to happen. They chose to ignore how much the workers were struggling, but those struggling workers knew their situation was bad and getting worse. The fascists were offering them solutions, mostly by scapegoating nonwhites and social minorities, while the left was being choked by the center. Regardless of what corporate owned media will tell you, the left has not had a foothold in US politics. Anything to the left of total corporate capture is labeled radical and unelectable. So the working class, desperate to escape its current normal, tried to return to a mythical normal of the past.

Key Art from Disco Elysium from Aleksander Rostov of ZA/UM

In the current election cycle, we see the pendulum swinging leftward, but the Centrists are working harder to stop it than they ever did to fight fascism. They see the workers fed up with the way things are and are back at it pitching a return to normality. Vote them in and everything—gas prices, food costs, and genocides—will go right back to normal.

The working class must reject this call back to old norms and dare to build a better world. The old normal, centrist rule by aristocrats who talk in circles about how fine things are, got us into this mess. Persecuting minorities and immigrants has done nothing to address the absurd amount of wealth inequality we’re facing. More tax cuts for the rich are never going to get the workers to prosperity. Spending all the money in the world on the police will never address the issues that lead people to addiction and crime.

Only the left is talking about actual meaningful solutions to our problems. It is gaining traction in the current political climate, but the corporations and their bought-and-paid-for centrist politicians would go back to siding with fascists before they ever consider allowing a leftist movement to come to power. The “Workers Deserve More” platform put forth by the DSA is under constant attack by both mainstream and far right news outlets. It offers a basis for real solutions to our problems instead of the scapegoating of the right and the lip service of the Ultraliberals. As such, it is derided by Ultraliberal-owned media, which gives it air time nearly every morning to rally its viewers against it. A democratic workplace is a utopian fever dream. Public ownership of the largest corporations would lead to authoritarian communism. A world without a senate full of aristocrats would be anarchy. They want us to believe that better things aren’t possible. These people aren’t your friends.

Key Art from Disco Elysium from Aleksander Rostov of ZA/UM

It is time for the working class to build power on the left. The fight is uphill and against giants, but the contradictions of capital have exposed their weaknesses. Now is the time to join a leftist organization in your area. Every politician that tries to tell you that better things aren’t possible should have a working-class primary opponent. The Fascists will scream at you for siding with minorities. The Ultraliberals will look down on you for daring to dream. The Moralists will call you an extremist for engaging with politics at all.

But these people aren’t your friends, and they’re certainly not your comrades.

Get involved today.

The easiest way is to join the DSA at DSAUSA.org/join and get plugged in with the people fighting against normal for a better world.

In a recent Wheaton Record piece, Illinois 6th district congressman Sean Casten (D-Downers Grove) is quoted as saying: “If the house is broken, do you call an arsonist or a carpenter? MAGA and the DSA are arsonists. To repair the institution, you need people of good character in office.”

Erica Bray-Parker (D) of Wheaton, whose campaign is the main subject of the article, is a solid candidate. Bray-Parker will certainly be a sea change from the 47th house district’s current representative. I’ve spoken with Bray-Parker personally about her support for important changes that Illinoisans need to afford life, such as taxing the rich and reforming Medicaid to end the corporate profit incentive. The Wheaton Record is just doing its duty of reporting, so my response is not to their writers or editors. I’d like to talk to Casten directly.

Sean, you call us arsonists. But buddy, you smell like gasoline.

The comparison between the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and MAGA is already becoming a tired trope among our country’s least-visionary political leaders. They see two political movements with mass membership and visions for change, and cry out for a return to “normalcy” so they can have brunch without having to reckon with the harm their complacency causes.

But the house is on fire.

MAGA is the current symptom of an ongoing political crisis. Americans are squeezed between rising costs, stagnating pay, and a collapsing opportunity structure. MAGA blames this on all the people our most bigoted neighbors already hate and gives them permission to broadcast it. MAGA is a slogan emblazoned on red hats, a piece of merch to signify in-group belonging and funnel money directly to our corrupt president. Obviously, immigrants, queer people, DEI, “critical race theory,” or whatever their latest complaint is, have nothing to do with the affordability crisis. The real causes include MAGA projects like ICE terror, a costly and pointless war with Iran, and historic cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

DSA, on the other hand, is dedicated to transforming our society to win what working people really need. Our national program, Workers Deserve More, calls for things like: 1) universal housing, healthcare, and childcare, 2) a Green New Deal with a federal jobs guarantee, and 3) an end to the US war machine so we can invest in public goods. Locally, our DSA chapter campaigns against Flock cameras and data centers that Big Tech pushes to pollute our communities and surveil us all.

So why is the house burning?

Fox7 Austin

Because politicians like Sean Casten are bought and paid for by the same corporate interests that prop up MAGA. Remember Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Sundar Pichai (Alphabet) behind Trump at his inauguration? Sean Casten has also taken money from Alphabet, SpaceX, and Amazon. These companies make up a part of the $649,250 in corporate money he’s taken in his career.

Healthcare costs are Americans’ number one cost of living concern: 27% of Americans polled said they were “very” worried about healthcare costs, ahead of concerns about gas prices, rent, or groceries. MAGA has a “Make America Healthy Again” wing, which seems mostly focused on selling quack remedies and leaving our most vulnerable behind to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the second Trump Administration’s headliner legislation, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” slashes Medicaid spending and creates new barriers to coverage. Illinois stands to lose billions of dollars, and the full damage has yet to be calculated. Nearly 18% of the American economy is in the healthcare sector, largely because our insurance model creates a massive private bureaucracy at insurance companies and hospitals. We in DSA call for universal healthcare to slash that private bureaucracy and bring that sector of the economy into accountable, public ownership. Meanwhile Sean Casten has not sponsored the most recent Medicare for All proposal.

Is that what you call carpentry, Sean?

We in the DSA, call for an end to the US war machine, meanwhile Sean Casten boasts about his votes to fund Israeli military activity and refuses to discuss his support for genocide with his constituents. Even so-called “defensive” military funding enables Israel to spend resources on what must logically be “offense” (read: genocide). His district includes Chicago’s Little Palestine. In Gaza we see the fire. And, you guessed it, in Sean Casten’s FEC filings we see the gasoline: over $200k in donations from AIPAC-aligned funders.

Sean, you’re calling us arsonists (metaphorically) while you fund a (literal) genocide. Make it make sense.

It’s capitalism’s insatiable thirst for exponential profits that have set our country on fire. And it’s the politicians they’ve bought who feed the flames. Casten says we just need politicians with “good character” to fix our problems. How can you have good character when you’re bought and paid for? The solution isn’t to do more of the same – electing Democrats of “good character” who take corporate money is just throwing gasoline on the inferno.

So what do you do if you, like me, live in a house that’s on fire?

There is another way to live besides throwing gasoline. Maybe it’s too late to save the house; there’s been a lot of gasoline poured out. If the house is going to burn, maybe it’s an opportunity to build a new house that shelters all of its occupants. A house that’s really worth saving.

The DSA difference is electing candidates who not only share our values, but are committed members of our organization and are accountable to working people. We do that by building DSA, a democratically-run organization owned by working people’s small-dollar dues rather than corporations or big money funders. Our organization is the largest socialist organization in this country’s history. You can be a part of the change by visiting DSAusa.org/join.

Maxine Wolf is a co-chair of the West Suburban Illinois chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (WSILDSA), covering all of DuPage county and parts of Cook, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties. This piece was ratified by the Central Committee of WSILDSA.

On Sunday, September 13th the members of West Suburban IL Democratic Socialists of America voted to endorse Guillermo Rodriguez for Alderman-At-Large in Aurora, IL.

We are proud to endorse West Suburban IL Democratic Socialist of America member, Guillermo Rodriguez for alderman-at-large in Aurora, Illinois.

Guillermo has been an active cadre member of the chapter for over a year. Guillermo has consistently demonstrated his excellent leadership skills and dedication to the working class. And Guillermo can’t be bought as he’s committed to not taking any Corporate PAC, Shadow PAC, or Special Interest Money.

We are excited to fight alongside Guillermo to achieve affordable sustainable housing, protections for our immigrant neighbors, and passing progressive tax revenues in the city of Aurora.

Smile, You’re On Camera

A deeper discussion about Automatic License Plate Readers

The DSA Against Data Centers campaign has recently decided to add opposition to “automated license plate readers” to its purview. You may have heard of the company Flock, or the acronym “ALPR” recently, as the use, misuse, and destruction of these devices has been in the news a lot lately. For this piece, I would like to give our members an overview of what these devices are, how they are supported politically and economically, and why we as members of the working class and the DSA specifically should oppose their use, especially in their current form.

Photo by Mother Flocker on Unsplash

What is an Automated License Plate Reader? It is a camera connected to a computer vision system that is designed to capture pictures of, and recognize the letters on, license plates. They have been in use for niche applications for a long time—places like parking lots, toll roads, and airports use them for security, access control, and assessing tolls. For the past few years, their use has spread to much more general applications. Increasingly, municipalities will install ALPRs on public roads, typically on their borders and in “high crime” areas, to scan the license plates of every passing car. The justification for this is to help prosecute crimes like vehicle theft or to help track down someone who is on the run.

In practice, these license plate reader networks are mostly used for stalking, of both the ostensibly legal and personal vendetta varieties.

The way the installation of these cameras work is typically that a local police department or sheriff’s office pressures the municipality (who owns or has easement rights on all the land adjacent to all the roads) to spend their money—your money—on these readers, and then the police department gets access from the vendor to the interface that lets them use the readers. One unit of government “owns” it, but a different one uses it.

The largest manufacturer of these cameras is a company called Flock. The second largest vendor is Axon, who you may have heard of before, because they make police body cameras. We’re going to be focusing on Flock in this article because that is what you will typically see in the Chicago suburbs.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Flock cameras are usually, but not always, composed of an oval-shaped camera and a solar panel mounted to a fiberglass pole, all painted black. Inside the camera body is a large lithium polymer battery, the camera optics, and a small computer with a cellular data connection. The camera is constantly recording locally and running basic image recognition. When it sees a license plate, it takes that single frame, or sometimes a short video, and uploads it to Flock’s cloud for further processing. Once in the cloud, the plate is run against databases of stolen vehicles and plates registered to people with active warrants. The datapoint is then stored on Flock’s servers for an amount of time dependent on the jurisdiction. Note that license plates are not the only thing they can snapshot and upload. Flock maintains that their devices cannot track biometric data, but there are instances of cops using Flock cameras to track pedestrians, so I believe they can be configured to alert on a generic human silhouette. At the Socialism Summit, one of the presenters said that “Flock owns the data generated by the cameras” which seems odd to me, you’d think that the data would be “owned” by the municipality that owns the pole, even if flock is holding it on their servers. If it is true, it’s quite alarming.

Now that we understand how these systems work technically, let’s circle back to how they work on a practical level. The main use for these systems by the local PD is flagging people with outstanding warrants. If you’ve ever seen a cop sitting at the edge of town next to one of these readers, they are waiting for someone,anyone, with an outstanding warrant to drive by. They will then pull that person over for a minor traffic violation and take them into custody. Note that the cops are trained to lie to drivers about why they are being pulled over and to omit the license plate hit from their report. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone here why the vast majority of warrants that could get you into a situation like this are bullshit.

The core use for these ALPR systems is to systematize enforcement of laws that very few people are in favor of, and that we as socialists oppose on principle. The systematic use itself is being covered up, as a matter of company and police policy.

Now I hear you asking, “Comrade, you always save the best for last, how could this possibly get any worse?”

Photo by ev on Unsplash

Well, let’s talk about how ICE uses these cameras.

ICE turns the equation on its head. Instead of sitting and waiting for a hit on a stolen car or a bench warrant, ICE feeds lists of immigrants into Flock’s query system and uses it to determine when and where people are the most vulnerable to abduction. Most of the instances where you hear about ICE pulling someone over and dragging them out of their car are powered by license plate reader data. Is this kind of dragnet an illegal search? A violation of your constitutional rights? Yeah, probably, but good luck getting ICE to stop doing it. Is it against Illinois state law for local law enforcement to share that data with ICE? Yeah, definitely, but there are a lot of racist cops in Illinois, and they very often share data even though it’s illegal.

Photo by Corey Young on Unsplash

So how can we fight these? There is the obvious political solution of getting municipalities to cancel their contracts and cut down the cameras. Barring that, municipalities can audit access logs for their camera data to identify cops sharing data illegally. Our DSA Against Data Centers (DADC) campaign is currently working on rolling these points into their campaign.

In addition to getting involved in the DADC campaign, there are several ways to learn more and get more involved. I would encourage everyone to read Unraveled Press’s article “Eyes on the Heartland” (linked below) to understand some of the political and cultural context of these systems. If you are interested in learning more about and documenting the use of Flock in your community, there is a nationwide effort to map out ALPRs called DeFlock.

You might be feeling overwhelmed. After all, these things are in your community, constantly watching you and your friends. I think there are a lot of scenarios in which allowing these cameras to remain functioning could seriously constrain DSA operations in the future. Protecting ourselves against this future requires all of us to step up now.

Further Reading

• https://unraveledpress.com/eyes-on-the-heartland-flock-alpr-illinois-kwame-raoul/
• https://deflock.org/