What appear to be cameras hidden in unmarked boxes have appeared on utility poles outside the Atlanta homes of some people connected to the movement against the police training center known as “Cop City”, raising constitutional concerns, the Guardian has learned.
The development comes after several years of ongoing state surveillance of some Atlanta residents opposed to the $109m training center, including officers following people in patrol cars and blasting sirens outside bedroom windows at 3am.
At the same time, the use of hidden cameras “categorically poses a new threat to privacy”, said Nathan Freed Wessler, of the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the ACLU. “The surreptitiousness is pernicious.”
The boxes are attached to utility poles about 30ft (9 meters) off the ground. They don’t bear the names of any law enforcement agency and have a clear plastic or glass panel. What appears to be a camera lens can be clearly seen through the panel in photos of one of them.
Three of the cameras are pointed at homes that Atlanta police, the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, jointly raided in February of last year, in search of evidence behind the arsons of police motorcycles. One camera is pointed at a cultural and social center.
Georgia Power, the utility company that owns the poles, told the Guardian the boxes are not their property. The FBI and the ATF denied any knowledge of them.
Atlanta police spokesperson Chata M Spikes initially responded to an email query from the Guardian by saying: “I’m not sure which boxes you’re referring to.” After receiving a follow-up email with a photo of one of them attached, the agency said: “Due to possible on-going investigations, we are unable to answer any questions related to your inquiry.”
The training center is soon to open on a 171-acre (70-hectare) footprint in a forest south-east of Atlanta. Opposition to the project has come from a wide range of local and national organizations and is centered on concerns such as unchecked police militarization and clearing forests in an era of climate crisis. Atlanta police say the center is needed for “world-class” training.
The movement against the center dates to 2021 and has included the destruction of construction equipment and the arson of Atlanta police motorcycles and a car. It has also included efforts to mount a referendum on the training center that gathered the signatures of more than 100,000 voters, historic levels of public participation in city council meetings, lawsuits, numerous protests, and national environmental and civil rights groups.
The three houses with cameras outside were the subjects of a pre-dawn raid a year ago during which one person was arrested and charged with first-degree arson in connection with the burning of police motorcycles in 2023. Police had offered a $200,000 reward and put up 450 billboards across the country around the same time as the raid. A trial is forthcoming.
One camera also points at a self-described “free social center” with a community library that holds events drawing hundreds of Atlantans, including readings, concerts and food giveaways.
Residents of one of the houses first noticed the cameras in the fall. Wessler, at the ACLU, noted that the highest courts of Massachusetts, Colorado and South Dakota have ruled that long-term utility pole camera surveillance of someone’s home requires a warrant. But other federal courts of appeals and state supreme courts have been divided on the question of whether such surveillance falls under the fourth amendment, which protects people from “unreasonable searches”.
The supreme court declined to take up the issue in 2023, leaving “people across the country … vulnerable to law enforcement’s claim of unfettered authority to surveil any of us at our homes, for as long as they wish, with no judicial oversight”, said Wessler at the time.
A non-profit organization grouping together several utility companies recently published an article on its website advising them to “always require search warrants” and what the author, an attorney, called “licensing agreements”, when police seek to use utility poles for surveillance.
John Kraft, Georgia Power’s media relations manager, did not reply to repeated requests about whether a search warrant was given to the company, or if it created a licensing agreement. Atlanta police also didn’t respond to the same query. A person on the legal support team of the arrestee in last year’s raid said the police had not produced a search warrant authorizing the surveillance.
This is not the first time police have hidden cameras in boxes on utility poles for surveillance of activists. Activists in Memphis, Tennessee, fighting for a $15 minimum wage and labor rights discovered a similar setup in 2020. One of them climbed the utility pole, opened the box, took pictures of the camera inside and posted them on social media.
Press coverage followed, and the box was taken down the next day.
A person who lives at one of the houses being surveilled and who preferred anonymity for safety concerns said the camera pointing at her house is “humiliating”, an extension of what she felt after the raid, when police found a nude Polaroid of her and left it displayed on a table. The Guardian reported on the incident. “They displayed a naked photo of me … and now there’s a camera looking into the house,” she said. “It’s creepy.”
Meanwhile, Mallory, a volunteer who helps run the cultural center and declined to offer her full name due to safety concerns, said she “feels a sense of fear when I’m going to open the community library, or clean up after a show … There’s this dynamic – the camera is hidden, but you know it’s there.”
Wessler said that the camera “pointing at a public space runs into not just fourth amendment concerns, but first amendment, right to association concerns. To automate the surveillance of lots of innocent people … is really corrosive, and should be unsettling.”
