On Thursday, East Tennessee authorities arrested Adam Lee Heimerman, an independent candidate for Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District, after police say he admitted shooting four automated license-plate reader systems between July 14 and July 22. At least one was a Flock Safety camera, and investigators allege that he fired at one system from church property while services were underway. Heimerman faces four felony vandalism charges.
The reporting has not established his motive, and his candidacy alone does not make the alleged vandalism political violence. The case shows how attacks on technology are moving beyond anonymous property damage. A Guardian investigation published days earlier documented at least 33 apparent anti-surveillance actions against Flock cameras across 23 states, including severed wires, toppled poles, smashed equipment, and covered lenses. Some participants circulated instructions for disabling the devices.
Those incidents vary in motive, severity, and intent, and they should not all be placed under a terrorism label. They nevertheless show how opposition to a technology can move beyond lawful advocacy and into decentralized, repeatable sabotage, especially when methods are publicized and copied across jurisdictions.
Other attacks have crossed a more dangerous line. On April 6, someone fired 13 rounds into the Indianapolis home of City-County Councilor Ron Gibson after he supported a proposed data center, leaving behind a note that read, “No Data Centers.” Gibson and his 8-year-old son were not injured. Four days later, federal prosecutors allege, Daniel Moreno-Gama threw a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman before traveling to OpenAI’s headquarters, where authorities say he intended to set the building on fire and kill people inside.
Although separated by thousands of miles and different in seriousness, these incidents shared a recognizable target logic because the people and property were selected for representing the development, approval, or operation of advanced technology. Taken together, the pattern warrants a new name: techno-terrorism.
Techno-terrorism is politically or socially motivated violence, arson, or sabotage directed at technology infrastructure, the people responsible for it, or public officials associated with its development. Its purpose extends beyond damaging the immediate target because it seeks to intimidate, coerce, or retaliate while disrupting systems on which a broader population may depend.
The term describes a threat pattern rather than a new statutory offense. Federal law does not create a stand-alone domestic terrorism charge, so prosecutors rely on statutes covering attempted murder, arson, explosives, firearms, threats, and destruction of property. Those charges describe what an attacker did, while the terrorism framework explains the motive, target selection, and wider audience the attacker sought to influence.
The pattern predates the backlash against artificial intelligence. In 2021, Seth Aaron Pendley tried to obtain explosives to attack an Amazon Web Services facility in Virginia and received a 10-year sentence. Sean Aaron Smith later received 78 months in prison after repeatedly trying to burn cellular towers around San Antonio in support of an anti-5G ideology. Tesla facilities became another symbolic target when Paul Hyon Kim attacked a Las Vegas collision center in March 2025.
The danger is not confined to executives or fortified corporate campuses. Research from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point describes a “substitution effect” in which attackers shift toward researchers, electric substations, or local officials when prominent targets become harder to reach. In May, Saline Township Treasurer Jennifer Zink resigned after citing death threats connected to a contested 1.4-gigawatt data center developed by Related Digital with Oracle and OpenAI. A township official neither operates servers nor controls the power system, but may be the most accessible person associated with a disputed project.
Supporting infrastructure can be as vulnerable. FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty warned in June that nearly 16,000 reported incidents of theft and vandalism against communications infrastructure occurred between June 2024 and June 2025, disrupting service for almost 10 million customers. Increasingly organized actors targeted fiber routes, cell towers, and backup-power systems serving hospitals, 911 centers, federal facilities, and military installations.
Many of those incidents were financially motivated crimes rather than ideological violence, but their operational significance remains clear. An attacker does not need to penetrate a hardened data center or corporate headquarters when an accessible fiber route, substation, or backup-power asset can be disrupted more easily and produce cascading consequences across several critical sectors.
None of this should stigmatize lawful opposition. People have every right to challenge data centers, artificial intelligence, automated surveillance, or any other technology, and concerns about privacy, electricity costs, water use, land development, and corporate power deserve democratic debate. Strong rhetoric, peaceful protest, and political advocacy are not terrorism, nor should they become a pretext for government surveillance.
The federal government does not need a new investigative bureaucracy. The FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and state and local law enforcement possess mechanisms for receiving threats, sharing intelligence, and coordinating responses. Those mechanisms should identify technology-targeted incidents that may appear isolated locally but form a national pattern.
A meaningful gap remains in public threat reporting. Congress should require future editions of the FBI-Department of Homeland Security Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism to include a standardized, cross-ideological section tracking qualifying violence, arson, sabotage, and credible threats directed at technology infrastructure, company personnel, researchers, and public officials. The requirement should expressly exclude lawful opposition and First Amendment-protected activity. It would not create a new ideological label or expand investigative authority, but would require the government to account more clearly for what violent actors are choosing to target.
‘RUN. HIDE. FIGHT’ IS ALREADY TOO LATE
CISA already has much of the operational machinery. Its protective security advisers and existing assessment programs can evaluate individual facilities, multi-asset systems, and regional dependencies. Those capabilities should be applied deliberately when technology-targeted threats arise, with attention extending beyond prominent facilities to the substations, communications nodes, fiber routes, and backup-power assets on which they depend. That would be a focused application of existing authorities rather than a new mission or bureaucracy.
Technology will not merely be used by violent actors; it will increasingly become the object of their violence, and the country should recognize that pattern before the next attacker succeeds.
Colton Overcash is the founder of Vertex Strategies, a Charlotte-based government relations and strategic advisory firm with a presence in Washington, D.C. He regularly writes and comments on data center and technology policy issues. He previously held two presidential appointments at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. He also served on the staffs of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC).