A man dressed as Marvel supervillain Doctor Doom stood behind the podium in the Seattle City Council chamber on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026, and thanked officials for expanding the city’s surveillance network. The stunt, a piece of deliberate political theater, has turned a Tuesday morning policy meeting into one of the week’s most-shared political videos, with video shared widely on X and covered by 404 Media, Gizmodo, and Dexerto.
The council’s Public Safety Committee was hearing public comment in the chamber at City Hall, 600 4th Avenue, when the speaker took the microphone in the character’s signature silver mask and white gloves.
“Doom took over Axon enterprises, and now Doom will be watching you,”
he said in a vaguely Eastern European accent, according to the 404 Media transcript.
“Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required.”
“This is the first of Doom’s gifts to the city of Seattle,”
he continued, per the same transcript reported by Gizmodo and others.
“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.”
The address did not stop there. He said Doom would watch from behind the cameras as people sought reproductive or gender-affirming care, would find immigrant neighbors for federal partners, and would work alongside officers who stalk their exes. He closed with:
“Doom will be watching you. Glory to Latveria.”
That last line is the same closing an activist in San Diego used in a similar stunt a few weeks earlier — see the Darth Vader Flock stunt for the parallel, reported by per the Wired report on the Darth Vader Flock stunt.
Behind the mask was Clifford Cawthon, a policy adviser for the Washington State Department of Commerce and a member of Community Not Cameras, a Seattle group pressing the city to scale back its network of police cameras and integrated data feeds. The costume was a cover for an argument he told 404 Media he has been making for years: that the city’s Real Time Crime Center aggregates too much, watches too many, and answers to too few.
Cawthon’s timing was deliberate. Seattle Police Department has access to 62 surveillance cameras placed in three neighborhoods — the downtown Third Avenue core, Aurora Avenue North, and the Chinatown-International District — after the council approved the deployment in fall 2024. Many of those cameras feed into the city’s Real Time Crime Center, a glass-walled room of roughly nine monitors that pulls CCTV, body-worn camera footage, automatic license-plate-reader (ALPR) feeds, acoustic shot-detection pings, and computer-aided-dispatch (CAD) data into a single dashboard. Axon markets the centers nationally as tools that aggregate information for faster responses.
Mayor Katie Wilson has kept the 62 cameras in operation while pausing further expansion pending an independent data-security audit. Cawthon told 404 Media the audit is overdue.
“There is a wall of about nine screens in which they can bring up cameras from around the city at any given time,”
he 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 said the costume idea came together in pieces. He had visited the Real Time Crime Center with Community Not Cameras and felt the wall of screens looked like a supervillain’s lair — or, as he put it, like Minority Report with a worse exit strategy. Around the same time, activist Anthony Ralphs went viral at a San Diego City Council meeting for dressing as Darth Vader to praise Flock cameras in the same joking, accusatory key. A colleague called Cawthon with the obvious next step:
“What if Doctor Doom went to the city council?”
The Marvel tie made sense. Doctor Doom — Victor von Doom, “Lord Emperor of Latveria” — is the villain in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, and his cultural footprint is large enough that the satire could land with viewers who do not know what ALPR stands for.
“We thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if the Seattle city council meets Victor von Doom, the Lord Emperor of Latveria,”
Cawthon told 404 Media,
“and Victor von Doom shares with this pathetic American municipal council that they are actually doing Doom’s bidding without even realizing it.”
In interviews, Cawthon said his concerns with the technology include what he described as insecure data storage, partnerships between surveillance vendors and federal immigration enforcement, and what he called a heightened risk of racial profiling for Black and brown residents, including himself. He also pointed to publicized reports of officers misusing license-plate-reader data to stalk partners.
“The data is not secure,”
he told 404 Media.
“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.”
The mayor’s office has not publicly addressed those specific allegations.
The appearance fits a recent pattern of activists using costume to dramatize opposition to automated surveillance at public meetings. Last week, KOMO reported that a woman in Texas attended a public meeting in full Joker makeup to complain about decorum at her own council — a flavor of political theater Cawthon called “drawing a connection between what is in reality a massive threat to our civil liberties and civil rights.”
“These stories, these ideas about fascism, authoritarianism, they can be very close to home if we let them,”
he said.
“Becoming the character and going to city councils is political theater in the best way.”
The surveillance fight inside Seattle is not moving in one direction. On Aug. 7, the Public Safety Committee — chaired by Councilmember Robert Kettle and voted 3-1, with Councilmember Rob Saka abstaining — redirected $250,000 previously allocated for Capitol Hill CCTV expansion to community violence-interruption ambassadors at the organization We Deliver Care. The vote was a partial win for Cawthon’s group, which had asked the council to shift money away from cameras and toward community-based programs. The measure now heads to the full council.
Cawthon himself is not a fringe voice in Seattle politics. He is originally from Buffalo, New York, holds a master’s degree in human rights and political science from the University of Manchester, and has taught political science at Bellevue College for years. He has worked as a community organizer, a politico, and a freelance journalist, and has organized around housing justice, workers’ rights, and surveillance reform across Washington state. He told 404 Media he sees the costume prank as an organizing tool, not an end in itself.
“I know plenty of people that, when I talk about public policy, they just throw up their hands and say ‘OK, well, that’s cool and thank you for sharing with me but politics isn’t my thing,'”
he said.
“But I can talk Marvel with them, I can talk video games, and we have a common language.”
Cawthon said reactions to the stunt were overwhelmingly positive and that it drove traffic to Community Not Cameras’ petition, which asks the council to take five steps including redirecting camera-expansion money to community-based prevention programs. The $250,000 redirect is, for now, the petition’s first win — and the closest thing the council has produced to a definitive answer on surveillance in the weeks since Doom took the podium. The full council has not yet voted.
