January 29th, 2020 IRC Meeting

Review

• 4th Amendment Lobby Day
• Cryptoparty

Decisions/Endorsements

Anti-Ring Post

Draft Text:

Jeff Bezos, using his media empire, created the "porch pirate" narrative in order to push demand for Ring cameras. Having deployed them in communities across the state, he is now poised to sell access to this spy network to the police.

If the state proposed building surveilance cameras outside the front door of every house in every city, there would be justified outrage. But by making the Ring camera a consumer object, it becomes a status symbol, something enviable.

The purported AI technology behind it is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, powered by an underpaid team of thousands of human contractors to monitor live feeds from across the world. And on top of that, the software is insecure and unreliable!

The police departments of at least nine Massachusetts communities have signed data sharing agreements with Amazon. They are all over the state including Lowell, Malden, Wellesley and Westfield. We call on police departments statewide to reject the unproven and worthless Ring technology and immediately divest any current contracts with Amazon.

We also urge all residents to agitate for their community to ban municipal use of facial recognition technology and for our Commonwealth to adopt the State & Local Facial Recognition Tech Moratorium (S.1385 & H.1538). Bans in Somerville, Northampton and Brookline are only the start. Together we can end the use of such surveillance technology.

Projects

Goals for Q1 2020:

• Organize meetups
• Organize Fundraiser
• Organize candidate trainings
• Revise platform

Video Newsletter/Podcast

Leader: Joseph

• Next pirate news recording?

Regional Meetings/Events

Leader: jokeefe

• Worcester (Malt)
• Boston (jokeefe)

Democracy and Dogfood (Tech)

Next meeting will be in February. Topics are:

• find discussion/voting system;
• update CCTV cameras to include older cameras outside North America we didn't include;
• write an app to record the location/ownership of CCTV cameras;
• set up torrents for PirateCon videos (creynolds);
• post remaining audio for PirateCon talks (srevilak).

Platform Discussion

Moved to 2020 Platform Discussion

Tabled Projects

Computer Donations

• jokeefe contacted friend who refurbishes computers for a non-profit
• Archived https://piratenpad.de/p/MassPiratesComputerDonations - move to wiki

FOSS Tutorials

Worcester farm group is interested in having some FOSS tutorials. Perhaps:

• how to do basic labels in GIMP,
• work through a few sample spreadsheets related to seed cost and
• similarly applicable real-world situations, depending on the needs of the group

Basically how to do graph design & product management with open source tools. Malt will put together a one paragraph description of what we need and we can mail it out to ask pirates to help.

Fight bills to make the Film Credit Permanent

H.2419 would make the film tax credit permanent. It is supposed to expire in 2023. The bill has 100+ signatures this time around.

Upcoming Events

• 1/29, 7-9pm, Boston Cryptoparty, Encuentro 5, Boston
• 2/2, 11am-1pm, Democracy and Dogfood (Tech) Meeting, Diesel Cafe, Somerville
• 2/4, 7-9pm, Mass MeshNet Tech Meeting, Culture House, Harvard Square
• 2/11, 7-9pm, Mass MeshNet Tech Meeting, Democracy Center, Cambridge
• 2/18, 7-9pm, Mass MeshNet Tech Meeting, Encuentro 5, Boston
• 2/25, 7-9pm, Mass MeshNet Tech Meeting
• Spring 2020, ?, Worcester Meetup
• Spring 2020, ?, Springfield Meetup
• Spring 2020, ?, Boston Meetup

Participants

• srevilak (Steve Revilak, Arlington, MA)
• jokeefe (James O'Keefe, Somerville)
• Malt (Sam capradae, Worcester)
• Pirate_Joe (Joseph Onoroski, Lowell, MA)

Observers

• davidd
• ChanServ
• hvxgr
• Deffy