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By Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the ACLU of Massachusetts

What if we were just one software update away from dystopia? What if suddenly, without any public debate, the government flipped the switch on a network of super-charged surveillance cameras that could create watchlists of people’s faces and track them automatically as they move through public spaces?

It’s a scenario that some elected officials in Boston are working right now to prevent. Last Wednesday, Boston City Councilors Michelle Wu and Ricardo Arroyo introduced two key surveillance oversight ordinances: one that would establish democratic control over new surveillance technologies acquired by the municipal government, and another that would ban face surveillance technology outright.

The reason for urgency? This week, a key government contract is up for renewal, and the details may have profound implications for the future of privacy in Boston and beyond.

Like most cities, Boston has a network of hundreds of municipal surveillance cameras, which are linked and administered by software that can analyze both live video feeds and historical footage. The cameras themselves don’t have to be all that complex—they just need to record clear video—but the cloud-based software can grow more powerful with each subsequent update, allowing for improved video analysis without the need for corresponding hardware upgrades. In other words, a camera could gain terrifying new features—like face surveillance—without looking any different to passersby.

That’s exactly what could happen to Boston’s municipal cameras—as soon as this week—if the city council doesn’t act quickly. According to records obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts, the City of Boston has been using software called BriefCam to manage its surveillance camera network; last year, the city renewed its contract and upgraded from BriefCam version 4.2 to version 4.3. This contract—facilitated by a third-party vendor called LAN-TEL Communications—is due to expire tomorrow, May 14, and it’s likely that BriefCam will push the City to upgrade to the latest version, which includes some truly scary capabilities.

How scary? See for yourself in this promotional video that the company posted on YouTube.

Since version 5.3, released in 2018, BriefCam has allowed users not just to identify faces, but to create literal “watchlists,” setting up a system whereby anybody moving through a public space can be tracked automatically, without their knowledge. Add to that the ridiculous claims that other face surveillance companies are making for their technology and its supposed predictive capabilities, and we’re not far from a Minority Report world in which people are automatically flagged by computers as suspicious or even criminal. And this is all assuming that face surveillance is reliable or accurate when the opposite has been shown to be true. Face surveillance is dangerous when it works and—as is more often the case—when it doesn’t.

City officials might argue that they have no intention of using these new features or even updating to the new software version, but there are two crucial problems with that response. First, as the ACLU’s own investigations have shown, private tech companies are ruthless and unscrupulous in promoting their products, and unwitting public institutions can fall prey to these tactics. Clearview AI, the extremely shady company that scrapes the web for photos of ordinary people, notoriously gave out free trials of its face surveillance product to schools and police departments. In many cases—including in Massachusetts—curious employees ran face searches without their superiors knowing about it. And given the level of technical detail, city officials likely wouldn’t think twice about a simple software upgrade, especially if the company pressured them by threatening to phase out support for older versions. (BriefCam just announced version 5.6.)

Second, even if we trusted government officials not to use powerful and dangerous features newly at their fingertips, there is no oversight, and no way to hold bad actors accountable. Save for a growing number of cities and towns across the Commonwealth and in places like San Francisco that have banned face surveillance outright, there are virtually no laws or regulations anywhere in the country that provide oversight of government use of face surveillance technology. What makes Boston’s situation so concerning is not just that the technology is dystopian, but that it could be adopted so easily, with no public debate and no laws to establish even the most basic safeguards of our civil rights and civil liberties.

That’s why the ACLU is proud to work with the Boston City Council to pass these much-needed ordinances, so that we can ban face surveillance and Bostonians can assume democratic control over the city’s rapidly expanding surveillance apparatus. At a time when public trust is essential but tenuous, the last thing we need is to emulate authoritarian regimes like that of Moscow.

Privacy can’t protect itself. Take action and tell the City Council to ban face surveillance!

TAKE ACTION

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Wednesday, May 13, 2020 - 1:00pm

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Read more about Blocking Face Surveillance in Boston

Originally published on Data for Justice.

Newly released data from the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) show that COVID-19 is present at higher rates in certain Boston communities, including Hyde Park, Mattapan, Dorchester, and East Boston. The analysis presented here by the ACLU of Massachusetts compares BPHC’s findings to census data, in order to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting Boston’s essential workers and communities of color.

COVID-19 Cases Concentrated Among Boston’s Essential Workers

According to the census data, the Boston neighborhoods most impacted by COVID-19 are co-located with the highest proportions of essential workers in the city.

Using data from the U.S. Census 2018 American Community Survey (ACS), we mapped the proportion of workers across Boston who are employed in “COVID-essential” occupations. We defined “essential” occupations to include the following:

Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations
Construction and extraction occupation
Farming, fishing, and forestry occupation
Installation, maintenance, and repair occupation
Material moving occupation
Production occupation
Transportation occupation
Office and administrative support occupation
Sales and related occupation
Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupation
Food preparation and serving related occupation
Healthcare support occupation
Personal care and service occupation
Protective service occupations

COVID-essential workers are most concentrated in Dorchester, Roxbury, and East Boston – the same neighborhoods where the virus is present at its highest rates.

COVID-19 Cases Concentrated in Boston’s Black & Brown Neighborhoods

Similarly, the areas with the most COVID-19 cases align with Boston’s communities where people of color make up a majority of the population.

Communities like Hyde Park, Mattapan, and Dorchester where over 50 percent of the population is non-white (including African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American, Multiracial, or any racial category other than “White Alone”) are again the same communities with the highest rates of COVID-19.

Latinx-Majority Chelsea Hit Hard

As this crisis evolves, more details are coming into focus that shows how already-vulnerable communities are those hardest hit by the virus.

As of April 7th, the city of Chelsea had 315 COVID-19 cases in a population of just over 40,000. This translates to a rate of about 79 cases per 10,000 residents – over four times higher than the rate in neighboring Boston of 18 cases per 10,000 residents, as reported by the BPHC.

On Monday evening, Massachusetts General Hospital’s Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, Dr. Joseph Betancourt, reported that 35-40 percent of the COVID-19 patients being treated at Mass. General was Hispanic or Latinx.

In an interview with WBUR, Betancourt mentioned that the outsized effect Chelsea is experiencing could be due to a number of factors, including increased rates of cohabitation and high proportions of residents working in jobs “where social distancing is not possible.”

Indeed, our analysis of 2018 ACS data shows that in many parts of Chelsea, over 70 percent of the employed population work in occupations that are deemed essential during the on-going crisis:

And even within Chelsea, census tracts with the highest proportion of Hispanic or Latinx residents align exactly with the tracts containing the greatest percentage of workers employed in essential jobs.

As editorial writer Marcela García states in her recent Boston Globe piece about Chelsea, “Not only are these immigrants — mostly Latino, many of them here without legal status — the most economically vulnerable, but a high proportion of them already have limited access to health care and other public support networks. Working from home is a privilege that they simply don’t have.” She describes how the COVID-19 outbreak is acting as a “great revealer,” bringing to light systemic inequalities that have plagued minoritized and working-class communities for centuries.

Ultimately, it is communities like Chelsea, with a very high proportion of both COVID-essential workers and residents of color, that are suffering disproportionately in this pandemic. Ironically, a major cause of their increased hardship is the irreplaceable role they play in supporting the continued functioning of all of society, by working essential service jobs.

This is exactly why the ACLU of Massachusetts and other advocacy organizations are pushing for legislative, executive, and judicial action to protect immigrants and working people. While the federal stimulus package passed by Congress in March is a start, it does not go far enough to establish the comprehensive social and economic protections – or the robust data collection practices – required to support vulnerable communities across Massachusetts today.

Our mayors, governors, and representatives must step up. Last week, the ACLU of Massachusetts called on the state Department of Public Health to center equity in its response to the crisis. We must record the race and ethnicity of those receiving tests and treatment for COVID-19, so as to better understand how the virus affects different communities differently. We must ensure that our first responders—including not just EMTs and other healthcare personnel, but also grocery store employees, delivery workers, and public transit operators—have the personal protective equipment (PPE) they need, and have priority access to testing.

The stakes have seldom been higher to get it right on equity. Our leaders must act now in order to save the lives of those working to protect and support us all.