Background

In June 2019, the ACLU of Massachusetts launched a campaign to “Press Pause” on the government’s use of face recognition and other at a distance biometric surveillance technologies. As a part of that campaign, we have filed dozens of public records requests with police agencies across the state, to learn about how they are using these technologies, and to learn about how companies are marketing their products. We filed a request with the Northampton Police Department and received hundreds of pages of documents in return, mostly marketing materials from surveillance companies eager to sell their products.