On Tuesday afternoon, in a four-hour-long hearing at the Boston City Council’s Committee on Government Operations, the ACLU of Massachusetts, Muslim Justice League, Student Immigrant Movement, Unafraid Educators, Algorithmic Justice League, and Boston Teachers Union joined forces with MIT researchers, the National...
Nationwide, people are marching in record numbers to demand justice for Black communities long subject to police violence, and an end to white supremacy. In response, government agencies from the local to the state and federal are mounting increasingly aggressive attacks on...
Can the cops in Massachusetts use digital surveillance technologies to track every driver’s every movement throughout the state? Not without violating the constitution, says the state’s highest court. In a series of crucial court rulings culminating in the historic 2018 Supreme Court...
Last week, the ACLU of Massachusetts and the two largest teachers’ unions in the state—the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the American Federation of Teachers, Mass. Chapter—sent a letter to all 273 school superintendents in the state, asking the leaders to prohibit the...
A school district in New York has flipped the switch to activate a facial recognition system across hundreds of cameras in its school buildings, drawing sharp criticism from civil rights advocates and concerned parents and students. The move comes as school administrators...
In December 2019, the non-partisan federal government National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published a landmark study presenting further evidence that facial recognition algorithms, across the board, are not ready for prime-time. The researchers found that face recognition algorithms perform more...
Yesterday the First Circuit became the first federal court of appeals to hear oral argument on the constitutionality of the warrantless placement of a secret video camera on top of a utility pole after the ACLU’s 2018 victory in the Supreme Court...
Face surveillance is dangerous when it works, and when it doesn’t. A new report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a non-partisan federal government research agency based at the US Department of Commerce, adds further data to a growing...
Face surveillance systems are currently being used by the government in Massachusetts, despite the absence of privacy protections or even legislative authorization. Communities across the state are rallying and organizing to push back, to protect privacy, racial justice, and civil rights in...
Last night Somerville became the third city in Massachusetts to enact a law requiring city council oversight and control of all municipal government surveillance, following Cambridge and Lawrence. The ordinance was approved at the City Council by unanimous vote. City Councilor Ben...