What a Small Texas Town’s Rebellion Against Surveillance Tells Us About the National Appeal of Surveillance Reform

​We don’t condone vandalism. But we have to admit that a recent event in the Texas Hill Country town of Bandera showed a flash of the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, or, perhaps more appropriately, of the settlers in the East Texas town of Gonzales who, in 1835, cried “Come and Take It!” while firing their small brass cannon at the Mexican Army.

We’re talking about the repeated efforts of the Bandera city council to install eight AI-enhanced license plate readers on poles around the town, only to have local residents use saws to cut the poles in half and take down the cameras. After several rounds of this rebellion, the city council finally gave up and ended its contract with Flock Safety, a company that is building a national network of cameras that track cars and store the daily movements of millions of Americans.

Brian McManus chronicles this contest of wills in Courier Texas.

“Bandera is the cowboy capital of the world,” one resident told McManus. “We don’t need to implement mass government surveillance in our town.”

McManus reports that Bandera has a lower crime rate than both the Texas and national averages. Banderans just didn’t like the idea of “ordinary people going about their ordinary lives in a town where everybody already knows everybody.”

There is one aspect of this story that touches on something of national significance. McManus writes:

“This was not a left-versus-right argument. It was rooted in community and the instinct toward personal liberty and suspicion of government overreach that defines much of rural Texas political identity. The irony that a surveillance state program backed by Republican state grant money ran headlong into Republican small-town resistance was not lost on people in the [city council] room.”

While Congress debates surveillance policy, it is clear that national concern about the need to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of the American people cuts across party and ideological lines.

Advocacy for reform amendments to FISA Section 702 comes from Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), as well as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Can you think of any other issue that unites staunch conservatives and stalwart liberals?

All of them and many more are backing measures to keep the government’s hands off Americans’ personal data without warrants, as the Constitution requires.
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They might agree with one Bandera resident who told McManus that surveillance “just doesn’t pass the vibe check.” Neither does the federal government’s warrantless collection and inspection of Americans’ personal data.

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