The Muslim Justice League has been active around Greater Boston for about a decade. As Executive Director Fatema Ahmad describes its mission, the organization “focuses on everything that’s come out of the war on terror, which we’re in the 25th anniversary of.”
That robust task, Ahmad noted in a recent interview with BINJ, is “heavy and directly connected” to the “growing surveillance state.”
“Mosques have been infiltrated by FBI informants for so long,” she said, “that it’s a joke in our community to say, Oh yeah, obviously that person is an informant.”
The jokes end there. Ahmad continued, “We surveyed about 100 Muslim folks around the Boston area, and one out of 10 had either been visited, or their family had been visited by the FBI. Like 10% of our community deals with that.”
She continued, “You’ll hear about it when leftists or other people get a door knock. They’re freaking out, Oh my God, the FBI came to my door. In our community, that is just happening all the time.”
While such adversity and the resulting advocacy is lonely at times, the Muslim Justice League director is somewhat hopeful about apparent changes, even recently, in how the general public views surveillance. In particular, there’s been increasing outrage over Flock Safety, a Georgia-based company that provides ALPR (Automated License Plate Reader) tech to thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country. The cameras photograph every passing vehicle, with the details then entered into a searchable database.
We asked Ahmad how her organization is harnessing the energy fomenting against these tools, both during the upcoming National Week Of Action Against ALPRs (Aug. 16-22, organized by the open-source mapping project DeFlock.org), as well as when the larger protest trend wears down. Her responses, edited and parsed by subtopic, are below.
On 25 years of watching the watchers …
For our organization, we know that there’s two sides to the war on terror. There’s the war itself, which, in the past few years, has escalated so severely in Palestine and Iran and other locations, Lebanon, and so on. And then there’s the domestic side of that, which is a lot of policing and surveillance infrastructure, built on Islamophobia. So for us, as a frontline community that’s heavily surveilled, we fight surveillance not just because it impacts us, but because we know Islamophobia is being used to justify it against everybody. That’s really the major way that, in the past 25 years, surveillance has expanded in this country.
Initially, the organization launched because Boston actually became a pilot city for a new type of counter-terrorism program called Countering Violent Extremism. A lot of [surveillance] starts with our community and goes way back before the war on terror, but that programming was really launched by the Obama administration as a way to identify people before they supposedly commit an act of violence.
Now, we’re seeing the Trump administration is taking that to a whole other level of policing people’s ideologies. There’s everything from behavioral policing or behavioral threat assessments to fusion centers … I think about 80 fusion centers around the country. We happen to have one of the biggest in the country, BRIC, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, which, I joke, is like Regina George in Mean Girls. Who hasn’t been victimized by BRIC or surveilled by BRIC?
We are a really tiny community, and for us, the best way to go about this is to build solidarity and show people how everything from ICE to these fusion centers came out of the post-9/11 fervor to expand policing. A lot of it, we’re the tip of the spear of really horrible policies that get pushed and then end up impacting other people.
On increased public scrutiny of mass surveillance …
Surveillance is not typically the sexy topic that people want to think about. But I think there has been a significant shift in the past 10 years. I would say before 2020, even talking about policing in a really radical, revolutionary way, folks were like, What are you talking about? Why are you trying to change these things? With 2020, there was just such growing awareness of how deep these issues run, how systemic it is in the US, and more concern around policing in general.
With surveillance, there’s this weird thing happening now where people feel like there’s nothing they can do about it because there is so much surveillance. What am I gonna do? Go off the grid? And there’s also a lot of people in this moment who are like, I don’t want this. I don’t want these data centers. I don’t want AI in every aspect of my life. It’s reached a tipping point where I think people are angry, and everyone feels surveilled now.
I remember the moment when the TSA introduced the full body scanners, and a lot of people were like, Oh, I don’t wanna do that. Muslims were like, Where have you been? We’ve been getting full body checks every time we go to the airport. I’m sorry now you guys have to get these body scans. There’s always this tension that certain communities are not just surveilled but really impacted by it. But it’s great if everyone is really starting to see that it could impact you. It is really intrusive, and we could all fight back. The fights against data centers and license plate readers are really exciting right now.
On ICE activity at Logan Airport …
When you think about what ICE is doing in the country … a lot of what’s happening to African and Muslim folks is in the airports, and it’s not visible because you’re just not even getting in the country. They’re sending you right back on the plane, and sometimes they’re often checking people’s phones to see what social media you’re following.
There’s things that we don’t even prepare for. You go to the airport. Suddenly it’s like, Smile, we’re gonna do these things. The kind of know your rights materials folks get about interacting with police in general, it is different in the airport. They can actually detain you. They can take your devices. It’s happening to citizens all of the time. They’re taking phones, laptops. So people are often shocked when it happens at an airport because, if you’re on the street, you would think, A cop can’t just come up and ask me these types of questions. And the questions that you get, especially from CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection], can be really invasive. For Muslim folks, it’s often, Where do you go pray? Who did you vote for? What tribe are you part of? They are really asking wild questions, and you feel like, I’m in this room that I’m not gonna get out of unless I answer it.
There’s a lot of horrific things that happen behind the scenes at the airports. And the technology that they have, the amount of information sharing between airlines and DHS and CBP … that’s like a whole other level of security screening that can cause you to miss your flight. And it often is just you have a name similar to someone else on a terrorist watch list. There’s all of these watch lists behind the scenes that they’re using.
I think the other important thing to know is for Boston, Logan Airport is actually notoriously bad for these things, especially for folks who are not citizens. So if you noticed last year when ICE was really getting going, there were a number of airport incidents where people were detained—including white folks. That was the surprise. It’s usually just us. All of them were at the Boston airport. So we actually tell people if you’re traveling internationally and coming back into the country, maybe don’t make Logan your point of entry.
On Automated License Plate Readers—all of them! …
Everyone’s getting these license plate readers now. Everyone talks about Flock, and it’s important to know that’s just a brand. License plate readers are a technology that has many brands, and the way I’ve been talking about it is as vehicle recognition. Because I think people hear “license plate reader” and they think, Oh, it’s just looking at my license plate and nothing else. No, honey, they are tracking your vehicle.
License plate readers have been around, but honestly, the heavy use really started in the past year or two. They’ve really exploded around the country, particularly because of Flock. … It’s really good to think about [in terms of], there’s a camera, and then there’s this technology where for license plate readers or vehicle recognition, you might need a fancy enough camera to really get a good look at the car. So not every camera could turn into a license plate reader necessarily, and that’s why they’re being marketed now in this way where they’re implementing these particular cameras mostly on poles.
A lot of them have solar power chargers, and both because they’re everywhere and they’re fixed locations, it’s much easier now with the expansion of the technology and AI for them to just find you wherever you are. If they, through a particular brand, have access to all the license plate readers across the country, chances are you got spotted on some camera at some point, and they can probably track you down.
So I think that’s why people are really understanding how creepy this is. We’ve been building up to it, unfortunately. So now it’s this much bigger problem, and you have license plate reader cameras everywhere. Some of them are mobile, but especially in the past year, there’s been major installation and deployment of fixed license plate reader cameras. It can be law enforcement. It can be the Department of Transportation.
On the response to ALPRs in Massachusetts …
Even just in the past couple of weeks, now everyone hates license plate readers. And I’m like, Wow, I love that everyone knows … what I’m talking about. … We have lots of members, and we have a lot of coalition building and movement building that we have done around these issues, and I think with license plate readers especially, that is across the board something everyone hates. Right-wing, left-wing folks, which is complicated to think about, like, How do we take these issues on? How do we move folks? But it is really cool to see how many people are seeing this as an issue and trying to take it on.
In Cambridge, [the city] had started putting [Flock cameras] up. Then months later, when people learned about ALPRs, there was pushback. The city council paused the contract, and Flock kept putting them up, and that pissed the city council enough to stop the contract.
In terms of the playbook [to counter Flock], we’re trying to actually put some new stuff out there, because in a lot of cities what we’ve seen is people are pushing back on the Flock contract. And maybe they’re ending the Flock contract specifically, but they’re not actually stopping license plate readers. This just happened in Salem, Massachusetts. They said, Yeah, we’ll get rid of Flock. We’re gonna get Axon instead. Or maybe they’re going to get Motorola Vigilant, which the Massachusetts State Police have, which directly works with ICE.
People are not realizing, [license-plate readers come from] more than this brand [Flock Safety]. We have to think about the technology as a whole. So we haven’t seen anyone do this yet, but for us as MJL, we’re really pushing that cities should just ban it. Ban the technology completely. There are some folks pushing for data regulation models, and I think that’s just nonsense. These tech companies always have ways of getting around it. Law enforcement have ways of getting around that, and we have seen how dangerous this technology is. There are reports every day of cops using it to track people.
On the National Week of Action Against ALPRs …
The Muslim Justice League [is] working with a bunch of people to lead some of the [ALPR-related actions] here [in Massachusetts], both for the week of action and going forward. So we’ll have research coming out soon that will show folks which cities have the highest number of license plate readers, the highest density, and where people should actually start organizing.
For example, if you look at the DeFlock map, you’ll see a lot in Medford, but it’s not Medford Police, it’s all Tufts University. Tufts has their own deployment that’s as big as some of the cities. So we want to be able to show folks in places like Lowell, Springfield, Quincy, Boston, Worcester, and a few other places, there’s really high concentrations of license plate readers. For us, we’re also tying this back to everyone’s favorite thing, BRIC.
A bunch of cities are getting license plate reader funding through BRIC, and BRIC is doing its own regional network. So Boston and Quincy are the two big ones that they’re starting with, and then I think there’s a few other cities within BRIC, because BRIC has nine cities officially that are supposed to be part of that.
And Boston itself, the Boston Police did a Flock pilot last year, and now they’re actually piloting Motorola and Axon [ALPRs] instead of Flock. … The primary buyers are law enforcement. You can’t just talk about Flock and not talk about the law enforcement institutions behind it and how much money is going to the police and DHS to buy all of this. You need to look at BRIC. Like for the City of Cambridge, it doesn’t quite matter that they stopped their own license plate readers. They’re still part of BRIC. Technically, they could access the BRIC regional license plate reader network.
What’s the playbook to get organized to actually get rid of them, not just stop one contract and then do data regulation or whatever? I think this is a really good moment to actually ban license plate readers. I hope folks at the Massachusetts state level start thinking about that too, but we’re really gonna start at the city local level.
Almost a year ago, we did a bike ride and mapped a bunch [of cameras] in Cambridge and Boston because at the time, they both had Flock. Now that Flock has gone from both of those cities, we’ll do some downtown Boston mapping of the new license plate readers. And if you’re not based in Boston, you should still come help us map them, and then you can take that back to your neighborhood. And in your neighborhood then you’ll be able to map them yourselves.
More information at muslimjusticeleague.org and noalprs.com.
