A group called the Transit Liberation Front smashed 10 OMNY machines in subway stations across NYC in response to a call from Black revolutionaries in Atlanta calling for a summer of resistance against the US & Israel’s colonial/state violence & surveillance.
Recently, Black Revolutionaries in Atlanta sent out a call for a Summer of Resistance, a sustained, militant, and decentralized campaign targeting the multitude of appendages of the settler-colonial so-called United States, its Zionist client government, and their many accomplices in promoting a genocidal agenda in Palestine that is killing tens of thousands.
In response, we turned our attention to the MTA and the touchless payment system, OMNY, that it is trying to shove down New Yorkers’ collective throat. These machines represent a world in which we must trade away our privacy for the right to move about our own city. The existence of OMNY and the city’s desire to phase out all other methods of payment is an obvious ploy to increase surveillance and further violate our communities by policing the main arteries of transit for everyday New Yorkers — as if the subways weren’t fucking crawling with police already.
We smashed ten of these machines in multiple subway stations across the city. We estimate that this is equivalent to about $40,000 in damage. OMNY is in part result of a contract between the MTA and Cubic Corporation, a sprawling multinational entity owned by the private equity firm Veritas Capital [9 W. 57th St.]
Veritas’s portfolio also includes Peraton, which is working with the Department of Homeland Security to build HART. This advanced surveillance system will compile and centralize biometric and other data on nearly 300 million individuals, further facilitating DHS’s campaign of terror against immigrants and communities of color.
This database, of course, will soon be open to Zionist security forces through DHS’s Enhanced Border Security Partnership, which promises rapid mutual biometric intelligence sharing among the Zionist entity, US, UK, and EU. Veritas is invested in the oppressive technologies shoring up the imposed colonial borders that have been constructed on Palestinian land and between the United States and Mexico, ripping apart traditionally Indigenous territories.
Here, at the margins, we see the extremity of state violence enacted against those it has decided to keep out by any means necessary, through both active violence—when the Zionist military murders Palestinians in cold blood—and passive, when US agents allow families to drown in the Rio Grande before their very eyes. These horrors are manifold, and Veritas is profiting from them. If your city has a public transportation system, it is likely to be linked to Cubic and Veritas. Chicago’s Ventra system, London’s Oyster, the Breeze card in Atlanta, and countless other systems inside and outside of the US are all Cubic endeavors.
Your governments are selling you out to a private company that actively promotes the imperialist projects from Palestine to Mexico. Why? In our view, they are rolling out an ever-more militarized version of the already extant police state. Cops flooding the subway and National Guard bag-checks are only the beginning. They are relying on us growing accustomed to being controlled in every aspect of our lives, of us willingly giving up our privacy in exchange for their rotten idea of “safety.” There is no safety under occupation, and we are indeed living on occupied territory.
We may not yet face the same violence in the metropole as we see at the margins, but, as the resistance grows and the intifada is globalized, they are certainly getting ready in case we get too rowdy, too ungovernable. We are the frogs in the slowly heating pot.
Disabling these machines is just one small act of resistance, one that requires no more than a good, heavy hammer (16 oz. or more, no wooden handles), some safety equipment (goggles and protective gloves), and a solid plan for concealing your identity.
Bring a friend to watch your back and go to town. Smash an OMNY, cover a camera, break one of their stupid video ads. Join the Transit Liberation Front today!
–The Transit Liberation Front