Skip to content
Tax Strike Tactics

Destroy the Apparatus of Taxation

Tax collectors rely on tools, and, increasingly, on computerized automation. Disabling these tools can strike a blow against the tax bureaucracy.

Example Traffic Cameras and Parking Meters

Disabling speed-trap cameras has become almost a sport. I’ve seen video footage of people disguised in Santa suits temporarily disabling cameras by wrapping them in colorful gift boxes, in broad daylight, as if they were putting up a municipal holiday display.

Play

Others have used stickers, fire, spray paint, Silly String, cardboard, bags, power tools, slingshots, baseball bats, duct tape, burning tires, tarps, socks, firearms, blankets, wire-clippers, glue, angle-grinders, explosives, tar-and-feathers, tractors, paving stones, pick-axes, trash cans, hammers, packing tape, hay bales, tire irons, bubble wrap, vehicle collisions, crowbars, spray-foam insulation…

Play

…and umbrellas to destroy or disable the cameras.

Play

In some areas authorities have had to install a second set of surveillance cameras to keep an eye on their speed cameras because they get vandalized so frequently.

During the gilets jaunes protests of 2018, the pace of speed camera destruction rose considerably. One site that was tracking reports noted 200 cameras disabled over the course of a single weekend. By Spring 2019, roughly three-quarters of France’s speed cameras had been attacked, causing the government to lose around €660 million in expected ticket revenue, in addition to the costs of repairing or replacing the cameras. Eventually, the government stopped trying to repair vandalized cameras, since they would be put out of service again so rapidly that it was not cost-effective to do so. The variety of methods used, even in the same area—with attackers sometimes destroying or further-damaging radars that had already been taken out of service by other methods—suggests that these attacks were relatively spontaneous and unorganized, and that they attracted many practitioners.

In one amusing example, French provacateur Rémi Gaillard converted a traffic ticket camera radar gun into a pose-with-Santa photo booth by dressing up as Saint Nicholas and setting up a chair in front of the camera so that it would take pictures of him rather than of license plates. In another, a family held a picnic at one of the cameras, taking turns to stand in front of the lens to obstruct it. One French traffic radar post was pried off its mounting and discarded, and then replaced by a large painted billboard of a rat, labeled (wait for it) “rat d’art.”

Play

(It’s worth noting that although speed cameras are ostensibly designed to deter infractions of traffic safety laws, governments often use them as pure revenue raisers. Some have been caught manipulating speed limits and the timing of traffic lights in a way that degrades safety but increases the anticipated revenue from the cameras.)

For a while there was a semi-organized movement in Chicago to make parking meters unusable—smashing them, disassembling them, making them unreadable with spray-paint, stuffing them with pennies, jamming them with glue or expanding foam, or removing them entirely. Vandals gleefully swapped tales of parking meter destruction on TheExpiredMeter.com.

Example “Robin Hoods” and “Parking Fairies”

Creative activists from Keene, New Hampshire, formed a group called “Robin Hood of Keene.” They shadowed parking enforcement officers on their rounds and quickly filled expired meters before the enforcers could reach them to write out tickets.

Members of the group place cards under windshield wipers that read, “Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king’s tariffs, [signed] Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Please consider paying it forward,” and include an address where donations can be sent.

In 2013, the city, alleging that the Robin Hooders have “repeatedly and intentionally taunted, interfered with, harassed, and intimidated” the meter officers, filed for a restraining order against the group. The activists insisted that this had nothing to do with any intimidation or harassment on their part, but with the city’s loss of revenue from the thousands of parking tickets the group prevented.

In the filing, parking enforcement officer Linda Desruisseaux said, “Besides following me, crowding around me, making video recordings of my activities, and placing coins in expired meters to prevent me from writing tickets, these individuals repeatedly taunt and harass me, asking why I am stealing peoples’ money and telling me to get another job… In particular, Graham Colson likes to taunt me by saying, ‘Linda, guess what you’re not going to do today—write tickets.’… The taunting and harassment tends to get worse when there is a group, as they try to one-up each other at my expense.”

A court ruled that the Robin Hoods were exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and that the city could not proceed with its suit. The city appealed all the way to the state supreme court, but failed to convince any of those justices to take their side.

A similar group in Anchorage, Alaska dressed up in frilly skirts and strap-on wings, calling themselves the “parking fairies,” and used donated pocket change to top up expired parking meters. They were protesting against a Parking Authority that aggressively ticketed people for every offence they could. The fairies got so many donations from furious drivers that they were able to purchase and refurbish an old “meter maid” patrol vehicle to help them do their rounds. As a result, the parking authority collected $100,000 fewer fines than they had the previous year.

Examples Toll-Booths

During the sixteen months of the Rebecca Riots in Wales, there were over a hundred attacks on toll-houses and toll-gates.

During this period, all the gates and bars in the Whitland, Tivyside, and Brechfa Trusts were destroyed. Two gates only out of the twenty-one survived in the Three Commotts Trust, whilst between seventy and eighty gates out of about one hundred and twenty were destroyed in Carmarthenshire. Only nine were left standing out of twenty-two in Cardiganshire.

Here is one description of how the destruction was carried out:

The secret was well kept, no sign of the time and place of the meditated descent was allowed to transpire. All was still and undisturbed in the vicinity of the doomed toll-gate, until a wild concert of horns and guns in the dead of night and the clatter of horses’ hoofs, announced to the startled toll-keeper his “occupation gone.” With soldier-like promptitude and decision, the work was commenced; no idle parleying, no irrelevant desire of plunder or revenge divided their attention or embroiled their proceedings. They came to destroy the turnpike and they did it as fast as saws, and pickaxes, and strong arms could accomplish the task.

No elfish troop at their pranks of mischief ever worked so deftly beneath the moonlight; stroke after stroke was plied unceasingly, until in a space which might be reckoned by minutes from the time when the first wild notes of their rebel music had heralded the attack, the stalwart oak posts were sawn asunder at their base, the strong gate was in billets, and the substantial little dwelling, in which not half an hour before the collector and his family were quietly slumbering, had become a shapeless pile of stones or brick-bats at the wayside.

Men and boys with axes, two in womens’s clothing, one on horseback, attack a wooden gate.

Rebecca and her daughters

When the Rebeccaites attacked the Scleddy turnpike-gate, they “broke the gates, posts, walls, and toll-boards into pieces so small that in the morning there was not a piece of the timber larger than would make matches.”

Toll-booth destruction was also part of the riots in Naples in 1647: “toll-booths throughout the town were demolished; the mob went from one gate to another. Everywhere the toll-gatherers had escaped—nobody thought of making any resistance…”

Toll-booth attacks were also part of the more recent “won’t pay” movement in Greece. Resisters there mobbed highway toll plazas, raising the bars and waving cars through.

Play

The Bonnets Rouges of 2013 destroyed most of the roadside speed cameras in Brittany, along with so many of the “ecotaxe” gantries that the government was forced to abandon that new tax.

Example Irish Water Charge Strike

In order for the government to tax water delivery as it hoped, it first needed to install residential water meters. Activists with Bray Water Meter Watch created an alert system that people could use to report sightings of utility workers installing the meters. Then activists would deploy on-site and interfere with the work.

On one occasion they captured two junction boxes that workers intended to install. They held the boxes hostage until the workers reinstalled the old, unmetered stopcocks and repaired the torn-up sidewalk.

A local politician produced a video tutorial showing people how they could uninstall and bypass any water tax meter installed at their homes:

Play

Examples Miscellany

Danny Burns reports that during the poll tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, “it was widely reported that Anti-Poll Tax activists had managed to put a bug into the computer, which randomly wiped out every sixth record on the register. The virus story was never proven. However, a month before it was mentioned in the newspapers, its effects were accurately described to two Anti-Poll Tax activists by two computer hackers one of whom had worked for Lothian Regional Council and had been sacked.”

In Anjou during the French Revolution resisters seized the tax clerks’ horses and sold them at auction. In Limoux they invaded the homes of tax officials and dumped their registers and office furniture in the river. In Touraine no sooner were the new tax rolls published but resisters rose up, forced the officials to surrender them, and tore them to pieces. In Creuse, as the clerk began to read the latest tax roll, “the women spring upon him, seize the tax-roll, and ‘tear it up with countless imprecations.’ ”

When the Internal Revenue Service seized tax resister Mary Cain’s newspaper, and put a chain and padlock on the front door of its offices, “Mrs. Cain sawed off the lock and chain and mailed them to the Internal Revenue Department with a defiant note.”

Notes and Citations