Outpost's campaigns

• Campaign · petition

  Know Your Cameras: the ALPR transparency petition

  That your municipality publish, on a public page and updated when it changes: every automated license plate reader operating in its jurisdiction, its exact location, who owns it, which agencies can search its data, how long the data is kept, and how many searches were run last quarter and by whom.

  Steps, sources and costs

  Done when: The page goes up and stays current. That is the whole demand — not removal, not a ban, not a resignation. A transparency campaign that quietly wants abolition is lying to its own signers about what they are signing.

  Steps

  1. Find what is already there. The surveillance room's find-it-near-you procedure for license plate readers takes about twenty minutes and gives you your own municipality's actual situation rather than a general one.
  2. Find the renewal date. File a records request for the ALPR contract and its term. The renewal vote is the moment this campaign has leverage, and it is on a calendar.
  3. Sign, and get your block to sign. A petition with two hundred names from one ward lands differently than two thousand from a state.
  4. Take three minutes at the meeting. Read the agenda item number, say the ask in one sentence, say you live there, and stop. The standing-up-in-front-of-people volume teaches exactly this, and the three-minute limit is real.
  5. Publish what happens. Whether they publish or refuse, that outcome belongs in the record — ours and yours.

  What this is: This is a speech petition, not a statutory one. It carries no threshold and compels nothing. Its force is that it arrives at a public meeting with a countable number of your neighbours behind it, at a moment when a contract renewal is on the agenda.

  Who can take part: no criterion

  What it may cost: Twenty minutes to sign and share. About two hours if you take it to a council meeting: reading the agenda, writing three minutes of comment, and sitting through the rest of the meeting. No money. No legal exposure — speaking at a public meeting on a published agenda item is the most protected civic act there is.

  It cannot take a camera down. It asks for a list, and a list is all it asks for.

  What it won’t do 2 more

  • It cannot reach private and homeowner-association cameras, which feed the same networks and never touch a public agenda. That gap is real and this campaign does not close it.
  • It cannot tell you whether the cameras helped. Nobody can, from outside the data — which is a large part of why the list matters.

  How to step away: Stop. There is nothing to cancel, no list you are on with us, and nothing happens if you never come back.

  Sources

  • our own surveillance registry, itself sourcedALPR networks photograph every passing vehicle and make the record searchable, and are deployed by agencies and private associations alike.
  • 5 ILCS 140 (Illinois FOIA), 5 business daysRecords requests reach the contract, and the deadlines are statutory.
  • Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018)Aggregated location surveillance raises a live constitutional question courts are working through now.

• Campaign · petition

  The Renewal Calendar

  That your municipality place every surveillance-technology contract renewal on a published agenda with at least thirty days' notice and a public comment period — rather than on a consent calendar where it passes unread with the sewer bids.

  Steps, sources and costs

  Done when: The notice rule is adopted and followed for one full cycle.

  Steps

  1. Read one month of your city's agendas and find the consent calendar. Count how many items passed on it without discussion.
  2. Check whether any surveillance contract was among them. This is the argument, and it is either there or it is not.
  3. Sign and bring the count to a meeting.
  4. Ask for the notice rule by name, in one sentence.

  What this is: A speech petition asking for a procedural rule. Municipalities set their own agenda procedures and may adopt this by ordinance or by practice.

  Who can take part: no criterion

  What it may cost: An hour to find your city's consent-calendar practice, twenty minutes to sign, three minutes to speak if you choose to.

  It does not change any vote's outcome. It changes whether the vote is visible before it happens.

  What it won’t do 1 more

  • It cannot reach purchases made below the threshold that requires a council vote at all, and those thresholds are exactly where quiet purchasing goes.

  How to step away: Stop. Nothing to cancel.

  Sources

  • our own surveillance registry, itself sourced to city recordsMunicipal surveillance contracts commonly renew through routine agenda items, and documented reversals have turned on those votes.
  • 5 ILCS 120 (Illinois Open Meetings Act)State open meetings acts require notice and a public comment opportunity, and set the floor this campaign asks to raise.

The rules every campaign keeps

• Nonviolent, always, with no exception and no wink.
• Every campaign states what specifically would end it.
• Every factual claim about a named organization or official carries a source a reader can open — a filing, a docket, an audit, a published record.
• We report the record and name the demand.
• No campaign promises it will work.
• Every campaign states the real cost of participating in time, money and risk — including legal risk — before it asks for anything.
• No campaign recruits, tracks, or scores a minor.
• Every campaign states plainly which of its steps are legally protected activity and which carry exposure — and routes anything at real stakes to a lawyer rather than to us.
• Every campaign says how to stop being part of it, and leaving costs a person nothing — no streak lost, no standing dinged, no message.
• When a campaign of ours turns out to be wrong about a fact, the correction goes on the campaign itself with the date, and the campaign is not quietly deleted.