What do people wear to protests? The "No Kings" protests of Oct. 18, 2025, predominantly featured white people aged from 55 to 70+. About 70% were comprised of women, and although they sometimes wore prescription glasses, most were without facial coverings or glasses. They were mostly liberal but ordinary, and they wore ordinary civilian clothes.
But notice that not all protesters are similarly garbed. The regulars in environmental rallies not only often wear dark glasses but also face paint, masks, or props like fake blood. In even harder-core protests, Antifa participants are more likely to wear hoodies, face covers, bandanas, or Guy Fawkes masks (popularized by the movie V for Vendetta). This style is often called “black bloc,” where people dress in black and cover their faces in order to thwart surveillance and convey the impression of belonging to a quasi-military force: “Black clothing, ski masks, scarves, sunglasses, motorcycle helmets with padding, or other face-concealing and face-protecting items. The clothing is used to conceal wearers' identities from both the police and politically opposing organizations by making it difficult to distinguish between participants.”
It’s not style. A lot of thought went into this seemingly simple getup. Let's examine it.
The base layer is the simple hat and sunglasses combo. Studies on facial recognition show that blocking the upper face (eyes and hair) confuses algorithms and human observers more than lower-face changes. “Studies with static faces find that upper face halves are more easily recognized than lower face halves—an upper-face advantage.” The next step up is wearing patterned clothing or accessories with infrared-blocking or disruptive designs as a way to hamper facial recognition cameras. The science behind it is called Computer Vision Dazzle.”Computer vision dazzle, also known as CV dazzle, dazzle makeup, or anti-surveillance makeup, is a type of camouflage used to hamper facial recognition software, inspired by dazzle camouflage used by vehicles such as ships and planes.” Thus, the keffiyeh is not just a fashion statement. It serves both a symbolic and tactical purpose.
These mods displace the apparent location of facial features, hampering surveillance camera algorithms. Since the cameras themselves often communicate with the network using wireless signals, they can also be jammed. This is often illegal, but if you’re a revolutionary working to overthrow the white settler society, will that stop you? It is possible to blind a security camera with flashlights, lasers, IR sources, and wi-fi jammers, to name only a few countersurveillance tools. Once you grasp this principle, then headlines like this become completely intelligible. “Emergency flights diverted from Portland hospital amid ‘laser party’ threats at ICE facility":
A call to shine laser lights into the sky in an effort to disrupt federal helicopters flying over South Portland has prompted serious safety concerns and forced a key trauma hospital to reroute air ambulances. The online flyer, posted on the homepage of Rose City Counter-Info, a self-described “anarchist counter-info platform in so-called Portland, Oregon,” encourages participants to take part in a “laser tag” event aimed at federal aircraft.
The post urges individuals to mask up, coordinate with others, and take steps to avoid identification – including cleaning laser pointers with alcohol, wearing gloves, and removing potential DNA traces before disposal.
It’s not just appearances or destructive vandalism but tactics. But it’s insufficient to conceal your face. It’s even more important to hide your phone signals. Cell phones lead right back to the owner. So militants wrap their phones in many layers of aluminum foil (with no gaps) to partially disrupt police tracking by blocking radio signals. Using a dedicated Faraday cage or carrying a burner phone is even better. Nor do they neglect the old-fashioned physical precautions to conceal origin and destination. They travel with trusted allies in unmarked vehicles (no ride-sharing apps like Uber, which log GPS data), arrive via busy public spaces to merge with non-protesters, reducing the chance of being singled out on CCTV, and leave in groups, dispersing gradually to avoid tailing. They use only cash to pay for movement. There’s a lot more to being a real protester than showing up.
Surely all these precautions will prevent the stupid police from identifying the ringleaders of a militant organization like Antifa. But history suggests that’s just what the cops want the militants to think. The cops want you to show up, confident in your Computer Vision Dazzle. In the mid-20th century, the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), running from 1956 to 1971, explicitly encouraged activities, meetings, and even conspiracies among perceived radical or dissident groups from the Black Panther Party to the Ku Klux Klan to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" these groups. Rallies and secret meetings were opportunities for the cops to infiltrate the radicals, putting anonymity, masks, and disruptive camouflage to work against the radicals themselves. Why is ICE focusing on places like Portland or Chicago? They’re bait to draw out Antifa, just as during the 2020 George Floyd protests, police departments nationwide deployed undercover officers to blend into crowds and gather leads on "agitators" or extremists.
This possibility puts the apparent tolerance of many Western governments for pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas demonstrations into a fresh perspective. The logic of infiltration encourages public security agencies to paradoxically clamp down on groups they are not interested in (like Jewish lawyers) and encourage disinhibition in groups they are interested in. So two-tier policing is probably real, but not necessarily for the reason you think. The protest game is far from a spontaneous activity. The recent No Kings rallies were funded in part by the Open Society Foundation, Tides, and many other organizations. And they were surveilled by a plethora of agencies. Underneath the seeming chaos apparent to onlookers was structure. In many ways, it is a battlefield in which two sides meet and actually wear uniforms and move tactically in the manner of opposing armies. If, like the elderly white protesters imagine, it is all a spontaneous affair arranged on the spur of the moment, then they still have a lot to learn.
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