Categories
cameras

Our Open Letter To Town Managers On ALPR And Flock Safety

DATE: August 25, 2026

TO: TOWN MANAGER

__________________________________________________________

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are a civil liberties group headquartered in the Town of Belmont and founded in 2012. We include attorneys, technologists, privacy experts, and ordinary citizens and residents of Massachusetts. We have advised Massachusetts municipalities for many years on surveillance ordinances, policies and technologies. We’re contacting you today about Flock Safety, to provide an update regarding a wave of revocations of municipal contracts for this invasive automated license plate reader technology in Massachusetts.

Police departments in many communities in Massachusetts rolled out Flock Safety cameras during 2024 and 2025. Now, many communities, including Boston, Cambridge, Douglas, East Bridgewater, Framingham, Grafton, Hopkinton, Littleton, Natick, New Bedford, Salem, Stow and Watertown, are revoking their contracts and taking the cameras down. This letter explains why, and discusses the privacy, civil liberties and legal issues with Flock deployments. We strongly urge your Town, if it has a Flock Safety contract, to join other Towns and cities in taking steps to end that deployment, and to not permit the use of ALPR in general in your community.

Flock Safety’s business model

Flock Safety is constructed to facilitate frictionless, nationwide data sharing between law enforcement agencies, creating in effect a nationwide network of 130,000 cameras tracking drivers, and individuals, wherever they go. The value it offers to its law enforcement clients is essentially a network effect: for each marginal jurisdiction added to Flock, the network becomes more valuable to every client that has already joined the network, because suspicious vehicles are often found outside of the jurisdiction where they were initially flagged.

Flock Safety’s product design

Flock’s business model drives its product design. Opening your residents’ location records to Flock means making their location records accessible, for example, to Houston PD, who routinely search all Flock jurisdictions for suspect license plates, hundreds of times a day. Notably, this has enabled out-of-state law enforcement to search the ALPR records of Massachusetts communities adopting Flock for suspected undocumented immigrants, and for many more categories of vulnerable people.

Flock sometimes assures municipalities that they will “own the data”, but their contract terms make clear that the ownership is only of the raw plate reads, which are scarcely valuable in themselves. All interpretation of those raw reads, and all of Flock’s array of AI-driven pattern-sensing premium add-on services, that enable law enforcement to track cars or associated cars or individuals, belong to Flock and Flock only. Nor does municipal “ownership” of the raw data mean that it won’t or can’t be shared onward by Flock. Any law enforcement agency can still search your residents’ location records, at any time and for any reason. Flock holds the data, whether or not the Town technically owns it, and from there can and does modify, interpret, share and sell that data with other private parties and federal agencies, at their discretion.

This business model makes it impossible that Flock will ever protect privacy well, for example by encrypting your residents’ location records so that Flock itself can’t see them, and then requiring law enforcement to provide a probable cause warrant before decrypting them.

Flock Safety’s deceptive practices

Even by one year ago, it had become plain that Flock Safety had a pattern and practice of deceiving municipalities. Municipal officials, often including police departments, want to reassure themselves that the data they share with Flock has reasonable guardrails. Flock Safety representatives have gone to many municipal governments to pitch their product, and have regularly told them that they will not share data with federal government agencies. But one year ago, it emerged that without disclosing it to municipalities, Flock had in fact been sharing data with CBP, in a confidential pilot program. Reporters found later that it wasn’t just CBP; it was ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, the Secret Service, and even NCIS. This year, after a wave of contract revocations, Flock Safety representatives have been insisting to cities and towns that their cameras are only about reading license plates. Once again, however, investigative reporting has shown this not to be true: Flock cameras can now be found focused on kids’ playgrounds and gyms, as well as other sensitive off-road locations. 

Flock Safety’s lack of competence and care

In Cambridge, MA, the City suspended the Flock contract in October 2025, and ordered Flock to take the cameras down. Then, on the day of a December hearing on whether to permanently revoke the contract, Flock Safety admitted to Cambridge PD that they had reinstalled cameras without the City’s permission. Cambridge has now ended their agreement. Remarkably, this precise sequence of events had previously occurred in Evanston, IL.

Flock’s systems are set up such that law enforcement officers from any jurisdiction can enter in any justification for a license plate search. They can simply say “investigation.” They can also leave it blank. There’s no requirement for the search to be tied to an actual investigation. There’s no constraint to prevent the search being for immigration enforcement reasons, or for personal reasons. No wonder then that in many places, including Stow and Lynn, police officers have been reported to be using the technology to stalk exes. Flock’s newest AI offering, “OS Investigate”, showcases how poor their internal controls are, the dizzying scope of the firm’s ambitions, and that yes, they’re definitely tracking people, not just cars. The ACLU has documented how Massachusetts Flock data has been searched by law enforcement agencies countrywide.

This month, Flock tried to address criticisms by reducing its standard data retention period from 30 days to 7, improving their internal auditing of suspicious searches, and allowing municipalities a nominal power to limit the kinds of searches other law enforcement agencies can perform on their network (i.e., if a law enforcement officer actually discloses that a search is for immigration purposes, a municipality could now bar such searches – but nothing has changed to make them disclose it.). All of this is essentially a token effort. The fundamental software and the business model of Flock cannot exist in the context of proper privacy protections, such as a warrant requirement for searches of automated license plate data that would otherwise be held in an end-to-end-encrypted manner. No ALPR firm adequately protects innocent residents’ privacy; without encryption, records can routinely be accessed by ICE, and other federal or even local law enforcement agencies via an investigative subpoena or even an administrative subpoena. Police have credited Flock Safety with helping to solve individual crimes, but it’s not even clear that automated license plate readers are accurate or reduce crime overall. Your Town’s resources may well be more effectively invested in human services programs than in technologies that reduce people to inaccurate data patterns.

Additional municipal costs relating to public distrust of Flock in particular

There’s considerable public anger on both left and right at the way Flock Safety has been rolled out without the public’s explicit consent. Some communities in Massachusetts – like Lawrence, Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville and Boston – have ordinances providing a mechanism of elected official consent and review for surveillance technologies, but most communities do not, and they should. If it is not meaningfully possible for ordinary residents to block approval of an unpopular police surveillance technology that affects residents’ own rights, then it may be readily deduced that there will be residents willing to take matters into their own hands, by blocking or vandalizing Flock cameras.

Any decision to adopt or continue the use of Flock in your town must take into account the additional costs of possible camera replacement, plus the additional costs of policing to prevent camera vandalism incidents. The case of Winona, MN is instructive here. In this town of 24,000 people, someone as yet unidentified “cut down poles and removed all eight of the city’s Flock cameras.” Faced with a situation of having to repurchase the cameras if they wanted them back up, Winona’s police chief decided not to do so, commenting, “we believe its use has contributed to growing concerns about trust in policing.” 

Alternative ALPR vendors also have substantial problems

Some towns abandoning Flock Safety have simply switched to a different vendor. But going with Axon or Motorola or Vigilant won’t fix the problem here. People feel that they aren’t in control of the technologies deployed against them. They won’t feel any more in control of an ALPR camera from a different company, and these other companies’ offerings aren’t better from a privacy standpoint either. Motorola’s commercial plate-scanning infrastructure is marketed to private companies, including auto financers and insurers, and not only for repossession but also for “risk assessment” purposes — even though risk scores have been shown to disproportionately harm low-income and other marginalized drivers. Axon’s PR materials talk cheerily about “integrating hardware devices and cloud software solutions” in “the Axon

ecosystem” and connecting “every officer, responder and agency”, which doesn’t help if outside agencies are targeting your Town’s residents for accessing reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare legal in Massachusetts. ACLU has a good overview of the problems with these systems here.

ALPR systems’ suspicionless searches of location records are now plausibly unconstitutional

The Supreme Court itself, in its June 2026 decision in Chatrie, has now issued a ruling that imperils the future viability of the ALPR sector as a whole.

When your police chief was in the academy, they were probably told that people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements in public, because those movements are public. Till 2012, that information would have been correct. But since then, in a series of decisions (Jones, Riley, Carpenter, and now Chatrie), the Supreme Court has undermined that previous understanding. Now, at least as regards their location records, people do have a reasonable expectation of privacy when in public, which means that collection of such location records are a search; and searches, under the Fourth Amendment, must be reasonable and generally require a warrant. So, ALPR companies find themselves on increasingly shaky legal ground, even if police chiefs aren’t always aware of the fifteen years of fresh jurisprudence that makes it shaky.

The holding in the June 2026 Chatrie decision reads, “Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.” The reasoning, however, is not limited to cell-phone location information, and lower courts are very likely to apply Chatrie to ALPR technology. Prior Supreme Court decisions in Jones (2012) and Carpenter (2018) suggested that location records might only be a search if they covered a sufficient period of time that police could detect the pattern of one’s movements in public – which Flock Safety definitely allows police officers to do with respect to a particular vehicle. But Chatrie goes further than this, saying, “the Government is wrong about the incapacity of short-term location information to reveal private matters.” Even short-term location information – like a single ALPR snapshot – can potentially reveal a person’s preferences, habits, and beliefs, and thereby be considered a search. The Court refers to “sweeping” location-identifying methods—as distinguished from merely “rudimentary” location-identifying methods—and rules that the former constitute a “search.” It is hard to argue at this point that a nationwide network of over 130,000 AI-searchable cameras like the one Flock Safety offers, is not “sweeping.”

There was advance warning of these legal problems, and we have been trying to alert Towns and cities to them. 2021’s Commonwealth v. McCarthy decision by the Supreme Judicial Court noted that, while the specific ALPR deployment at issue in the case (on the Sagamore Bridge down to Cape Cod) was lawful under the Massachusetts Constitution, it was possible for ALPR deployments to form a dense enough pattern in residential neighborhoods that they would be “too permeating police surveillance,” and therefore trigger a warrant requirement. The Flock Safety deployments round your way may not, or may not yet, reach this level of density; but this adds a further layer of legal risk to the Town, not just from the fact of the deployment of ALPR, but from the manner of it.

Conclusion

We therefore advise strongly, in the light of these facts and rulings, that you have a conversation with your Town solicitor to confirm the points raised above, and take action to protect the privacy of your residents. We are ready to assist with this process, as we have done in other municipalities; I’m available at 617-208-9002 for further discussion.

Sincerely,

Alex Marthews and Julie Bernstein

Co-Chairs, Digital Fourth.

Categories
News ordinances

How We Blocked Flock In Cambridge

Cambridge and Somerville and Boston, as a result of prior work by Digital Fourth, ACLU of MA and others, have “surveillance oversight ordinances” that put procedural hurdles in the way of police adoption of surveillance technologies.

Under these ordinances, for something like Flock Safety, city agencies are legally obliged to disclose to City Council that they are intending to deploy any surveillance technology. They must explain what the technology is; what will happen to the data from it (collection, retention, sharing, destruction); and whether they believe it will have a differential impact on any group within the City. That report must be presented at a public hearing, and the City Council is empowered to say yes or no to the technology.

In the context of this ordinance in Cambridge, unfortunately, a lot depends on who chairs the Public Safety Committee, and how close they are to the cops. We made very little headway in blocking surveillance technologies from January 2023 through to the summer of 2024, because the chair of Public Safety, Paul Toner, was the most powerful Councilor and was very tight with the cops. He waved through anything they asked for. He was very reluctant to schedule separate public hearings for new technologies. In February 2025, therefore, he made sure that Flock would be approved, and the three City Councilors with genuine concerns (including DSA-endorsed Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler), weren’t able to prevail. We brought six people to give public testimony against it.

At the same time, we were fighting the City on a proposal to allow Cambridge PD to deploy drones. We worked closely with ACLU of MA, and Councilors were worried enough that Toner had to schedule a hearing. At the hearing, we focused on the fact that Cambridge PD hadn’t bothered to develop or disclose a policy on drone use, so whatever they were saying about how drones would or would not be used wasn’t binding. We recommended that Cambridge PD go and draft a policy, consult with us and with ACLU, and bring the policy back to City Council, whereupon City Council would consider whether the proposal to deploy drones was reasonable. Remarkably, City Council agreed, against Toner’s objections. It was a sign of things to come. Over a year later, Cambridge PD has not moved forward with that proposal.

In May through to June, things began to shift regarding Flock. Our national folks monitor surveillance, privacy and Fourth Amendment news very closely. The news broke that Flock had helped a Texas cop chase down a woman suspected of having an abortion. Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler, responding to that news, filed a policy order for reconsideration of the Flock deployment, backed up by Nolan and Siddiqui. Because we were monitoring the agendas for City meetings in general, we saw that the Pole and Conduit Commission was proposing to approve the actual installation of Flock equipment. We saw an opening, and mobilized to get the Pole and Conduit Commission to delay approval of actual installation till after City Council had considered Sobrinho-Wheeler’s policy order.

Flock had to disclose to that Commission the exact locations where they planned to put in the cameras. That gave our advocacy lots of ammunition. Bad news kept flooding in for Flock Safety, and we made sure City Councilors, the City Manager and the Pole and Conduit Commission members had that information. Then, on July 8, a scandal that had been circulating around City Hall for around a year broke, and Paul Toner announced his future resignation, and was stripped of his committee chairmanships. Toner was replaced as chair of Public Safety by his vice-Chair Angie Wilson. She scheduled consideration of Sobrinho-Wheeler’s policy order for September. We organized speakers for that session. Toner still strenuously objected to revoking Flock’s contract, so it was agreed to suspend it, pending a review by the City Manager. We submitted for this hearing a thorough analysis of where the cameras were to be deployed, because Flock had had to disclose to the Pole and Conduit Commission exactly where they were planning to put them up; we made the argument that the ALPR cameras were heavily focused on East Cambridge in a way that would deeply and differentially affect the residents of public housing complexes in that area.

The review returned to the Council on December 9, and Wilson invited Gideon Epstein of ACLU of MA and Alex Marthews of Digital Fourth to provide expert testimony, like we had done in 2018-21 under Toner’s predecessor. Then, unexpectedly, at the start of the meeting, Cambridge PD and the City Manager’s office recommended revocation of the Flock contract. They had just found out that morning that Flock Safety was in breach of the contract terms. The City had suspended the contract and made very clear that no equipment was to be installed, but a Flock technician had gone ahead and reinstalled two cameras anyway. What with that, and our and ACLU’s expert testimony, and nine out of ten public testimonies being thoroughly opposed to Flock, the writing was finally on the wall. Public Safety Committee recommended revocation, and given the City Manager’s and the police’s posture, it was a given that the full Council would wave through the revocation.

The City Council still preserved, and the City Manager is even now trying to preserve, the underlying City approval for the use of ALPR in general, but now without a specific vendor in mind, and therefore without any specifics on where it would deploy or what the policies would be. The onus is now on the City/Cambridge PD to identify an ALPR vendor that won’t pose significant privacy issues.

Categories
Mission News privacy shotspotter

End Cambridge’s Use of ShotSpotter Once and for All

[This alert is from The Black Response; Digital Fourth is a member of “Stop ShotSpotter Camberville,” a coalition of community groups opposed to this surveillance technology.]

“On Monday, May 11, 2026, at 5:30 p.m., the Cambridge City Council is scheduled to vote on a policy order to end the City’s use of ShotSpotter microphones and remove the devices from Cambridge neighborhoods.

ShotSpotter is a network of microphones installed across the Port and Riverside (Coast) neighborhoods (see ShotSpotter dashboard). The system is marketed as a technology that detects loud sounds and alerts police to possible gunfire.

However, during the April 29 Public Safety Committee hearing (video not yet available), it became clear to council members and attendees that ShotSpotter is continuously listening. The Cambridge Police Department explained that when ShotSpotter detects a gunshot, the company provides them with an audio clip containing one second before and one second after the sound. This raised significant concerns because the existence of audio from before the alleged gunshot indicates that the system is actively listening at all times. [Not only that, but ShotSpotter records continuously over a 48-hour period; Cambridge PD acknowledged that that was so, and that recordings from within that timeframe were “useful for evidence.” – Digital Fourth]

Boston University Professor Spencer Piston emphasized the distinction between continuous recording and the alert that the police eventually receive, noting that while ShotSpotter may not permanently store all audio, the technology still relies on constant monitoring in order to generate alerts. This raises serious concerns.

Additional concerns were raised about the structure and oversight of the program in Cambridge. The current ShotSpotter system is funded through a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant, the same federal department that oversees ICE. Harvard Law School Professor Mason Kortz testified that the City of Cambridge is not itself a party to the current ShotSpotter contract operating in the city. As a result, city officials have reportedly faced difficulties obtaining and reviewing the contract. Since we are not party to the contract, residents lack clear protections regarding how data may be accessed, shared, or used.

The ACLU of Massachusetts, represented by lawyer Gideon Epstein, explained why ShotSpotter appears inconsistent with the standards established under Cambridge’s surveillance technology ordinance, a framework the ACLU helped develop.

Taken together, these concerns paint a troubling picture. Cambridge’s use of ShotSpotter may create risks that sensitive surveillance data could be accessed by federal agencies, including ICE, potentially undermining Cambridge’s commitments as a sanctuary city and Welcoming Community.

Four of the five members of the Cambridge Public Safety Committee, Councillors Al Zubi, McGovern, Nolan, and Sobrinho-Wheeler, have sponsored and submitted a policy order for the Monday, May 11, 2026 City Council meeting to remove ShotSpotter from Cambridge. The ShotSpotter policy order is the second item on the agenda: POR 2026-98.

We encourage community members to sign up for public comment and send letters in support of the policy order and to attend the meeting if possible. Please join us in supporting this important step toward ending Cambridge’s use of ShotSpotter.

Categories
cameras Mission News Police body-worn cameras

Lack of Police Oversight Board Delays Body-Worn Camera Adoption in Somerville

[Narrative reposted by permission of Derrick Rice]

On Friday April 24th, a working group of Somerville residents concerned about body-worn cameras [“BWCs”] delivered this letter to City Council, co-signed by 22 community leaders and organizations. The letter outlines the gaps between widely recognized BWC policy requirements and the City of Somerville’s proposed BWC Surveillance Technology Impact Report (“STIR”), which functions as the legally binding use policy). It also emphasizes the importance of developing a BWC use policy with public engagement and defining the policy prior to collective bargaining.

On Tuesday April 28th, we were sponsored by Councilor Scott to speak at City Council’s Legislative Matters Committee meeting. Derrick Rice presented, summarizing some of the policy concerns and emphasizing the procedural concerns. The Legislative Matters Committee then deliberated the BWC STIR. You can watch the video here (presentation @ 49m38s, deliberation @ 1h05m to 1h37m). 

Derrick: “From what we in the public are able to see, there is a real cause for concern in this moment. … We have six years of task forces studies in this council’s past deliberations have converged on a clear answer to the question of how body-worn cameras should be governed if adopted, yet we don’t see elements of that adequately represented in the STIR presented by the city. The city’s own studies and past commitments have led us to expect community transparency and input on this policy, yet we’re being caught off guard by the mayor’s request for funding and STIR approval prior to any public engagement. I am one of many people appealing to you to use your authority over the STIR to help ensure we meet these held standards of transparent policy and public engagement.”

Throughout deliberation, all councilors communicated some degree of apprehension with the BWC STIR. Ultimately, they agreed to hold the item in committee, effectively declining to seriously consider approval at this time. (Want to know what they said? See the addendum below!)

What’s Next

The City Council’s Legislative Matters Committee has opposed the BWC STIR for now, but Mayor Wilson’s administration could push for its approval at any time. We will be watching carefully to see if and how the City responds to our letter or changes its process with regard to collective bargaining negotiations and BWC policy.

In the interim, community members have circulated a variety of content regarding the consideration of Body Worn Cameras:

Somerville residents can sign up for future updates by filling out this form.

With neighborly love,

Derrick Rice (he/him)

e: local.derrick@rice.io

Want to be more involved? Have something to add? Spot an error? Please get in touch!

Addendum: What They Said

Here’s what the councilors on Legislative Matters had to say on April 28th: 

Councilor Mbah: “I’m a proponent of body-worn cameras, but now the more I hear about this conversation I just also want to make sure that those loopholes that continue to surface have to be closed. We have to do it right. So, you’ve really articulated a lot of stuff that is also — I mean, it almost feels like common sense. If anybody wants public safety, they should be able to accept those things. They should be able to accept that this is all about accountability”

Councilor Strezo: “I would like to have the administration respond about the concept — because there is a good point that is brought up — about the police oversight board. … The administration had to have seen this coming with the body-worn cameras talk. All the research that I’ve seen has mentioned that this is an important element to implementation of the body-worn cameras. We need that oversight board.”

Councilor Ewen-Campen: “This is different from every other impact report we’ve done because it’s the subject of collective bargaining. …  this council has an executive session — had conversations about this topic — but the public hasn’t seen any of that, right? …  I’m concerned about the kind of putting the cart before the horse; that it’s not come as a surprise to anyone that the use policy is really, really important to me, to my colleagues on the council, to the public, and to not be able to have a detailed conversation about it before we’re asked to approve it in public is really, really hard”, adding “given the budget conversations we’re having this year, I’m extremely apprehensive about that.”

Councilor Davis: “Aside from all of the sort of the tactical issues that are raised with trying to review a document that we can’t change that relates to some discussion that may be happening that we can’t really materially impact. — I guess I will repeat [Councilor Ewen-Campen] a little bit. — This is a backwards way of doing it.”

Councilor Scott: “As I look at the impact report, I am certainly in agreement that there are a few glaring omissions here. …  one thing I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is no pathway for this to be a beneficial technology implementation without meeting at least these baseline requirements that have been presented, both in the Good Counselors 2022 memo and the legion of sources that was cited here, which I do want to call out again, included the cop staffing study that the city paid for in 2022 that was done by an outside consultant that included a chief of police”, later adding “I firmly believe that we must have a civilian oversight body in order for this to be of any positive effect.”

Councilor Scott went on to clarify with Legislative Liaison Raddassi (representing the administration), that the city’s ongoing negotiations with the police unions will constrain what can or cannot be in the BWC policy. These are discussions that we — the public — have no transparency into, despite the clear impact it has on all of us.

Legislative Liaison Raddassi: “The collective bargaining agreement will set the limits of what can be included in a surveillance use policy. …Those conversations have been happening in executive session with this council around some of the policy considerations that councillors have raised. And so again, this STIR is based on the current body-worn camera policy because it’s basically the only thing we can debate about in public at the moment.”

Councilor Scott: “I think I heard, I just want to make sure I repeat accurately what you said, that the outcome of collective bargaining will serve as a top-end constraint over what could be pursued in terms of access and policies in that use policy.”

Legislative Liaison Raddassi: “Correct.”

Councilor Scott: “Okay. Well, from my standpoint, that’s just entirely backwards of where we should be doing this as a city. The city council has a very specific role in this process. … I am inclined not to support this in its current stance. I would encourage the city to go back and rethink their approach to this.”

Categories
privacy state

Support (and amend) the Mass. Consumer Data Privacy Act

We’re working hard, in coalition with a whole heap of other advocacy groups, to pass the first good general commercial privacy law for Massachusetts. It’s going surprisingly well. There’s a lot of legislative support, and it helps that people’s privacy is much in the news.

The Senate already passed their version, which had limitations – most notably, that it didn’t include a “private right of action” to enable individuals to sue corporations for violating their privacy.

Now, we’re working on the House, where the “Massachusetts Consumer Data Privacy Act” has been reported out of committee with a private right of action, and is with the Ways and Means Committee – the last step before reaching the floor for a vote. House Ways and Means is now under heavy industry pressure to weaken the bill before it gets there, which is what happened in the Senate.

We’re therefore urging Ways and Means members, and House legislators more generally, to report the MCDPA out favorably, without weakening it, and with four important strengthening amendments. These are:

  1. THRESHOLDS TO SUE: “EITHER/OR”, NOT “BOTH/AND”

Our first recommendation is to change H.4746’s language relating to the ability of private individuals to sue corporations that violate H.4746’s privacy rules. The Senate bill has no private right of action. The House bill’s private right of action is very limited. It sets a high, dual threshold, limiting it to corporations that have both over $200m in gross annual revenue and data on two million consumers. This dual barrier will enable certain companies that are collecting a lot of data, like phone apps, to slide under the radar.

Therefore, we’re suggesting that private individuals should be able to sue corporations that meet either of these thresholds. 

  1. PROTECT THE PRIVACY OF PEOPLE’S “PHILOSOPHICAL BELIEFS”

The federal government is investigating people to see if they pose a national security risk on the basis of their social media posts, communications or web searches. The President’s NSPM-7 memorandum declares philosophical beliefs like “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”, as views that justify investigation of Americans by a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Attorney General Bondi ordered the FBI’s JTTFs to prioritize the investigation of Americans with these beliefs, and ordinary Americans, like Renee Nicole Good, are being deemed “domestic terrorists” for nothing more than being in ICE’s way. A simple fix can protect the beliefs that we express in social media and communications, by including “philosophical beliefs” in the definition of sensitive data, as is already done in California’s Consumer Data Privacy Act.

  1. IMPROVE PROTECTION OF CHILDREN’S DATA

The Senate bill, S. 2619, says that data controllers are liable for mishandling “personal data of a consumer that a controller knows, or should have known, is a minor”. H.4746 changes this to “personal data of a consumer that a controller knows, or willfully disregards, is a minor.” That’s a significant weakening of the standard. It will be very hard for people suing a data controller to prove that the data controller “willfully disregarded” that the person whose data they mishandled was a minor. The Senate language is significantly better, and bringing the House language into line with the Senate’s in this respect would simplify the conferencing process.

  1. YOUR “GENETIC DATA” SHOULD NOT JUST INCLUDE YOUR DNA

The definition of sensitive data in the Senate bill includes “(iii) genetic, neural or biometric data” and “information derived therefrom.” This means that not only your DNA profile itself, but interpretive data, such as what 23andMe interprets your DNA profile to mean in terms of susceptibility to diseases or your inferred relationship to another person, would be classed as sensitive data. Similarly, not only the data “net” of your facial features created by facial recognition, but the fact that your face is interpreted as a 95% match to a criminal suspect, ought to qualify as sensitive data. So, we think that it is important to protect all data derived from cataloging the expression of our RNA and proteome. This could be accomplished by changing “genetic data” to “genomic data” (please see https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/202.224), and including the Senate’s phrase “information derived therefrom.”

LEGISLATIVE TEXT FOR THESE AMENDMENTS:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SgtWqTgLxSgWjw0hPp-BFfMGWeSlz2grgx4EHADiDS8/edit?tab=t.0 

Categories
cameras immigration News privacy

Cambridge Suspends Flock, But May Revive It Dec. 9

Image of Frankenstein's monster on the operating table, with Dr. Frankenstein and Igor attending, from the 1931 Frankenstein movie
How dead is really dead?

On Monday, October 20th, the Cambridge City Council voted to temporarily halt the city’s use of automatic license plate reader technology, including Flock Safety, because of concerns about privacy and data sharing with the federal government. 

Many community members offered oral public testimony, including members of Digital Fourth, the ACLU, collaborators, and other concerned citizens. Much of this testimony focused on issues with Flock Safety specifically, especially their issues with Flock’s recent history of sharing information with federal agencies. 

Members of the city council, including those who had voted in favor of moving forward with Flock Safety in February, were surprised and concerned by the issues with Flock Safety that were raised during public comment. Specifically, they were concerned by the idea that the information collected by Flock Safety cameras owned by Cambridge might be shared with Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Council Member Marc McGovern, who had initially voted in favor of Flock Safety in February, stated his concern about the testimony shared about the breaches of contract committed by Flock Safety against communities like Evanston, IL. McGovern said that “there are all sorts of loopholes in the control that we became more aware of over time.” 

After over an hour of public comment, the council voted unanimously to refer the issue to the Public Safety committee, and in the meantime, to suspend or revoke the use of Flock cameras. Many councilors expressed the desire to allow time for more public comment. 

The Cambridge Police Department has stated that none of the Flock Safety cameras are operational. Volunteers with Digital Fourth independently verified that the cameras have been removed. 

The governor’s thoughts on the development were shared in a recent CBS News article. She stated that “cameras are ubiquitous” and came out unambiguously in support of “responsible surveillance technology …when it comes to the investigation and deterrence of crime.” It remains to be seen what the Cambridge City Council and the Public Safety Committee will decide constitutes “responsible use.” 

Several members mentioned the possibility of working with a different automatic license plate reader company. However, recent reports have detailed issues of data sharing by other automatic license plate reader companies, as well. According to a recent report by 404 Media, an app recently demoed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allows officers to scan a license plate with their phones and cross-check it with millions of other records, like marriage records, license data, vehicle ownership, voter registrations, and ALPR data. This app partners with another ALPR company, Motorola Solutions. Though Flock has a particularly spotty record, when a municipal police department partners with an ALPR company, it is always difficult to confirm that the data collected by the cameras will not be used for purposes that the police department would not approve of. Even if an ALPR company seems to be using the data that they collect ethically at one point, this does not preclude them from changing their policies in the future. 

On December 9th, the city will discuss the Flock Safety at a Public Safety Committee meeting from 12pm-2pm. Invited panelists will include a Cambridge-based Digital Fourth representative, representatives from the ACLU, the Cambridge Police Department, and Flock Safety. 

As the Cambridge City Council prepares to turn over after the recent election, it is a vital time for privacy-concerned residents of Cambridge to make their voices heard. 

Categories
cameras Mission News

Let’s Stop Cambridge From Getting Flocked Up

Recently, Cambridge residents have been receiving communications in their mailboxes that new “Flock Safety” cameras are being installed in their neighborhoods. 

Flock Safety (“Protect Your Community With 24/7 Coverage That Never Sleeps!”) is a surveillance company which produces and installs, among other products, cameras with automatic license plate reader (ALPR) capabilities. Flock is marketed as an all-encompassing “privacy solution […] boosting efficiency and reducing crime” for municipalities.

There are, however, serious privacy concerns with Flock’s systems. Despite months of denying contracts with federal agencies, Flock recently revealed that it has a contract with Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and shares ALPR data without the consent of local officials. This week, it was also revealed that they had been sharing data with ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, the Secret Service and, for good measure, NCIS. Due to the company sharing data in violation of Illinois law, the state of Illinois recently terminated their contracts with Flock. After Evanston, IL, ordered Flock to shut down its use of ALPR cameras in the city, Flock reinstalled the cameras without permission, prompting Evanston to send a cease-and-desist letter. This week, Eugene, OR, also paused its Flock deployment as a result of privacy concerns.

As other states and municipalities reckon with Flock’s dishonest data sharing policies, Cambridge should take a long look at their own contract. This is the state of play in Greater Boston for now, as far as we know. The City of Boston launched a pilot contract with Flock in 2024, but has not yet, to our knowledge, proceeded to a full rollout. Flock cameras are appearing in Brookline and on the Watertown-Waltham line. Cambridge City Council, at the urging of Cambridge PD and embattled Councilor Paul Toner, approved Flock Safety for use in February 2025, and Flock opened an office in Boston in August 2025. Now, resistance is mounting in the Greater Boston Area due to concerns about data sharing, and Cambridge residents are being confronted with the implications of Flock in their own neighborhoods. 

So far, 16 Flock ALPR camera locations have been proposed in Cambridge (the blue pins):

The densest deployment is planned for East Cambridge, near the public housing at Newtowne Court, Washington Elms and Roosevelt Towers, as well as Kendall Square and MIT. The other proposed locations are on major thoroughfares into and out of Cambridge, including nearly all routes of travel between Cambridge and Boston. This raises the concern that it will become very difficult for local residents to move about without having their license plate information, and thereby in many cases their patterns of life, captured. 

Depending on the city’s contract with Flock relating to data retention, these residents’ patterns of movement may be visible to both the Cambridge Police Department and other agencies using Flock’s database. This is particularly concerning because Flock has developed an AI tool which reports suspicious vehicle movement patterns to local law enforcement. This is to say, artificial intelligence may have a hand in not only assisting police with searching networks for particular crimes or “hits,” but in deciding what is suspicious in the first place and flagging potentially innocent residents based on algorithmically determined criteria. Citizens should not be subject to the whims of an algorithm determined by a private company whose policies are not transparent or subject to the same rigorous checks that a government administration would be. Flock has given Cambridge no reason to trust in the idea that their algorithms are effective and unbiased, and has in fact provided more reason to suspect the contrary. 

There’s a further issue. The City of Cambridge Surveillance Use Policy directs the City to pay attention to whether any communities are being “disproportionately impacted” by the deployment of any surveillance technology, especially “low-income communities, communities of color, or any community that is marginalized in the City.” Based on the proposed camera locations, it’s obvious that the movement patterns of residents of Strawberry Hill and West Cambridge traveling, for instance, to Harvard Square, would not be as regularly captured as would the movements of East Cambridge residents. The City has not considered whether there are disproportionate impacts of this kind; the Council, in approving it, relied simply on a declaration by Cambridge PD that there weren’t any.

A key privacy practice is data minimization: Limiting data collection to the minimum required, and not retaining data for longer than it is required. Flock’s website discloses that the local law enforcement agencies that contract with them may store data themselves, but Flock itself stores all license plate data for 30 days. As a result, in accordance with their data sharing record, Flock data may be visible for a significant window to out-of-state law enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), CBP, the Department of Homeland Security, or other federal agencies, either through the pilot data-sharing scheme Flock now claims to have suspended, or through requests by federal agencies to local and state law enforcement who themselves have Flock contracts. 

Federal agencies may also have the opportunity to access Flock ALPR data through the Boston Regional Intelligence Center and through informal favors granted by local members of the Joint Terrorism Task force, which has recently been directed by Trump in a presidential memorandum to conduct investigations of groups which espouse “anti-fascist,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-American” or “anti-Christian” viewpoints. The actions of the current federal administration make it even more urgent to protect the sensitive data of vulnerable Cambridge residents, including immigrants, politically active people, and those who express views that might be classified under these dangerously loose categories. Anything that requires the use of a car in certain areas of Cambridge has the possibility of being tracked. Whether residents choose to exercise their free speech by attending a protest, accessing reproductive care, or simply moving about, Flock’s license plate readers may be storing that data, exposing it to federal search, and potentially using it to draw conclusions about the vehicle driver’s future potential to commit crimes. For example, many vehicle going into and out of Cambridge Health Alliance’s Windsor Street Care Center, which offers reproductive healthcare services, would be in Flock’s databases.

Data stored is always data that may be used. Any data stored with Flock is not safe. Even if the City of Cambridge specifies that they do not want the ALPR data that they store to be accessed by federal law enforcement, there is no guarantee that Flock will successfully prohibit access by federal law enforcement to their own systems directly in the absence of the consent of the city of Cambridge, especially considering their recent record of lying to cities about their data sharing practices. What’s more, federal agencies can always subpoena Flock. 

We are currently advocating for Cambridge to terminate its arrangement with Flock, along with many other Cambridge residents, local advocacy groups, and MIT professors. As is all too common when it comes to local surveillance technology deployments, notifications on the proposed Flock camera deployments have been relatively under the radar, but progress has been made in the direction of an examination of Flock’s data sharing policies. Recently, all Cambridge city council members voted in favor of taking a second look at the deal with Flock that they approved in February, but it was specified that this review was not expected to result in abandoning the contract altogether.

During this meeting, Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler called attention to the funding source for the Flock cameras being deployed in Cambridge. They would be paid for largely by the federal Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant, meaning that Cambridge would technically only be leasing them. This system of funding would place very little control over Flock’s data storage systems in the hands of the Cambridge city council, and potentially open the door to more federal abuses of the type already being perpetrated by Flock in other states. The unexpected, and probably short-term termination of UASI funds by the Trump administration is not expected to change the City’s decision.

Approval of the specific locations for the cameras was included in an agenda for a recent Pole and Conduit committee meeting, but was later removed. The next committee meeting is scheduled for Thursday, October 23, 2025, but it is unclear whether or not Flock will be discussed. 

As the members of the Cambridge City Council and the committee make time for community feedback and consider recent developments with Flock, Cambridge residents have a vital opportunity to make their opinions heard. Cambridge residents should take advantage of their right to free speech by reaching out to their city council members on this topic, all of whom are up for re-election. As informed and engaged members of the community, Cambridge residents should not be willing to accept the creeping spread of civil rights violations associated with the surveillance state.

Note: This article was written with assistance from Digital Fourth volunteers Alex M., Alex T. and Julie B.

Categories
Mission News

Trump Admin Directs Boston’s JTTF To Investigate “Antifa” Protests

On September 25, 2025, the President issued an order, NSPM-7, directing the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a strategy to disrupt “antifa” organizations and nonprofits that advocate for “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”  ACLU just released a useful analysis of it, here.

Just in case any readers mistakenly thought that this new strategy was aimed only at spying on those planning or committing acts of violence, the President supplemented his order with a September 26 article, Democrats’ Unhinged Crusade Against ICE Fuels Bloodshed, containing a list of Democratic elected officials who had suggested publicly that his administration’s acts were authoritarian, fascist, Nazi, or Gestapo-like, and describing such suggestions as a “battle cry for violence.” That same day, DHS published a memo, DHS Is Fighting Back Against Antifa Violence, that included as an example of such violence, Democratic members of Congress attempting to exercise their legal right to conduct oversight visits of ICE facilities. On October 1, DHS and FBI circulated a joint intelligence bulletin to all law enforcement agencies in the country, Domestic Violent Extremists Pose Increased Threat of Violence to ICE Facilities and Personnel, arguing that previous attacks “took advantage of First Amendment-protected activity,” and therefore making a case for pro-active monitoring of protests against ICE. In advance of Saturday’s expected nationwide “No Kings” rally against the administration, House Speaker Mike Johnson has described it as a “hate-America” rally that would draw “the pro-Hamas wing” and “the antifa people.”

We should not deceive ourselves here. In the eyes of this administration, all Democrats, and all Republicans who dare to cross or even criticize the President, are now “antifa” — no matter how lawful, peaceful or reasonable their opposition is. This is a coordinated administration effort to depict all opposition to the administration as an appropriate target for DHS and FBI surveillance, spanning the whole range from mere verbal criticism through to actual, though thankfully rare, acts of violence. It won’t matter to Patel’s FBI or Noem’s DHS how much you support the police; if you cross this administration, it won’t matter even if you are the police.

This is no longer about “supporting public safety” by giving law enforcement every possible tool. This is about whether the tools previously given to law enforcement will be illegally used to criminalize political opposition. And the administration might as well right now be holding up a gigantic neon sign, saying, “We Plan To Criminalize Political Opposition.” Those going to the No Kings protest this weekend should plan accordingly.

And for those who think that, while the Trump administration might feel this way, Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and Boston PD would never, here’s the actual front cover of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association’s newsletter “Pax Centurion” from their now memory-holed fall 2018 issue, which contained a vile and lengthy poem identifying as “antifa” undocumented immigrants, socialists, liberals, students, and anybody who took a knee to protest police violence:

Want to do something about surveillance?

  • MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS: Call the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security at the Legislature at (617) 722-2020, ask to speak to House Chair Rep. Daniel Cahill, and say that you’d like his committee to vote out favorably H. 2687, “An Act relative to protecting Massachusetts residents against federal government surveillance.”
  • BOSTON RESIDENTS: Call the Police Commissioner’s office at (617) 343-4500, tell them that you oppose the deployment of surveillance technologies against people organizing or attending protests, and ask what Boston PD’s response is to these federal instructions to use counter-terrorism powers against Boston residents for expressing First Amendment-protected speech.
  • CAMBRIDGE RESIDENTS: Call the office of City Manager Yi-An Huang on (617) 349-4300, and tell him that in light of what the Trump administration is doing, you oppose allowing Cambridge PD to fly drones over protests, deploy Flock Safety security cameras that DHS can access, and participate in the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
  • OTHER CITIES AND TOWNS: Email your questions and concerns here.
Categories
Uncategorized

Mass Senate Passes A Pretty Good Privacy Bill

A schematic of modern data surveillance systems

After thirty years of the commercial internet — thirty years of people’s sensitive data being traded, breached, exploited for scams, hacked by nation-states and their proxies, and sucked relentlessly into the maw of the NSA like a child being sacrificed to Molech, the Massachusetts Senate has actually passed a pretty good commercial privacy bill, the Massachusetts Data Privacy Bill (MDPA), S.2619.

The bill, which passed unanimously, bans the sale of sensitive data, including location data. It is most similar to a law that recently passed in Maryland, which is probably the strongest commercial privacy bill in the country. It contains language requiring companies to meaningfully minimize the collection, storage and retention of our personal information. It prohibits the sale of our sensitive personal information, which includes: precise geolocation; health care information; biometric data, such as face and fingerprint scans; citizenship or immigration status; information revealing someone’s sex life, and any information about a person’s race, color, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin; and information that pertains to a child. The bill’s protections for geolocation data extend not just to Massachusetts residents, but crucially, also to people visiting Massachusetts to get reproductive or gender-affirming care.

Nevertheless, the bill falls short of what Digital Fourth and other privacy advocates have pushed for. We fought hard for a private right of action, but that language was removed by the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Thus, when a firm harms a Massachusetts resident or visitor by illegal acts under this bill, private individuals won’t be able to sue the firm directly. Enforcement will depend on the priorities of the overburdened Attorney-General’s office. Industry groups lobbied especially hard to kill that provision. Also, the definition of “sensitive data” doesn’t include your browsing information or search terms, so firms will still be able to sell and share that at will, including with the government. Last, to avoid offense to law enforcement, the Senate Ways and Means Committee also stripped a requirement for law enforcement to get a warrant before they request your location data from a private firm.

At the start of the session, it looked like perhaps all we could get was a narrow bill targeted only at location data. What goes to the House now is something broader and better than that original proposal. We’re genuinely grateful to the Senators who worked to make this bill happen, including Senate President Karen Spilka, Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem, Cindy Friedman (the bill’s primary author), and Michael Moore (Chair of the Senate Committee on Advanced Information Technology, the Internet and Cybersecurity). We also worked closely with a whole coalition of organizations, notably including EPIC, Consumer Reports, ACLU of MA, Color of Change, unions, women’s rights and reproductive justice groups, and the Massachusetts chapters of the American Legion, and we’re grateful for their guidance and assistance. One of our most active members did years of outreach to veterans’ groups, who then called and emailed their legislators in support of strong comprehensive privacy legislation, after learning from us that the sensitive personal data and geolocation data of active duty troops and veterans was being purchased from data brokers and could be used to track deployments.

On the House side, House leadership has been waiting to see what the Senate produced, before deciding whether to move a privacy bill forward this session. Legislators including Tricia Farley-Bouvier and Dave Rogers have been working on worthwhile bills. Just as on the Senate side, there has been heavy industry pressure to prevent action on privacy or to make what emerges from committee as weak as possible. Despite the inevitable shortcomings, we desperately need House leadership to act to move this forward.

There is real urgency here. Your data is not safe with the people we’ve given it to. The new Trump administration has moved fast and hard to extinguish the remnants of federal privacy laws left over from the 1970s. Every item of data the government can access, will be integrated, processed, and flagged as necessary for use against you. Bought contraception last weekend? Went to a protest? Expressed a view online that the President might deem “anti-Christian” or “anti-American” or even “anti-fascist”? Good luck — thanks to the administration’s efforts, which build on a quarter-century of bipartisan efforts to expand “data-sharing” in the name of counter-terrorism, it’s now open season on any activity that uses an internet connection, or that involves carrying a cell phone or walking past a security camera.

Worse, thanks to DOGE, well-established data silos for personal data housed by different federal agencies are quickly being broken down. Between these efforts, and the continued expansion of commercial and government surveillance spearheaded by Palantir and similarly malevolent tech companies, your IRS data, your Social Security data, your health, financial, location and Internet data are readily available to not only the federal government, but foreign companies and governments, as well as domestic groups intending to harass, threaten, and even kill people they disagree with.

It turns out that data doesn’t care what it’s being used for. Promises to use it only for good, count only if the person making the promise follows through consistently on that promise and remains in power. The Constitution’s protections of privacy under the Fourth Amendment and under statute aren’t magic; they’re only as powerful as people’s, and especially judges’, continued willingness to prioritize those rights above governmental and commercial administrative convenience.

Swift and decisive action by the Massachusetts House to enact the MDPA would be an easy win for legislators. According to a poll conducted by Beacon Research, 92% of Massachusetts likely voters support banning the sale of location data. Pew found that 78% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans support lawmakers taking action to protect their online privacy. It turns out that most Americans don’t think privacy is dead, and don’t like the endless, intrusive hassle of engaging with an abusively designed digital ecosystem. Whether it’s Massachusetts Founding Father James P. Otis complaining about the British Crown’s unreasonable searches and seizures of people, their papers and effects, or citizens now complaining about comprehensive data dossiers and data sharing, privacy was and is very popular.

If you want to help, please call your State Representative. Tell them that privacy matters to you, and that you want the House to take up and pass a strong bill, like the Senate’s original S. 2516. It should include quality data minimization protections for all people in MA. It should ban the sale of all sensitive data, including browsing data and search terms. It should, like S. 2516, include a private right of action. And it should happen now, so we don’t lose the last shreds of our privacy under federal government assault. The House needs to step up and protect the people – now.

This article contains contributions from volunteers Alex M., Alex T., and anonymous Digital Fourth volunteers.

Categories
ordinances

Don’t Get Fooled Again: Boston Should Not Permit Systematic Police Surveillance of Social Media

On August 27, after a lot of work from Digital Fourth members, ACLU’s Kade Crockford, the Muslim Justice League’s Fatema Ahmad, and computer scientist Nasser Eledroos, Boston City Council formally voted to reject Boston PD’s second attempt in a dozen years to set up a permanent social media surveillance framework for the residents of Boston and surrounding communities. The technologies at issue were SourceFeed, SearchFeed and Chorus Intelligence Suite. Councilors Breadon, Louijeune, Mejia, Pepén, Weber and Worrell voted to reject the technology. Councilors Durkan, FitzGerald, Flynn, Murphy and Santana voted to accept it.

We’re setting out here the background on this issue, and what our volunteers have been doing on it. We’ve been around long enough in town to know that this isn’t BPD’s first effort to deploy this technology – and that the first effort failed spectacularly. In 2014 and 2015, BRIC, Boston PD’s DHS-funded intelligence arm, used Geofeedia social media surveillance with the aim of identifying potential Muslim terrorists. For years, BPD, through its intelligence arm BRIC, used keywords like “#MuslimLivesMatter” and “Ferguson” to collect the posts of local activists, leading to searches of completely innocent individuals, including Councilor Tito Jackson. They only abandoned it when the City Council found out. In fact, BPD has a long track record of suspicionless surveillance of activists like Veterans for Peace, Stop the Wars Coalition, Occupy Wall Street, Code Pink, Black and Muslim activists and now also, as we expected, pro-Palestinian protest groups, including those at local universities.

BPD claims to want to “identify pre-violent extremists”, but the police have no business surveilling such people’s communications. If they have probable cause that a particular individual is planning a crime, they can get a judge to approve a warrant for the person’s communications; they can even do it simply by asking the social media company, or by subpoenaing them. These kinds of social media surveillance software vendors are different. They surveil hundreds of networks at a time and millions of people’s communications, using AI to flag whatever they define as anomalous. When BRIC gathers records on individuals for whom there is no reasonable suspicion of their involvement in a crime, that violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures”, as well as the federal privacy regulation, 28 CFR Part 23.20, that is supposed to prevent BRIC from doing this kind of thing.

On August 11, our volunteer co-chair Julie participated as an invited expert on a panel at a Committee hearing, where she described various surveillance technologies of concern that are used by the Boston Police Department (BPD) and BRIC without any warrant based on particularized suspicion. She discussed how an executive order is demanding that the federal government eliminate the data silos mandated by the National Data Privacy Act of 1974, to merge state databases into a master database being created by Palantir, a company notorious for its dystopian surveillance and highlighted how DHS has forced universities to share data on its students. Julie drove home the threat of searches and seizures based on expression of  opinions that contradict current policies of the United States in social media or in the press, giving examples of students apprehended by ICE, including Rümeysa Oztürk of Tufts University. 

Also testifying at this hearing was our member Fiona from Smith College. She described the danger posed by the pilot contract that BPD has with the ALPR company, Flock. Fiona discussed how the national database of license plates captured countrywide was used by a Texas sheriff to track a woman seeking an out-of-state abortion and the fact that the Flock database has been accessed by the federal government. As a member of Smith Students for Reproductive Justice, Fiona said that she saw privacy protection as paramount in ensuring reproductive autonomy. She emphasized that access by other states and the federal government to databases generated by surveillance technology used by the BPD also threatens the freedom of political activists, protesters and immigrants.

On August 12, Julie was also a panel expert at a Committee hearing dedicated to discussing the three social media surveillance tools, SourceFeed, SearchFeed and Chorus Intelligence Suite. Back in October 2024, BPD decided to use an “exigent circumstances” exception in the Surveillance Oversight Ordinance, to adopt social media surveillance without either notifying the Boston City Council or submitting an impact report within the 30-day time frame required by the Surveillance Ordinance. SourceFeed and SiteFeed are especially intrusive because they involve chat surveillance on a number of platforms. If our DHS-funded regional systems flag people without reasonable suspicion as “pre-violent extremists”, she argued, the federal government’s elimination of data silos could easily give them those locally collected leads. Julie emphasized that the DOD’s use of social media surveillance failed to notice Jack Teixeira as he was leaking classified information on Discord and that in 2022, the BPD did not even show up when notified about a demonstration by the Patriot Front, a known violent group in Boston, and a Black man filming the event was attacked. The plain fact is that, as we’ve been observing for a dozen years, trying to detect terrorist attacks in advance on social media doesn’t work. The signal-to-noise ratio is impossible to get around, no matter what AI-driven tools you deploy. The best such systems can offer is easier access after an attack to the social media accounts of an already-known attacker – but that means that by definition, the collection wouldn’t be under “exigent” circumstances intended to prevent immediate loss of life and limb.

One Digital Fourth member, who is a graduate student at Boston University, gave powerful testimony at a second hearing on Social Media Surveillance on August 19, saying that in the past the BPD has surveilled political groups and that she feared that social media surveillance would target our most vulnerable residents including immigrants and activists and homeless people whose posts would be screened to look for mental illness. Our member recalled the conversations that she has had with fellow Boston University students. Domestic students are fearful that exposure of their political affiliations could lead to them being denied opportunities. Foreign students are afraid that surveillance of their social media could lead to the revocation of their visas. Even staying wholly off social media doesn’t protect you. She said that this fear leads to censorship and that Boston’s tradition of free speech must be protected, especially as the federal government targets people for their opinions. At the end of the hearing, Julie told the committee that they had to reject the use of these technologies by BPD. She reminded the Committee that BPD had responded to a social media post made by the Muslim Justice League to its members encouraging their attendance at a City Council meeting by sending a massive police presence to the meeting, where they blocked entrances and behaved as though there was a threat when there was no evidence of one. Since the Committee has no way to enact guardrails to protect the public from abuses, this surveillance needs to be ended.

When the City Council discussed the matter on August 27, one of their main objections was procedural. BPD had so little respect for the Surveillance Oversight Ordinance that they didn’t follow it. They justified the “exigent” adoption of social media surveillance tools because of the pending federal elections, but the Ordinance requires that after thirty days, they either cease to use the tool, bring it to City Council, or apply to the Mayor for a temporary extension that also would be notified to City Council. Instead, it was July 2025 before they notified the City Council of their ongoing social media surveillance program. If BPD can’t respect the process of approval of the technology, how can Boston area residents trust that they can run the actual surveillance in a responsible and rights-respecting way?

When the Ordinance was negotiated, it contained flaws that stack the deck in favor of police continuing their use of surveillance technologies. It should be the case that, the City Council having now voted the technology down (again), BPD would not be allowed to use it. Instead, their use of it has been delayed, and more work is needed to stop it. The Ordinance says:

“If the City Council does not approve the use of the proposed new surveillance capabilities, the request shall be sent to the Surveillance Oversight Advisory Board who will make recommendations to the Mayor. Subsequent to receiving the recommendations from the Surveillance Oversight Advisory Board, the Mayor may at their discretion resubmit a modified request to the City Council for approval.”

This is the first time this procedure will be used.

The Surveillance Oversight Advisory Board is a five-member body consisting of a City Councilor chosen by the City Council President (currently Ruthzee Louijeune, who voted against this technology); a representative of the MA ACLU (currently Chris Conley); a representative of the Boston Police Commissioner (currently Teresa Anderson); and two representatives chosen by the Mayor, including at least one academic expert (currently Ân H. Lê and Hilary Robinson).

In the event the Mayor chooses to resubmit a modified request to the City Council, the same process would apply again, where the Council would have 60 days to conduct a review and take a vote on whether to approve the request. So, our next task as advocates is to work to ensure that the Advisory Board’s recommendation on this technology is negative.

We have managed fine since 2016 without Boston PD contracting with a third party vendor to surveil our social media. We are blessed with historically low crime rates. The only threat Boston’s elected officials should be worrying about is what our local police and the federal government will do with this data if BPD collects it.