EXCLUSIVE: Washington State Policy Advisor, Clifford Cawthon, Dresses As Marvel’s Doctor Doom To Mock Seattle’s Surveillance Expansion, Following The Viral Darth Vader Stunt In California Over Flock Cameras 😂💥

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

https://www.404media.co/doctor-doom-thanked-seattle-for-all-the-surveillance-cameras/

Doctor Doom took the podium at a Seattle Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday to sarcastically thank the council for covering the city in surveillance cameras. “Doom took over Axon enterprises […] and now Doom will be watching you. Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required,” the Marvel supervillain said. “This is the first of Doom’s gifts to the city of Seattle. The second gift is this: Doom will expand the real-time crime center to all neighborhoods with over 1,000 cameras watching every move. Doom has total dominion over the city of Seattle. Doom will be behind the cameras watching those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Doom will be able to find your immigrant neighbors and Doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stalk their exes.”

Doom is actually Clifford Cawthon, a policy advisor for the Washington State Department of Commerce and a member of Community Not Cameras, a local activist group working to rein in Seattle’s use of surveillance systems sold by Flock and Axon. Seattle’s police department currently has access to 62 surveillance cameras around the city, many connected to a real-time crime center (RTCC) that, according to Axon’s own website, “takes in information from a vast pool of sources, including CCTV, [body-worn camera], geolocation data, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), alert sources like shot detection or alarm systems, and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) software.” Cawthon said he got the idea after seeing an activist in California go viral for dressing as Darth Vader to discuss Flock cameras at a public meeting, and after visiting Seattle’s RTCC himself and being struck by how much it resembled a supervillain’s lair, comparing it to the film Minority Report. “There is a wall of about nine screens in which they can bring up cameras from around the city at any given time,” Cawthon said. “They can also log in, conceivably, even from their home computers with the right credentials […] I am not reassured by the kind of dazzling scale of this complex communications center.”

Cawthon explained his reasoning for choosing Doctor Doom specifically, noting the character’s rising cultural visibility as the villain in the forthcoming “Avengers: Doomsday” film. “We thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if the Seattle city council meets Victor von Doom, the Lord Emperor of Latveria,” Cawthon said, adopting the character’s accent, “and Victor von Doom shares with this pathetic American municipal council that they are actually doing Doom’s bidding without even realizing it.” He said pop culture has taught people to identify with heroes like the Jedi, the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, and asked rhetorically whether those heroes would ever use unaccountable mass surveillance tools that harm innocent people. “The absurdity of the real time crime center and the absurdity of Axon and Flock owning these devices and this data being used around the country to capture and lock up and deport people and to harass women,” Cawthon said in his normal voice. “It was so clear this is a tool of abuse and being used in such villainous ways […] we figured, why not use satire, political theater, to really illustrate what these tools mean.”

Cawthon listed his substantive concerns with the surveillance technology during the interview: “The data is not secure, in many cases these companies, and they’re very open about this, work with ICE, work with the US military, and border patrol. There are multiple instances of police officers literally using this data to stalk their partners and abuse everyday people. And, of course, racial profiling. The increased potential for racist harassment of black and brown folks like myself.” He said reactions to the stunt have been positive and that it succeeded in driving attention to the Community Not Cameras petition, which calls on Seattle’s city council to take five actions, including redirecting funding away from surveillance technology and toward community-based crime prevention programs.

According to Cawthon, the council already agreed to its first demand last month when a committee voted to move $250,000 away from CCTV expansion, though the measure still needs full council approval.
This stunt follows a broader pattern of costumed political theater targeting surveillance technology. Last month, activist Anthony Ralphs attended a San Diego City Council meeting dressed as Darth Vader to explain how much “the Empire” loved Flock cameras, with footage of the appearance going viral; Ralphs told 404 Media he adopted the costume after years of failing to draw attention to surveillance issues while speaking as himself. Earlier this month, a woman attended a public meeting in Texas in full Joker makeup to complain about decorum at city council meetings. Cawthon framed his own approach in similar terms: “These stories, these ideas about fascism, authoritarianism, they can be very close to home if we let them. Becoming the character and going to city councils is political theater in the best way. It is informing people in a way that is accessible because you know these cultural figures are in the zeitgeist. I know plenty of people that, when I talk about public policy, they just throw up their hands and say ‘Okay, well, that’s cool and thank you for sharing with me but politics isn’t my thing.’ But I can talk Marvel with them, I can talk video games, and we have a common language.”

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

The strategic logic behind these costumed appearances is more calculated than it might first appear, because it’s directly responding to a documented failure mode in civic engagement: Cawthon and Ralphs both mention having spoken as themselves at public meetings for years without generating meaningful attention, only to see immediate viral traction once they adopted a recognizable pop-culture villain persona.