Anthony Ralphs’s Darth Vader Protest Takes San Diego’s Flock Fight Global

Anthony Ralphs had spent about a year opposing Flock Safety at San Diego City Council. On August 19, he put on a Darth Vader cape and mask, complete with mechanical breathing and a voice changer, turning a local fight over license-plate readers and surveillance cameras into an international viral moment.

Ralphs said he tried the conventional route first: business attire, public comment, constitutional concerns, and court precedent. He concluded that formal arguments were not being heard, then chose a character he saw as an emblem of an empire. His three-minute Vader speech criticized Flock’s network as warrantless, a characterization Ralphs made rather than an established finding about the program.

The frustration followed a December 2025 council meeting where hundreds of people opposed Flock through in-person participation, Zoom, and online comments. After six hours of deliberation and debate, the council voted to continue the program, despite the article’s account that most public comments opposed it.

A week after that meeting, Ralphs said he was surprised to find the public chamber empty. He increased his attendance from every two weeks to weekly, then twice weekly; by spring 2026, he said, he was attending council and subcommittee meetings and organizing others to testify.

When will this end? When will you listen to the vast majority of your constituents?

Anthony Ralphs, addressing the five council members he said voted for Flock

The performance reached well beyond the chamber. Coverage appeared in Singapore and was translated into Spanish and Arabic. Ralphs’s goal was not simply attention: as an event producer, he said he wanted musicians, artists, painters, actors, and thespians to help the anti-surveillance movement regain traction after the December vote.

That places two approaches side by side. Ralphs’s council testimony sought to contest the program through the city’s public process. The Vader character made the same dispute easier to circulate and turned it into a recruiting tool for a campaign he is building through DeFlock San Diego, the TRUST SD Coalition, and other privacy-rights groups.

After the speech went viral, Ralphs returned to the council carrying the mask, which wheezed as he set it at the podium. He directed his demand to the five members who voted for Flock. The December decision remains the policy action at the center of the dispute; the next test is whether the campaign’s wider audience changes the political response.