June 29th, 2025 Meeting

Meeting to be held via video conference: https://communitybridge.com/bbb-room/mass-pirates-member-meeting/

Recording:

Decisions/Endorsements

Commonwealth Bills to Review

• An Act to promote transparency of facial recognition and driver's license photos (S.1731))
• An Act to implement the recommendations of the special commission on facial recognition technology (H.1946/S.1053)
• An Act relative to unmanned aerial systems (H.3749 / S.2438)
• An Act relative to protecting Massachusetts residents against federal government surveillance (H.2687)
• Dignity Not Deportations Act (H.1588 / S.1122)
• Right to Repair Bills:
  • H.433 & S.189
  • H.398
  • H.1278 (Hearing occurred)
• Decrim Sex Work Bills from https://bswac.org/. Emailed Rikki and Desmond their thoughts on them as they are the most up to date on the issue:
  • An Act to promote the health and safety of people in the sex trade (H.1980)
  • An Act to study the decriminalization of sex work (H.2467)
  • An Act relative to safe reporting (H.1747)
  • An Act relative to sexual assault by an officer (H.2634)

Here is an etherpad for people to offer suggestions.

Bills We Decided On

• An Act to provide accountability in the use of biometric recognition technology and comprehensive enforcement (H.96/S.36)
• Civil Asset Forfeiture reform (H.1953)

Federal Bills to Review

• Senators working on a bill that would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 is the primary reason we have freedom of speech on the Internet. See this explainer. We have long supported Section 230 implicitly, but we never wrote up a statement why. Including why we support free speech seems important right now, as well. Possible statement:

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA230), specifically section 230(c) which reads:

(c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
   (1)Treatment of publisher or speaker
      No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

   (2)Civil liability
   No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
      (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
      (B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1)

is the reason we have user shared content on millions of sites around the Internet. It is what protects the comment sections of our site and all others on the Internet.

Efforts to tamper with Section 230 have made people worse off and harmed our 1st Amendment rights. With FOSTA and SESTA, Congress excluded consensual sex work from Section 230 protections. The resulting law has made consensual sex work more difficult and more dangerous for sex workers while not stopping sex-focused human trafficking.

The Massachusetts Pirate Party categorically opposes efforts to exclude any human activity from Section 230 protections or to limit or expire Section 230 protections in whole or in part.

• Budget Reconciliation bill:
  • Congress set to hand Trump billions to recruit more ICE agents
  • Deportations to Add Almost $1 Trillion in Costs to the “Big Beautiful Bill”
  • What’s in the 2025 House Reconciliation Bill?
  • Illustrative Distributional Effects of Policies Consistent with the House Concurrent Budget Resolution for Fiscal Year 2025
  • The Republican Plot to Un-Educate America
• Anti-File Sharing bills:
  • Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (H.R.791) - ...more
  • American Copyright Protection Act (Not yet posted) ...more)
  • ... more on the bills at https://torrentfreak.com/fears-of-overblocking-unite-critics-of-u-s-pirate-site-blocking-bill/
• Kids Online Safety Act (S.1748)
• Pro Codes Act (H.R.4009 ...more
• American Music Fairness Act (H.R.861)

Projects/Events

Pirate News

Leader: Joseph

• Pirate news recording scheduled for Sunday, July 6th, 7pm with go-live at 7:30pm.

2025 Voter Outreach

Leader: Jamie

Based on Mass. Election Division data, we have 721 voters.

Alec has sent public record requests asking for all voter records to the 221 cities and towns where we know Pirates are registered. We have identified the names and addresses of over 300 voters and are waiting for the remaining responses. Most take 5-10 business days. Only Boston has notified us that they may need up to 25 business days.

Based on the USPS direct mail calculator, per piece mailing costs are:

• post cards: $0.19-0.29/piece
• envelope: $0.29/piece

To mail them a post card with our upcoming events would cost $0.10 to print and $0.19-0.29 to mail a single card. The cost for 721 cards is roughly $220.

2026 Campaigns

Leader: Jamie

Jamie and Alec are working on the 2026 election plan.

Participants

Observers

• Jamie
• Joe
• Steve

Summary

Reports

• Good event last week at the Boxboro Fifer's day

Future Events

• We had a trolling incident at our last conference; they were behaving badly, we asked them to leave, and they did.
• In the future, our event sign ups should have a checkbox to agree to our code of conduct
• We should have a copies of code of conduct at events

Decisions and Endorsements

• There are updated links for bills to review.
• None of the bills have had hearings, with the exception of right to repair motorized wheelchairs.
• We looked through https://malegislature.gov/Bills/194/H2687. It seems good; we'll ask our friends at restore the fourth for their take.

Federal Bills to review

• Budget reconciliation. Appears to be almost through the senate. Looks like it will bloat ICE.
• LIGO may be one of the items cut by the reconciliation bill. https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-s-proposed-cut-giant-physics-experiment-could-snuff-out-new-form-astronomy

Section 230

• Jamie wrote a draft position statement on efforts to repeal Section 230
• We'll add this to our list of issues.

Pirate News

• Jamie and Joe will record next sunday

Voter outreach

• We jave 721 pirate voters, in 221 cities and towns