If a city with an ACLU-backed ordinance requiring community control over police surveillance concedes to Big Brother, is there any hope for the rest of us?
Something interesting happens when Americans who worship the convenience of the mass surveillance apparatus find themselves under the treads of jackboots. Many begin to see how vulnerable they’ve been left by politicians they foolishly trusted, and finally start demanding reform.
While creeping fears are slowly opening suburban eyes and waking up millions of dormant activists, Cambridge folks have long been wary of Big Brother and his wicked sisters like police violence and dodgy equipment procurements. In 2018, following a “close collaboration” with the ACLU of Massachusetts, the city even passed an ordinance to require community control over police surveillance (CCOPS).
“Far too often, police departments across Massachusetts and the country obtain invasive, costly surveillance equipment without any meaningful transparency or oversight,” ACLU of Mass Executive Director Carol Rose said at the time. “This ordinance charts against that trend, requiring public engagement before the Cambridge police can acquire surveillance technology like drones and cell phone tracking devices.”
In the wake of Donald Trump winning a second term, and following some recent shootings that left many Cambridge residents on edge, the people’s republic has become an interesting MAGA era testing ground of sorts for such an ordinance. An optimist would say the highly educated and progressive population there can serve as a model for other communities where people want to protect civil liberties. A pessimist, however, might argue that if Cambridge can still fall under increasing surveillance despite such vocal opposition, the rest of us in less enlightened locales are completely screwed.
One advantage that the home of Harvard has on this front is outstanding news coverage. Thanks to Marc Levy and Cambridge Day, people actually stand a chance of knowing about looming infringements on Fourth Amendment protections. In a Feb.4 piece titled “Fears of increasingly totalitarian government cited when Cambridge police ask for more tech,” for example, the outlet reported about how the “menacing actions of Donald Trump’s presidential administration and near certainty of worse to come had city councillors nervous about approving high-tech police equipment including license-plate readers, phone hackers and surveillance drones.”
More than 40 people showed up at City Hall to oppose the aforementioned measures, yet two out of the three were still greenlit by a majority vote. The body “sent the drones to a more extensive examination in committee,” but gave police authority to hack phones and scan plates, technologies the department argues “will enhance our ability to investigate crimes, locate missing persons, and improve situational awareness during critical incidents.” Laughably, the Cambridge police chief also said the new tools would “[respect] … civil liberties.”
You know where this is going—straight down a slippery, slippery slope. As Levy later reported, at the subsequent Cambridge City Council meeting, the topic of drone use was temporarily tabled, but “a surprise dispute over how the city’s surveillance law functions added work before the topic [can] return to city councillors for a vote.” Specifically, there’s disagreement over whether elected officials “can shut a program down if they think police have run amok.” The city’s lawyers say they can’t. Privacy advocates disagree.
“The ACLU was deeply involved with the formulation of this ordinance,” Kade Crockford of the technology and civil rights program at the ACLU of Massachusetts told the body. “It definitely was not the intention when we were formulating the ordinance that the council would not have the power to claw back authority. … It was, in fact, the explicit intention that the council would have the authority to claw back any surveillance technologies that were approved that events later demonstrated to the council was a mistake.”
Cambridge Day also quoted Alex Marthews of the civil liberties watchdog organization Digital Fourth, who addressed the hovering drone question: “What we have before us today is not a policy. We have a set of suggestions and recommended uses. … I am not seeing in the materials presented or the discussion that we’ve had an emergency need that requires the policy to be brought only in draft form.”
I have covered mass surveillance at the sketchy intersection of main street and federal funding for decades, and these developments do not surprise me. They do, however, disappoint, because while most Americans only purport to value privacy but in reality blindly entrust authorities with spy tech and mount cameras on their homes, there’s always been some hope in select cities such as Cambridge, where stakeholders show up in person to birddog the man. As Marthews of Digital Fourth told BINJ for a story about State Police phone-hacking tech, it is “a well-known dynamic in the context of police equipment and surveillance technology [that] once you’ve acquiesced to it, if there are not restrictions on its use built in up front, it will tend to be used toward everything down to routine drug busts. … They’ve got the tools, why not use them?”
If the restrictions Cambridge has in place aren’t worth the ordinance they’re printed on, though, what comes next? And if there’s nobody at Harvard Law School or in the extraordinarily learned Ivy environs who can thwart dubious surveillance, then what hope is there for those trying to keep drones and stingrays out of the badgelicking suburbs? I genuinely want to know, so I asked Harvey Silverglate, the legendary civil liberties litigator who is something of an icon in the area. His response was hardly soothing.
“While ordinarily I would be shocked to see Cambridge violate the privacy of its citizens, in The Age of Trump nothing surprises me,” Silverglate wrote. “All norms of civilized conduct have collapsed.”
