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The Field Guide

The Lensbreaker’s Field Guide — compiled edition

THE LENSBREAKER'S FIELD GUIDE

by Tom Fairbanks

Preface

This is a field guide for the patient, precise disabling of the machines conducting warrantless mass surveillance in our communities. This advice is painstakingly thorough. Maybe you can get away with not doing it. But I’m putting it here because I don’t want you to get caught.

The will of the people is overwhelmingly clear. We do not want mass surveillance. We do not want our patterns of life harvested for corporate profit. We do not want to be subject to dystopian control. Yet our will is being trampled - our protests repeatedly ignored by countless police departments and politicians working secretively with nefarious for-profit tech companies.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes clear that the system designed to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - that system meant to protect us from unreasonable search and seizure - has been invaded by a foreign pathogen, the people must act as the body politic’s immune system: to identify, isolate, and destroy the infected parts before they spread.

Fighting in the day - in city councils and at protests, talking to your neighbors and people you disagree with - is mandatory. But the fight must be taken to the night as well. We strike now, before the right to privacy and ability to be anonymous vanishes altogether.

On Anonymity

Anonymity is the counterbalance to power. It is the failsafe the masses have always possessed when oppressed by the few.

But anonymity is now under threat. For the vast span of human history, there was always sanctuary in the crowd. To move through the world without being cataloged, to hold unobserved thoughts, and to associate in private were fundamental sources of dignity and power. It is only in the last fifty years - a blip in our history - that the advent of modern computing has disrupted this balance. Suddenly, our lives can be reduced to records in a dataset and processed by an AI model. With the right mix of data the patterns of our lives are laid bare. Technology has the potential to extinguish anonymity altogether.

The tech elite have realized. Having conquered industry and politics, they are closing in on absolute knowledge of every individual. Yet one check against their power remains: the coordinated will of the people. If they oppress too boldly, the people can rebel.

Yet rebellion requires secrecy. If those with unlimited resources gain perfect knowledge of every one of us, they can identify and stop dissenters well before they can form into a movement.

This is not a side effect; it is their aim. Internet tracking, purchase histories, secret warrants, and hundreds of thousands of privately owned sensors and cameras now record our lives without consent, oversight, or probable cause. They hide behind the lie that this is for our safety. Behind this lie, they seek control. They seek to extinguish our ability to resist.

Losing anonymity is a one-way door. Once every step we take is captured, logged, and analyzed, we can never don anonymity to take our rights back again. We must not tolerate the death of anonymity. We must use it to strike at its attackers while we still can, acting as the immune system humanity desperately needs.

We should be allowed to have secrets. That is our one eternal dignity - and no system has the right to take it.

Skills

The following skills or attributes are useful for lensbreaking, in rough priority order.

Don’t worry if you don’t have all or many of these. Most are learnable.

Glossary

Because they are long-standing concepts for describing covert missions, many military terms are used throughout this field guide. Others are invented or slightly modified from their original meaning, and so are included below.

baseline: as in, the baseline for the environment in which you’re operating. Includes patterns of sound or light that normally happen where you are. Consciously registering noises and light changes as “part of your baseline” allows for better situational awareness.

change site: A hide site used for the purposes of switching between guises, and possibly leaving behind gear while executing subsequent steps of a mission.

civilian guise: your true identity. How you would dress normally for a given situation, with no effort to disguise who you are.

exfiltration: The withdrawal of personnel from a hostile or dangerous location, often covertly, after a mission is complete.

extraction: The removal of personnel from the general area of operations for a mission, typically by a dedicated pre-established mechanism or plan.

FFP: Final firing position. The last covered/concealed position before engaging a target. Even though the word firing implies projectiles, "FFP" will be used herein to describe all positions from which we strike.

hide site: A concealed, temporary location used for observation, rest, or staging while remaining undetected by enemy forces.

infiltration: Covert or stealthy movement of personnel into a hostile or dangerous location, avoiding detection to reach a target area.

insertion: The act of moving personnel or assets into the general area of operations for a mission, typically by a dedicated pre-established mechanism or plan.

LEO: law enforcement officer.

melee strike: disabling a sensor by direct physical damage; destroying the pole or dismounting it from the pole; painting or smashing.

ranged strike: disabling a sensor by hitting it with a projectile; typically leaves the damaged hardware in place.

stealth guise: aka black bloc. An all black, full body, identity-concealing outfit. Closer to a Halloween costume than a normal outfit with only extremely generic items shared with your normal wardrobe.

street guise: clothing, appearance, and mannerisms such that you don’t look out of place moving around and loitering in public on city streets. Different from your typical clothing with only extremely generic items shared with your normal wardrobe.

PART 1

Anonymous and Undetected

Breaking a surveillance camera is easy. You could, in broad daylight, walk up to a camera on foot, pick up a medium-sized rock, and hurl it at the camera. Repeat this process until it is visibly in pieces. Done.

Yes, it’s true - you’ll have taken out a mass surveillance camera. But you’ll also be easily caught by the authorities if they try at all.

So the challenge is not in the breaking, it’s in the breaking while leaving no possible way for yourself to be caught.

The actual mechanics of your strike matter much less than your ability to do so while disguising your true identity. How to arrive at a target anonymously and then return home remaining anonymous and undetected, this is the primary skill to master from this field guide.

Stealth

The number one way to mask your identity is to not be seen in the first place. This is accomplished through stealth.

What stealth means varies widely depending on who or what you’re trying to evade. Practicing stealth in the wilderness while hunting or as a soldier in enemy territory is very different from that in urban or suburban settings. In the case of lensbreaking, we’re very much in an urban/suburban setting. We strive to evade the notice of pedestrians on the street, motorists in passing vehicles, and residents in surrounding structures.

Stealth is not the same thing as simply hiding behind something. Sometimes stealth involves hiding, but more often it just means being theoretically visible but blending into your surroundings such that you don’t seem out of place.

When actually hiding during stealth, for instance by hunkering down behind a tree or a bush, the goal is rarely to be impossible to see. While being completely hidden breaks your subject’s lines of sight to you - it also breaks your line of sight to them. When hiding you don’t know when the coast is clear or if it’s time to abort hiding and start fleeing. Much better is to stand in the deep dark in a position someone is unlikely to look and watch as your subject passes without noticing you.

This is accomplished through situational awareness, considering what your subject’s threshold of awareness is, and adapting your behavior to fall below that threshold.

Situational Awareness

Your number one advantage in stealth is that you’re looking for them but they don’t know to be looking for you. You notice everyone coming first in order to get first-mover advantage. Anytime you’re on a mission and you get surprised by a person or vehicle of which you were unaware, consider this a failure and try to learn from it. While traversing between locations, your awareness should be spent scanning your environment to be the first to notice others.

Military reconnaissance teams have a practice called S.L.L.S. (pronounced "sills”). It stands for “stop”, “look”, “listen”, and “smell”. It’s a reminder to halt your forward momentum and force your senses to recalibrate before you commit to the next step.

When you stop, you immediately eliminate your own noise, allowing your senses to tune into the environment rather than your movement.

Then you look - scanning near and far for shapes, silhouettes, or glints of light that break the natural pattern of the night. A person walking at night is visible for two or three blocks if you pay attention to the long sight lines down streets. A car’s headlights are even more visible, casting light up to ten blocks, but also bouncing off of every street sign meaning you can use these reflections to know when a car’s headlights have appeared behind you.

You listen for giveaways of incoming human presence: the faint clomp of distant footsteps, car radios, the increasing whooshing road noise of a car that’s getting closer. The corners of street blocks act as sound breaks, meaning that when a car turns a corner nearby there is often a step function increase in the amount of noise you hear. Note also that wearing a hood over your head impairs your hearing. When performing S.L.L.S. it’s a good idea to temporarily drop your hood for the sake of better listening.

Finally, you smell - which in the military context is meant to give early warning of signs of human activity like fires, car fumes, etc. In urban environments these types of signals are less relevant, but smell is a good placeholder for stopping for a second to breathe and be present in the current moment. Take it as a cue to be mindful, and check in fully with what you’re feeling as well - it’s part of your current situation.

By running this quick S.L.L.S. check, you convert your inherent advantage of being unseen into decisive action, ensuring you are the first to detect rather than the one detected. Make a practice of S.L.L.S. whenever you enter a new area of operations or transition into a new phase of your mission.

Threshold of Awareness

It’s not possible for humans to take in and process the entirety of sensory input around us; it would overwhelm our senses. In order to cope, we filter what we pay attention to and notice stuff above a certain level of important. This is our threshold of awareness. When practicing stealth, our goal is to fall below this threshold of awareness in other people. Either by blending into the baseline environment if we are going to be easily visible, or by moving such that we won’t be easily visible in the first place.

Drivers of cars are the easiest to evade because their threshold of awareness is pretty much confined to traffic indicators and what’s in the road directly in front of them. Their night vision is ruined by their headlights, and they have a lot of stuff to pay attention to as it is.

People inside surrounding structures are also fairly easy to evade: we’re operating late at night so no one is likely to be staring out of their window keeping watch. And walls and windows have a strong amount of noise blocking. It’s really just loud noises that have the possibility of waking someone that will draw their attention.

Other pedestrians are trickier. A group of people walking around or loitering together are likely to be making noise and be more focused on each other than their surroundings, but a solo pedestrian can pose problems. They are on the same level as you in terms of night vision and hearing and since they’re alone at night, will have their heads on a swivel scanning for threats.

Adapting Your Behavior

To not be noticed by cars, see them coming first and move to be behind something that will mostly block your silhouette from being seen. Step behind hedges, walk partially up driveways, stand behind tall foliage. You’re not trying to hide all parts of your body in doing this, you’re just making it very likely to have the car pass without noticing you. As long as you’re keeping your awareness up you should have a lot of time before you’re in visibility range. Drivers aren’t scanning the dark sides of the road so it doesn’t take much to evade notice. You can usually sit or stand in a way where you look casual enough if you’re being observed from a different angle. Because of how easy it is to evade cars, and the fact that cars can sometimes be LEO, evasion is usually worth the effort.

For people in structures, it’s mostly about being aware of when you’re making noise and realizing that stealth is broken. Don’t make loud noise until you’re ready to flee immediately after. For smaller noises, do pay attention to single rooms that jut out away from the main mass of a house. These are likely bedrooms so choosing to make noise directly outside those windows is not ideal. Tripping motion-triggered lights are for the most part not an issue when moving in public or close-to-public areas - these go off all the time so the owner develops a blindness to them. If you happen to be trespassing in less trafficked areas, then definitely be aware not to trip these lights. Private security cameras should be avoided - always try to walk past these from as far away as possible. More about these in future chapters.

For pedestrians, the best bet is normally to opt for blending into your surroundings rather than attempting to hide. This is because they’re on fairly equal footing with you in terms of threshold of awareness. Solo pedestrians especially may notice if someone ahead suddenly veers off the sidewalk into some bushes. The last thing you want to do is increase the alertness of people around you by being seen acting suspicious. Better to act as if you belong. Be aloof towards their presence. Sitting down against a fence or pole, stopping to tie your shoe with your back towards them, fiddling with small items in your hands are all good mannerisms to adopt to avoid seeming suspicious. Only go for evasion if you’re confident you’re out of sight in the first place, they don’t seem to be seeing you, and you are confident they’ll pass without noticing.

Dogs

Special note here about dogs. First, to be clear: all dogs are good dogs. Period. But as it pertains to your stealthiness, they’re a major problem. They are S-tier detectors. Spend enough time moving quietly in still neighborhoods at night and you’re bound to set off a dog at some point. They’re extremely perceptive, often detecting you from across a street. What mainly triggers them is your lingering in a particular place. When a dog gets set off, there’s nothing to do but to pack up, move on, and adjust your plan accordingly.

Compartmentalized Identities

Stealth only goes so far. You will be witnessed as you move around at night. To protect your true identity you become a different person. Change your behavior, bearing, and gait. Most importantly, never cross the streams: your true civilian identity does not go anywhere near a FFP at night; none of your disguises ever go home.

Civilian Guise

Your true identity. The only guise that ever comes or goes from your home. Used for transit. Also used for legitimate in-the-daylight activities such as recon. But never used directly to carry out a strike.

Street Guise

In large metropolitan areas, society has a special type of blindness towards people living on the street. While it is a sad reflection on humanity in general, we have collectively developed an instinct to look away whenever we see an unhoused person rather than make eye contact and mark them in our mind. The street guise is the primary way to move around in a medium-to-large city at night and not look out of place.

One thing about the Street Guise, said plainly. This guise borrows an invisibility that isn’t yours. It exists because society has decided its unhoused neighbors are beneath notice, and if you misuse it, the cost lands on them— not you. After any incident on a block, police canvassing starts with the people actually living on it. You are wearing someone else’s anonymity. Treat it like it was borrowed, because it was.

Gray Guise

In smaller to medium sized towns an unfamiliar, potentially unhoused face might be more memorable than not. In these towns there’s a non-zero chance that a person driving past you will recognize you. This makes the Street Guise more of a liability. Instead optimize for clothes that break up your silhouette, covering key distinguishing parts of your body with plausible outfit pieces. Take into consideration: if someone who knows you gets within 20 feet of you this guise breaks down. But from 50 to 100 feet if you cover defining traits and move your body differently than you normally do, there’s a strong chance to evade recognition.

Stealth Guise

An all black, full body, identity-concealing outfit. Maximum concealment of your identity, form, and features. If you are seen, there is practically no way you’ll be identified. However, someone wearing what essentially looks like an all black Halloween costume is very conspicuous. Anytime you are seen you will make an impression. Your goal is to not be seen at all. Use this guise to strike and retreat quickly, and to hide entirely in shadow should anyone appear to witness you.

Auxiliary disguises

When the goal is not necessarily to conceal your identity, but just move around in areas you otherwise shouldn’t without being noticed, consider these. The goal is for a casual observer to have zero thoughts about your presence.

What to Disguise

It’s helpful to analyze specifically everything we’re trying to hide.

Face

A picture of your face will very likely score a hit in a rudimentary facial recognition search. A computer vision algorithm detects specific anchor points on your face and derives fingerprinting geometries from them. The counter-measure is to simply mask these anchor points so they can’t be used. A bandana or a balaclava to mask the face; mind that an uncovered brow can be very distinctive for some people. IR can somewhat see through very thin cloth, though this is often overblown. Avoid nearly see-through fabrics and you will be fine.

Eyes

Sunglasses during the day, goggles during the night. Note that during the day sunglasses block visibility of your eyes, but these are transparent to IR cameras at night. And on the flip side, there are special lens coatings for goggles and glasses which reflect IR, but are transparent during the day.

At night, it’s very important to walk the line between concealment and your own visibility. If your eye covers are too dark, you’ll be less observant. Perhaps worse, if you constantly perceive things to be darker than they truly are at night, you will have impaired judgment about how much stealth you’re actually employing in your movements.

Airsoft goggles - the type made of solid plastic with a bunch of small perforations - are a really good option as they completely conceal your eyes but still allow a decent amount of nighttime light through. They don’t fog up, and are designed with a wrap-around form factor to not limit your field of view.

Body

Generally speaking, anything distinctive about your body should be hidden. If your build is particularly large or thin or short, find ways to make your disguise move you in the opposite direction. Flowy loose clothing, shoulder pads, or lifted shoes might be your friend.

Tattoos, Piercings, Facial Hair, and Other Markings

A tattoo or piercing caught on camera during a strike could give you away completely. Consider fully taping over your tattoos with duct tape (as well as adding random pieces of tape in other locations to obfuscate where you’re actually concealing something). Aside from intentional markings, consider that even temporary injuries or persistent bandaids on specific parts of your body can be tied to your Civilian identity. If you have a handlebar mustache or a distinctive beard, a Batman cape and cowl is probably not the best stealth shroud to use.

Digital Fingerprint

Your phone advertises Bluetooth and is connected to cell towers (for which location is known). And mass surveillance companies have already revealed plans to collect and store device signatures. Flock may easily roll this out as a software update, or may already have. Do not bring your phone, smart watch, medical devices, or any other Bluetooth-enabled items on strike missions. If you have a medical device that you can’t remove but that sends signals, purchase Faraday fabrics and fashion a body wrap around the affected area.

Unique Equipment

Be very aware of any equipment in your kit that is going to be on camera, and think long and hard about how distinctive it might be. If an investigator is able to freeze-frame on a bike you use or a specialty brand of slingshot you bought online, it’s possible that those purchases are the final clue needed to track you down. Opt to mask all branding and distinctive features by removing tags or covering with duct tape. Consider disguises for your equipment too. When possible, buy your distinctive equipment with cash, wearing a baseball cap and a medical mask. Or buy online with smaller businesses that will allow you to send a USPS money order - which does not require ID to purchase. Mail these purchases to an alternate address under a pseudonym.

Fingerprints

If you must handle a device (e.g., a Ring camera) or touch a surface (e.g., a metal pole or fence), wear gloves and/or have a disposal plan. The more you wear gloves, the better your dexterity while gloved will become. If shooting projectiles, wear nitrile gloves while handling and loading your ammunition as a 100% rule.

Gait

The state of the art on this is not as far along as people imagine. Like facial recognition, it’s a one-to-N matching problem, meaning that it requires a database of N possible matches against which to compare. Unlike facial recognition, there is no centralized database of everyone’s gaits, nor is there likely to be one soon. Therefore, gait analysis won’t be used to identify you out of the blue, at least as of 2026. Do keep an eye on the state of the art here, though.

However, gait analysis could certainly be used to confirm you as a suspect if you become a person of interest in an investigation. As such, it’s worth being mindful of when you’re likely to be on camera and varying your walking style. But this is a secondary concern to maintaining your ability to flee effectively. Rocks in shoes or strange orthotics are not recommended.

Hide Sites

Changing disguises is pointless if you are observed while doing it. Through daytime exploration and reconnaissance, find clandestine locations - Hide Sites - within your intended area of operations. Use these to change guises and prepare your gear. Spend as little time in Hide Sites as possible.

A hide site is a way to break the chain of traceability, so at a minimum a Hide Site has:

An ideal Hide Site has:

Parks, forests, abandoned lots, large landscaping features like bushes, and areas between freeway on-ramps and off-ramps are all great sources of quality Hide Sites. If you’re in a very dense city, you may need to be less picky. When in doubt, spend a lot of time there just watching and listening before changing guises.

Mission Structure

The structure of a mission is dictated by the need to compartmentalize our identities. We leave home as ourselves, arrive at a Hide Site where we can assume an Alternate Identity. The Alternate Identity moves on to strike and then returns to the Hide Site to switch back to being ourselves again. We then return home.

Phases

The inner phases of this mission structure - Infiltration, Strike, and Exfiltration - may be repeated in a loop in a single night. E.g. leave home to your Hide Site, change into your Street/Gray Guise - approach, strike, and depart multiple targets - then return to your initial Hide Site before heading home.

Rationale

If an investigator gets evidence that the Alternate Identity struck a camera, and they trace the Alternate Identity’s movements backwards or forwards in time, the chain is broken at each Hide Site disguise change. They may know that Alternate Identity went into the Hide Site and then 10 minutes later a differently dressed identity walked out, but that’s weak evidence. Remember that the police won’t have the benefit of video footage tracking each and every one of your steps, just “a person dressed in a work jacket carrying a black sack passed by this Ring camera at 2 AM” and “a person of approximately the same build but wearing different clothes and carrying a different backpack passed by 10 minutes later”. Having these “identity breaks” ensures any evidence gleaned about one identity - any mistakes we make that might reveal our movements or tactics - doesn’t follow us all the way back home.

What You Leave Behind

It’s not possible to leave nothing behind. Footsteps and trampled underbrush will always be a concern. Always opt for hide sites that have been at least minimally worn down by human presence. Parks are the best and very beautiful at night.

Depending on your strike style, you may also be leaving forensic traces. These will be covered in their respective sections, but as a general rule always leave as little behind as possible.

Most importantly, never leave your equipment behind. Much of it has fingerprints on it, and that same item may have made an appearance on security cameras earlier in the night. Always return for a piece of gear that you’ve discovered you’ve left behind. Full backtrack. You can almost always find it.

Footage

Probably the most significant thing you’ll be leaving behind is your image on security cameras. Both residences and businesses are loaded with cameras. A bit funny to have to say given the overall subject of this field guide, but: you should do your best to minimize how often you’re on camera.

Ring doorbell cameras should be particularly avoided. Ring has a standing relationship with Axon to streamline police being able to get footage from residents via the owner’s Ring app. Owners get an anonymized and vague notification of a crime, and are given the option to essentially blindly contribute their footage to the surveillance state. This is another way evidence is gathered on every citizen— evidence that can be handed to law enforcement without a warrant— before a specific crime has even been committed. Yet another dystopian violation of our rights.

There are good news pieces with these cameras too: a lot of them are truly closed-circuit and will never be looked at unless the owner of the camera deliberately goes looking for something. And all cameras tend to have a very zoomed out perspective in order to capture the entire surrounding scene. This means that distance is your friend— passing 50 feet away on the other side of the street is typically enough to be fairly inscrutable on most cameras.

Probably the most interesting and surprisingly useful thing about cameras: they see a spectrum of light called Infrared (IR) that humans can’t see. This alone doesn’t guarantee that a given camera can see in the dark. In order to have night vision, a camera also needs to cast IR light over the scene itself. And if you have an IR viewer of your own, you can see those emitters light up at night— every camera suddenly as obvious as a porch light. Handheld IR monoculars can be had cheaper than you’d expect, and even the lowest quality ones do the job. Pairing the ability to detect cameras easily with the idea of crossing the street, you can now optimize your walking route to stay off camera as much as possible.

Much more on this later, but note that you can also use an IR-viewing device to verify that Flock cameras have stopped working.

Your First Mission

There is a lot of operational overhead involved in planning Hide Sites and FFPs, packing your gear, and switching identities - all in the dark of night. Add on top of this the actual mechanics of your strike and the stress of executing a mission with real stakes and it makes sense to have a dress rehearsal.

Start your lensbreaker career with a “night recon” mission. The objective: in the dead of night, deliver yourself into striking range of your target, observe, then return home safely, all while protecting your true identity. This includes using Hide Sites to change identities as well as packing the strike gear you’ll need for a true strike. You’ll go through all phases of a mission, which will allow you to make your mistakes before risk enters the equation. Take note of what went well, what went poorly, any discoveries you made about your gear or surroundings, and what can be improved. Every mistake or bit of good luck is something to learn from.

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