Mass. ACLU Scores Important Civil Liberties Victory with Cambridge City Council Vote Against DHS Surveillance Cameras

Kudos are due to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Cambridge City Councilor Marjorie Decker (D) for spearheading a successful drive to win Monday's unanimous Cambridge City Council vote to halt work on the installation of 8 surveillance cameras under the auspices of a program funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security - the very name of which inspires wags of a certain age to start doing their best Col. Klink impressions and waxing rhapsodic about "Ze Homeland" while goose-stepping about.

The $4.6 million DHS grant - secretly applied for by still-unnamed local officials - allowed for the construction of 180 surveillance cameras in Boston, Cambridge and 7 other area cities in two phases ... phase 1 starting just in time for the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Which fellow locals may recall is the first time Boston had been under military occupation since the Revolutionary War (although we came close in April 1968 after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated).

This is a bold step for Cambridge to take at a time when the general trend is to put cameras in every public place possible - led by the United Kingdom among others. And truly bolder than it appears at first blush.

It seems that the Cambridge City Council itself was unaware of the DHS project until last summer when the Cambridge Chronicle broke the story and has had difficulty getting straight answers from its own Police Commissioner and Fire Chief. According to the ACLU, the councilors have been asking questions like "what agencies would have access to the cameras' digital images?" And "where would they be stored and for how long?" And would they be transmitted to the supersecret Commonwealth Fusion Center in Maynard, MA - part of a national network of over 60 such centers meant to act as regional versions of the National Security Agency for the purpose of domestic surveillance to "fight terrorism" - set up with the full blessing of former MA Governor Mitt Romney (R) back in 2004.

The official excuse - voiced by representatives of the Cambridge Police and scattered officials elsewhere who don't exactly seem to be leaping to the fore to defend the DHS move, is that the cameras are being installed to help local security forces "evacuate the city" in the event of earthquake, forest fire, Smurf Attack or Islamic Revolution. The fact that your faithful editors here at Open Media Boston could install second-hand Fisher Price Baby's First Webcams in the same locations for like 20 bucks and network them for a few bucks more notwithstanding, the secretive way this whole initiative was handled smacks of Bush-era paranoia and deserved to be shut down on those grounds alone.

It must be stated that this ex post facto action by the Cambridge City Council is great, but a bit confusing since at least some of the cameras are already installed and the Cambridge Chronicle is currently running "test" pictures taken by the cameras. It's not clear how Cambridge officials expect to shut the surveillance effort down within their borders and make sure it stays shut down - given DHS' wide latitude to overrule local governments in the "interest of national security. But this movement had to start somewhere, and Cambridge is the first local government in the nation to take such action; so better late than never in this case.

Brookline residents meanwhile suffered a temporary defeat on the same issue as its Board of Selectmen just voted 3-2 to try the DHS cameras out for one year before making a long-term decision. Here's hoping Brookline residents get those cameras shut down at the end of that "trial period."

As such, we recommend Open Media Boston viewers check out the background of this situation on the ACLUM website, and join the effort to stop DHS surveillance cameras in Brookline and around Massachusetts. This surveillance network deserves to be opposed on First Amendment and privacy grounds alone - although there are plenty of other reasons to fight cameras in public places. Take your pick, and get to work.

And who knows? With a lot of elbow grease and a good bit of luck activists might ultimately force DHS to remove its cameras from public squares and reinstall them in the places they're most likely to catch terrorists trying to destroy the American way of life - in the boardrooms of the major banks, investment houses, and multinational corporations that are causing the global economic crisis. Now that would be a surveillance project we could all get behind.