How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance

If you weren’t on campus this summer, then something you didn’t see – perhaps by design – was the installation of hundreds of small eyeball-shaped surveillance cameras. Building 1 alone now has 6-7 cameras per floor and The Tech has reported on the locations of more than 500 others.[1] Cameras point towards faculty members’ offices and bathroom entrances. Some are so close to faculty offices that their microphones could reasonably be expected to pick up and record what is said in those rooms.[2] It turns out that MIT is exploring adding AI capabilities provided by Ambient.ai. This could make searching for any particular person a snap. You could just type in: “Show me all footage of the curly-haired chemistry colleague going to the bathroom.” In the May 2026 Institute Faculty Meeting, the MIT administration acknowledged that they have already tested AI capacities on our campus without our knowledge or consent. Some of our colleagues don’t like these new surveillance cameras. They say they are intrusive. They say they don’t want their movements, conversations, and bathroom rhythms monitored. They say that campus culture has become increasingly repressive, stifling speech and chilling protest. They say that the mere possibility of AI tracking sets into motion the Panopticon effect, whereby constant yet unverifiable surveillance leads us to anxiously alter our own behavior because someone could be tracking us at any moment. They say that more surveillance doesn’t equal more safety. They say that governments with a penchant for authoritarianism could enlist the information for broad-based repression. They say that facial detection and recognition systems have well-documented gender and racial biases. They say that it’s a waste of money. We do not agree with these annoying colleagues who are causing trouble for our benevolent Big Brother Tech administrators! We do not agree with these annoying colleagues who are causing trouble for our benevolent Big Brother Tech administrators! For this reason, we are writing to let the community know about our new arts initiative: The Initiative to Beautify the AI-capable Surveillance Benevolently Installed by our Administrator Overseers and the MIT Corporation In Collaboration with Big Brother Tech Companies. For a handy acronym, you can refer to our project as the IBAISBIAOMITCORPICBBTC initiative. The goal of the IBAISBIAOMITCORPICBBTC initiative is to beautify every single AI-capable camera on our campus as an indicator of our support and love for the campus surveillance now bestowed upon us from up high. To beautify the cameras, we are sticking luxurious gems of many colors on each and every camera. You can see a beautified AI-capable surveillance camera in the photo below. The gems are removable in case someone doesn’t like them, but we frankly cannot imagine who might dispute the aesthetic appeal of bedazzled surveillance cameras. The IBAISBIAOMITCORPICBBTC initiative started in August 2026 and will continue for as long as there are naked, AI-capable surveillance cameras waiting for bedazzlement. An AI-capable surveillance camera in Building 10, post-bedazzling. Photo: Claudia Tomateo Each gem that we place on an AI-capable surveillance camera is an indicator of our admiring appreciation for Big Brothertechnology. At a time of austerity and belt-tightening, the MIT administration loves us enough to spend millions of dollars to watch over us as closely as if we were maximum security prison inmates, or bugs under microscopes. For that reason, we, the co-authors, are paying for the luxurious gemstones out of our own pockets. No need to thank us! We do it because we love the Institute and we know that these are hard times. The choices the MIT administration has made during these trying circumstances are so inspiring. They align perfectly with our core values. For example, deep funding cuts to the MIT Libraries have set into motion a plan to cancel our subscriptions to 700+ academic journals integral to our research and teaching.[3] But who needs journals when you have Grok and Instagram! The tiresomely old-school cost of supporting scholarship and pedagogy is so dull compared to the exciting opportunity of an Ambient.ai contract that will empower the tracking potential of our 500 new surveillance cameras! We are also glad that the administration only consulted a handful of staff and faculty (we are pretty sure it was five) before transforming our campus into an AI-capable Panopticon. This was exactly the correct number of people, each with exactly the correct viewpoint on the issue, which is that, to be safer, we should always have more cameras and cops. This is always the right recipe! There is definitely no scholarship or first-person experience that contradicts this. Thank goodness the administration did not broaden its initial decision-making process to hear from its own faculty who study AI nor to consult with international students and scholars, undocumented people, survivors of intimate partner violence and stalking, trans and nonbinary people, and communities of color. Those perspectives definitely do not matter and the five people who were consulted do indeed know exactly what to do (AI-CAPABLE CAMERAS! EVERYWHERE!). We look forward not only to the beauty that these bedazzled cameras will bring, but also to their efficiency in turning the MIT tradition of hacking into a distant memory. Now that no action in our hallowed halls can be assumed anonymous or unmonitored, our whole culture will change. And what a relief that is! After all, we do not want to be seen as celebrating the freewheeling creativity of outside-the-box thinkers and doers! That kind of licentiousness is not helpful for attracting the obedient NPC students and faculty that the Institute depends on.[4] Even better, maybe MIT can now arrange for hacks – especially ones related to particularly ticklish topics – to trigger the AI-capable cameras to alert the Cambridge police directly, so that we can auto-prosecute the perpetrators (thereby saving resources – so efficient!). Sounds like science fiction, right? And yet our forward-thinking administration has already collaborated with Cambridge district prosecutors to press criminal charges against students doing hacks on campus, so this collaboration should be a snap to set up.[5] We are confident we speak for all faculty when we say that we simply cannot have students publicly expressing moral, ethical and political viewpoints on a college campus. We are confident we speak for all faculty when we say that we simply cannot have students publicly expressing moral, ethical and political viewpoints on a college campus. Thankfully, the Sauronic array of electronic eyeballs can suppress that kind of rowdiness, too. Of course, MIT’s recently updated protest and demonstration rules are already doing a great job stifling student political self-expression and assembly on campus, all by themselves.[6] But just think how much more effective they will be at crushing all civil dissent when coupled with omnipresent cameras that produce such a detailed stream of documentary evidence that even the most peaceful sit-in can be prosecuted as vigorously as if it were a violent crime![7] In addition, these AI-enabled surveillance cameras will be an enormous boon in the battle to keep us all safe from unauthorized posters – the infestation of unapproved art besmirching the blankness of our alabaster walls and half-empty bulletin boards. We can’t wait to see how having more technological tools for censorship will turbocharge MIT’s always-welcome efforts to micromanage how community members decorate our offices, dorms, and hallways. During the 2025 MIT Arts Festival, for example, an artwork about MIT’s Indigenous history was censored because it violated the postering policy. And thank goodness nobody got to see that! Truly, all hell could have broken loose. Bedazzled Camera in Building 10. Photo: Claudia Tomateo Speaking of keeping minoritized groups on a tighter leash, wouldn’t gender-neutral bathrooms be great places to post cameras? Anyone supporting gender neutrality by using one of those bathrooms is definitely suspicious for their wokeness. They might even be “radically pro-transgender” and thus now qualify as a terrorist.[8] Forget all that research on the gender and racial biases of AI.[9] If subjecting everyone on campus to 24-hour-a-day camera surveillance gives YOU a warm and cozy feeling of safety, who cares if others – such as international students, trans and nonbinary folks, Palestinians or other community members of color – feel the opposite way? Those over-privileged whiners are always making a lot of fuss over nothing! In fact, we can’t think of a single reason why existing on MIT’s campus at this particular sociopolitical moment might make members of those groups scared of having their image and voice data stored in the cloud and sold to third-party data brokers. We were therefore stunned when, at last May’s Institute Faculty Meeting, MIT faculty members who study AI raised serious concerns about Ambient.ai’s data usage and retention policies. So overblown were their worries that a committee was constituted to advise the administration on contract terms.[10] Now that all those expensive cameras have been bought and installed, we agree that it’s the perfect time to loop in a bit more community input – but only to address the carefully circumscribed question of which of the many wonderful AI tools MIT should subscribe to. We are also happy to trust the MIT administration and Ambient.ai with all of our personal data and campus movements. We are also happy to trust the MIT administration and Ambient.ai with all of our personal data and campus movements. We know that MIT will only provide information to criminally prosecute its own community members for really, really good reasons, like protesting a genocide or downloading a bunch of scholarly articles in a server closet. [11] Another soothing fact is that the MIT Police is one of the only university police agencies still sharing data with the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force.[12] Almost every other municipal and university police force left this agreement after it was publicly denounced by civil liberties organizations. But MIT Police is still generously sharing our data with the FBI, thank goodness! All the more reason to embrace the loving gaze of our beneficent overlords. That said, if any students, staff, or faculty still have pesky concerns about this unprecedented ratcheting-up of campus surveillance, now you know that there’s a committee to contact with complaints.[13] Or, you could join us, the cheerful bedazzlers, by celebrating the beauty of our beholdenness to Big Brother Tech. Do you feel proud to be involved in the capitalist project of improving Ambient.ai’s services and enriching surveillance for all people, everywhere? Do you patriotically embrace the fact that Ambient.ai shares the data they collect with government and law enforcement when they receive subpoenas, without needing to ask or tell the institutions from whom they collected it? If so, there are hundreds of white plastic eyelids out there awaiting artistic adornment to enhance their visibility even as they enhance ours! In sum, we thank our glorious administration for their brilliant technical solution to a social problem. This is how it should be, because all social and political problems definitely have a technical solution, and usually we just need to pay for something involving AI rather than have an open discussion as a community (what a waste of time that would be!). We urge our dissenting colleagues to get with the program, because AI-capable campus surveillance is modern, efficient, innovative, and inevitable. It will definitely make all groups on campus feel equally safe and secure. Additionally, since all protest and dissent will be chilled, and all hacks rendered impossible, we will have a perfectly orderly and tranquil campus. Even the illegal art won’t be posted on the bulletin boards! (Or, if it does get posted, the students can be caught and maybe we could cut their threateningly creative hands off? Just an idea!) Thank you, Glorious MIT administration and Glorious MIT Corporation, for knowing what is in our best interests. Note: The IBAISBIAOMITCORPICBBTC initiative is inspired by the artwork of Jill Magid, MIT alumna, and Julia Scher, MIT Visual Arts Program Fellow and former MIT Lecturer.[14] [1] See https://thetech.com/2026/04/16/ai-surveillance-cameras [2] Although the MIT administration was directly asked over email whether these new cameras have built-in microphones, they declined to answer this question. A FAQ site they subsequently put up to address faculty concerns (https://evpt.mit.edu/campus-security-cameras-frequently-asked-questions) notably does not deny that these new cameras have built-in microphones, which is concerning since such hardware could be hacked to record sound even if MIT itself chooses to refrain from doing so. This is against the law in Massachusetts, which is an all-party consent state in regards to audio recording (https://www.ambient.ai/learn/massachusetts-video-surveillance-laws). [3] For funding cuts to the libraries see this article: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/12/business/mit-library-layoffs-closing/. And for a subset of the journals whose subscriptions are on the docket for cancellation, see https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/oa3n8dnb3qyoackrhrqv9/Proposed-Journal-Cuts-Relevant-to-SA.docx?rlkey=v28nq4sqbwyujnxyzsb7qmfb8&dl=0 [4] NPCs are non-player characters in gaming culture. They are the essential automaton workers of the future, and we should be striving to create them through our research and pedagogy. [5] An MIT student involved in a recent hack that resulted in such charges being filed has shown us their defendant’s copy of the criminal charges filed against them. We have also seen emails sent by members of the MIT Police in which they voluntarily shared personal information and surveillance images of an MIT student with the Cambridge Police, who had issued a general bulletin asking for help identifying protesters at a demonstration that took place in Cambridge (but not anywhere on or near MIT’s campus). [6] See https://fnl.mit.edu/how-the-rights-of-mit-student-protesters-were-undermined-and-how-to-fix-things-moving-forward/ [7] MIT’s own policy states that the surveillance camera data it gathers is not to be used against students in disciplinary cases (https://ist.mit.edu/about/policies/video-surveillance). Yet those of us who have served as faculty advisers to students in past Committee on Discipline (COD) cases have witnessed surveillance images and video with sound being used as evidence against MIT students in multiple COD cases. [8] See https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-USCT-Strategy-1.pdf [9] A recent example of AI surveillance sent eight police cars to swarm a Black teenager eating Doritos: https://kansascitydefender.com/technology-ai/eight-police-cars-swarm-a-black-teen-guns-ai-nationwide/ [10] See https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/42mt23qkq1witxyne12py/Security-Cameras-Group-Membership-7-8-26.docx?rlkey=j0ezgklfcjdfvtt8kv2x6tlbh&e=1&dl=0 [11] Regarding recent anti-genocide protests, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-Palestine_protests_at_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology; regarding the legal case that contributed to Aaron Swartz’s decision to kill himself, see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case-not-neutral-not-leading-not-standing-technologists and https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ [12] See theshoestring.org/2026/05/16/hampden-sheriff-last-local-holdout-for-controversial-anti-terrorism-partnership/. For more details about how MIT chooses to share information with external law enforcement agencies, see https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/pfhx6ts6bk3ux1nv9arje/PublicSafety-annualreport-2025.pdf?rlkey=qcepo446z6kqeciegno8w7l0r&dl=0 and footnote 5 (above). On the broader local repercussions of such information sharing, see https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/05/08/boston-environmental-activists-fbi-visits. [13] See https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/42mt23qkq1witxyne12py/Security-Cameras-Group-Membership-7-8-26.docx?rlkey=j0ezgklfcjdfvtt8kv2x6tlbh&e=1&dl=0 [14] Our bedazzling is inspired by Julia Scher’s artworks (https://act.mit.edu/2025/08/surveillance-seduction-and-subversion-the-art-of-julia-scher/) and Jill Magid’s System Azure Security Ornamentation (https://www.jillmagid.com/projects/system-azure-security-ornamentation).