Recent reporting from Los Angeles highlights the urgent need for city councils across the United States to take control of local government surveillance operations, subjecting police spying to democratic control, oversight, transparency, and public accountability. On November 10, Boston residents have an...
In a hearing last week at the Boston City Council, police leaders signaled that they would support a measure to require community control over police surveillance, and community advocates highlighted extreme racial disparities in policing in Boston as a primary driver of...
The Trump administration has taken the first official step towards fulfilling its promise to conduct “extreme vetting” of visitors and immigrants. On March 30, the State Department released a proposal outlining its plan to require visa applicants to disclose all the social...
Legislation recently proposed in the senate would give US and foreign governments unprecedented access to our real-time communications and sensitive personal information stored on the servers of private companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. On February 6th, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Chris...
In December 2016, the Boston City Council held a hearing to discuss the Boston Police Department’s plan to spend $1.4 million on a social media surveillance system. Police Superintendent Paul Fitzgerald and Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) director David Carabin spoke of...
Earlier this week, just before he gave his state of the union address, Trump came a step closer to fulfilling his promise to “load it up” by issuing an executive order to keep Guantanamo Bay open indefinitely. According to the order, the...
Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Boston officials have come out strong in defense of immigrants, Muslims, and other marginalized groups that find themselves in the crosshairs of the new administration. But key Boston Police Department policies and programs put these communities...
On September 11, the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, thousands of spies, police officers, prosecutors, and surveillance profiteers will gather in Washington D.C. for a spying technology extravaganza known as ISS World Americas. On its website, the event organizers describe ISS...
Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has a must-read essay in the latest Harpers Magazine. Her final paragraph sums up our predicament nicely, and points us in the direction we need to go. The problems that are now impossible to ignore didn’t begin with...
Mayor Marty Walsh and Police Commissioner Bill Evans have spoken out in defense of Boston’s immigrant community, pushing back against the xenophobic and racist rhetoric coming from our nation’s highest political office. Boston, our leaders want the world to know, is a...