How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance – MIT Faculty Newsletter

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! 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. 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.