Mass surveillance: Video surveillance

You can dress anonymously to prevent an adversary from identifying you from CCTV footage.

You can make anonymous purchases to prevent an adversary from identifying you from CCTV footage of physical stores.

You can disable surveillance cameras.

When filmed by surveillance cameras, you can:

• To prevent gait recognition, wear baggy clothing that hide your body shape, use an umbrella or other concealing objects, or drastically change your walking style by adopting a “funny walk”.
• To prevent facial recognition, wear a mask to cover your facial features, and sunglasses or a hat with a low brim to cover your eyes.

You can conduct sensitive conversations away from surveillance cameras to prevent an adversary from recording those conversations with surveillance cameras equipped with microphones.

Before an action, you can identify the location of surveillance cameras at an action site and make plans to avoid them if possible.

You can use a bike instead of any other type of vehicle: compared to other vehicles, a bike is much harder to identify on CCTV footage, especially if its distinguishing features are minimized. For example, you can use a different stolen bike for each action you carry out.

CCTV footage from the arson site showed two people setting fire to the excavator, and one of them burning themselves accidentally.^[1]

CCTV footage from the hospital on the night of the arson showed:

• The license plate of the car that brought Louna to the hospital.
• The faces of the other people in the car.
• One of the people in the car carrying a watering jug. Investigators would later try to find this watering jug during a house raid.

CCTV footage from cameras in several towns was used to try to reconstruct the route of the car that brought Louna to the hospital, and the route Louna took when she left the hospital.^[2]

CCTV footage from a bus allowed investigators to identify the license plate of the motorcycle on which Peppy and Krystal arrived at and left the protest site.^[3]

Five hours after the bombing, Ruslan Siddiqi was walking away from the bombing site when he was filmed by a surveillance camera.^[4] About three weeks later, he encountered a local cop who compared him with a photo from the surveillance camera footage and arrested him.

Immediately after the action, investigators requested CCTV footage from public transportation (buses, train stations, etc.), businesses, home surveillance systems, and municipal cameras, all within an extended perimeter of the action site.^[5] In particular, footage of the interiors of buses appears to have helped identify people traveling to and from the action site.^[6] Investigators also requested footage from highway toll booths, presumably to identify the occupants of known cars traveling on highways to or from the action site.

CCTV footage helped identify a vehicle driven by the person, when they were seen entering a parking lot on foot after a demonstration, and the vehicle was seen leaving the same parking lot a few minutes later.^[7]

Soon after the April sabotage, investigators requested CCTV footage from businesses and municipal cameras, and lists of vehicles from automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and speed cameras, all within an extended perimeter of the sabotage site.^[8]

Public CCTV footage was extensively used by investigators to reconstruct the movements of Mónica and Francisco before and during the actions, despite the mitigations they took (taking taxis, changing clothes, wearing disguises).^[9]

On the evening leading up to the arrest, one of the people — while being followed by cops — stopped at a gas station and was seen by the station's video surveillance cameras buying gas and filling a gas can.^[10] The cops obtained the CCTV footage the next morning.

Investigators used footage from the demonstrations, recorded by surveillance cameras and police forces, to:^[2]

• Identify a person who was only partially masked, with their eyes, glasses, and forehead visible.
• Match a person who looked pregnant based on their belly, seen in a demonstration, to a person who gave birth a few months later.

Two of the people were allegedly seen on video surveillance leaving a store where investigators believe the envelopes used to prepare the parcel bombs were purchased.^[11]

Public CCTV footage was used by investigators to reconstruct the movements of Mónica and Francisco before and after the action.^[12] This showed that they were near the action site shortly before the explosion of the device.