Thursday: Oppose Cambridge Police Surveillance!

This Thursday, the Cambridge Pole & Conduit Commission will consider Flock’s requests to put up 15 to 20 surveillance cameras with Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technologies around Cambridge. The Cambridge City Council, in a 6-3 vote on Feb. 3rd, approved Cambridge PD’s request to install these cameras. It was supposed to roll out to Central Square only, but it looks like Cambridge PD and Flock have asked to put up a camera at the corner of Rindge and Alewife Brook Parkway facing eastward. That is pretty far from Central Square.

Anyone living within 150 feet of the camera location should have been mailed letters from Flock telling them that the can attend the Pole & Conduit Commission meeting this Thursday at 9am and comment on Flock’s request. The Pole & Conduit Commission hasn’t posted its agenda or the requests it will consider on Thursday. If you got a letter or found out that you are near where Flock wants to install one of these cameras, please attend the meeting to speak against it and notify your neighbors.

The Cambridge Day, who recently published a story on us, reports that City Councilors Patty Nolan, Sumbul Siddiqui and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler have called for reconsidering introducing more cameras to Cambridge. These cameras are paid for by the federal Urban Area Security Initiative grant program and the data they collect will be shared with the Boston Regional Information Center (BRIC) and from there to ICE, CBP and other agencies that are part of Trump’s new secret police already active in the Boston area.

We urge you to attend this meeting at 9am on Thursday and speak against the camera nearest you, if you received a letter or know that the camera will be within 150 feet of your residence. You can register in advance and the earlier you register, the earlier you will be able to speak. Issues you can bring up:

• A Texas sheriff recently searched ALPR data to identify the location of a Texas woman who sought an out-of-state abortion. We will see more efforts like this as conservative state legislatures criminalize abortion and attempt to force their views on us;
• The Cambridge Police Department has stated in a public hearing that they use license plate readers to monitor traffic in the vicinity of protests. People exercising their 1st Amendment right to peaceful protest should not fear that they will end up in a local, commonwealth or federal database because their car was near a protest;
• Last year, Boston shared its ALPR data 37 times with federal agencies and state police in other states. The Flock ALPR database is available nationaly and Flock has a pilot contract with Customs and Border Patrol to send them ALPR data directly;
• In the past, ALPR companies have not done a good job keeping their data secure. In Boston, there was a leak of ALPR data on 68,924 scans of 45,020 unique vehicles which caused the Boston Police Department to suspend ALPR data collection in 2013.

We urge affected Cambridge residents to speak at Thursday’s hearing at 9am. If you plan to attend or can put up flyers in your area about the cameras, please email us at info@masspirates.org.