One of the reasons the history of Lowell is so fascinating is that you can take almost any issue of national importance and see how it played out in this city. Looking at a global issue in a local context makes it easier to relate to what was or is at stake.

For example, in the decades before the American Civil War, Lowell’s entire reason for existence was the production of cloth made from cotton harvested by enslaved people in the American south. Consequently, it was in the city’s economic interest to at least remain quiet about slavery in the United States. Yet Lowell also became a leader in the abolitionist movement. To read of the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act in a textbook is one thing; to hear how people who previously lived in your neighborhood struggled with the law enhances your understanding of it.

At this Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting, we caught a glimpse of this dynamic again at work. Two emerging flashpoints in American politics – data centers and the surveillance state – were both discussed by the council.

The topic of data centers arose in a Division of Planning and Development response to motions filed by Councilor Rita Mercier (in July) and Councilors Belinda Juran and Kim Scott (in March) asking for the status of zoning changes intended to regulate data centers.

According to the DPD response, the city commenced a comprehensive review of its entire zoning ordinance 13 months ago with the assistance of a consultant, Community Scale LLC, which had experience with data centers from earlier work with the city of Everett. A steering committee composed mostly of city employees and officials was created to oversee the process and has met several times. This fall there will be community outreach events, neighborhood group meetings, and an online comment form to gather community input. (The much-publicized June 29, 2026, meeting on data centers at the Butler School was part of this.) The city and its consultants are also reviewing how other communities have regulated data centers ranging from outright bans to detailed regulations that seek to limit adverse impacts.

Finally, DPD hopes to “develop two regulatory options for consideration by the City Council” and that these are expected to be initially presented to the council this October with final action coming by the end of January 2027.

On the surface, this discussion was noncontroversial, but I sense a disconnect of expectations. There has been a longstanding need to overhaul and update the city’s zoning code. That’s a big undertaking and it was likely difficult for DPD to get council backing to do it since it would require a lengthy, disciplined strategic commitment whereas the council tends to be reactionary and operates on a week-to-week basis. However, rising neighborhood animosity towards the big Markley data center triggered a council reaction. Hence council interest in changing the zoning to stop data center expansion. Following the management principle of “don’t let a crisis go to waste” it looks like DPD used the data center furor as a wedge to get the council to look comprehensively at zoning.

However, I’m not sure the council is interested in a comprehensive look at zoning but instead seeks patchwork solutions to whatever complaints constituents bring to them this week, be it data centers, ADUs, or something else.

Then the neighbors around the Markley facility who are plagued by noisy diesel generators and other quality of life issues, want their complaints remedied immediately which is something a zoning change would be hard pressed to do since new zoning rules typically don’t apply retroactively.

But opposition to data centers transcends the neighbors living around the existing facility. Across the United States, we’re seeing widespread voter opposition to data centers. You know that’s the case because politicians from both parties who once supported data centers have pivoted to radical opposition to them.

I think this opposition is only partly grounded in concerns about the data centers themselves. The harm they cause to the quality of life of those living around them; to the electrical grid; to the water supply; and to the environment, all are factors. However, a bigger concern is artificial intelligence itself, both as a technology that will take people’s jobs but more importantly perhaps as a mechanism to further enrich and empower the billionaire class that owns and controls them to the detriment of ordinary citizens everywhere. I suspect that concern exists among the citizens of Lowell and is growing.

At the start of this newsletter, I mentioned that the council addressed two issues of national importance with one being data centers. The other, which came to the council almost by accident, involves the surveillance state in the form of invasive security cameras.

Among the usual claims for property damage and requests for handicap parking signs on the Petitions section of the August 25, 2026, council agenda was a petition by a resident to “address City council regarding AI police state camera system discussion.”

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t watch council meetings live but catch the replay on YouTube the next day. One of the reasons I do that is so I can fast forward through citizen petitions which are either routine or present issues that don’t make much sense to me.

However, contrary to my past practice, I watched this entire segment and, more significantly, agreed with everything the petitioner had to say. The petitioner delivers his remarks at 2:30:40 of the YouTube transcript of the meeting, however, he also submitted his proposed remarks to the city clerk as his petition and is therefore online as part of the agenda packed, so I’ll quote some of what was written in that document:

I am here today to discuss the Al Flock cameras that have been installed all around Lowell. . .

. . . I am not necessarily against the use of police cameras in high crime areas. The Lowell police has been using them for a few decades now. You may have seen them in parking lots outside of stores with the flashing blue lights on them. These camera systems are called CCTVs, or “Closed Circuit Television”, meaning that the video is being recorded and saved on local hard drives stored in the Lowell police station. When footage is needed, they can log into the local server and pull video when needed. It’s exactly how security cameras work in a bank or a store.

These Al Flock cameras are different; they’re always on and always watching. These cameras have the power to recognize license plates, car models, faces, driving routines, clothing, ethnicity, etc. Anything that you can determine with your eyes, it can as well.

These cameras have the ability to take in all this information about you, track your every move, stalk you, and build a virtual profile of you, and store it on Big Brothers computer. What can these profiles be used for?

Flock is a private, multi-billion-dollar company whose systems collect and store footage in data centers (hence the rise in demand by tech companies to have these centers built in your area). Tech giants do not make all their money from selling hardware or subscription services. They make their money from storing and selling data.  . .

This is just the corporate business side of things. With Al and drone weapons, as well as government tyranny on the horizon, who knows what evil these cameras can lead to. . .

The petitioner ended by asking the council to (1) end the contract with Flock and remove all its cameras; and (2) let the people of Lowell decide if they want to be surveilled by a private company.

Flock Group Inc. which does business as Flock Safety, was founded in 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a privately held company that manufactures surveillance hardware and software. The company is valued at $7.5 billion, operates in 5,000 communities in 49 states and performs 20 billion scans of vehicles in the US each month. One of its primary initial funders was the billionaire Peter Thiel, who is co-founder of Palantir Technologies, a company that provides artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems to US security agencies and the military.

Flock has been much in the news lately and not in a good way. On August 28, 2026, the Lowell Sun reported that a Stow, Massachusetts, police officer resigned just before a disciplinary hearing in which he was accused of using the Flock Safety system multiple times “for no legitimate law enforcement reason.”

The same day, Wired magazine ran a story headline, “A Georgia Cop Used Flock to Track 2 Other Cops: His Ex and Her Friend.” The offending (now former) police officer used the Flock automatic license plate reader at least 56 times to track another officer with whom he had had an affair. He also used the system 29 times to track the vehicle of a third officer who was spending time with the former romantic partner. According to Wired, “. . . many [police] officers have instant access to Flock, a powerful, informative and invasive tool for tracking people’s locations. Across the country, there have been at least 45 documented incidents of police officers misusing Flock in order to look up or track current or former romantic partners.”

At Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting, after the petitioner spoke, councilors questioned Lowell Police Chief Greg Hudon who said that the Lowell Police Department has 25 Flock cameras around the city (and that DPD has Flock cameras intended to catch people illegally dumping). Chief Hudon said that the concerns expressed by the petitioner were well-founded, but the Lowell Police have procedures in place to limit Flock access to legitimate law enforcement purposes and an audit trail that helps ensure that’s the case. The Chief then emphasized how effective a crime-fighting tool these cameras are.

I think the Chief and most of the council were addressing concerns about rogue police officers tracking ex-spouses whereas the issue is much bigger than that. Councilor Juran understood the concern of the petitioner (and others, including me) when she said the problem was the aggregation of data collected by these cameras that would be used by others. She said that the use of the system by Lowell Police Officers was “the tip of the iceberg” and that Flock is using information collected by the cameras to identify people and potentially sharing that with others.

Chief Hudon replied that the Lowell Police have opted not to share data from the cameras, however, unless the system in Lowell is physically isolated from the Flock Company, the company and its technicians would still have access to the data notwithstanding any limits set by the Lowell user. With that access, who knows who else the data is being shared with.

Councilor Juran then moved to refer the matter to the public safety subcommittee for further discussion, but Mayor Gitschier suggested it might be best to hold that discussion in executive session since it might disclose strategies for fighting crime. The city solicitor said it would be more appropriate to do it in an executive session of the entire council rather than just the subcommittee, so that’s what is going to happen.

Councilor Juran’s concerns, like those of the petitioner, are well-founded and widely documented. For example, Wired has also reported that regulators in Illinois discovered last August that Flock had violated state law by running a now-paused pilot program that handed Customs and Border Protection access to cameras in the state. The magazine also reported that a police officer in Texas searched more than 83,000 Flock cameras across the country last year while searching for a woman who had a self-administered abortion.

The modern surveillance state has been with us for years now. If you search online for a new pair of sneakers, for the next 72 hours you are bombarded with ads for sneakers from every website and platform you visit. For the most part, it’s easy to dismiss this as the price we pay for internet access.

However, two things have combined to dial up the “I’m very concern about this” meter. First is the maturation and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence. Previously, there might be a lot of data about me floating around, but it would take someone a lot of time, effort and money to piece it together in a way that could be injurious to me. But AI changes everything. The super computers filling the data centers everyone is protesting can search, sort and combine billions of bytes of information in seconds and erase any expectation we have for privacy in our lives.

That those AI companies are owned by the same billionaires who crowded the front row in the U.S. Capitol rotunda on January 20, 2025, for President Trump’s inauguration only elevates those concerns. I’m fully convinced that the DOGE miscreants who burrowed into the Social Security Administration and Health & Human Services data bases walked away with digital copies of everyone’s financial and medical histories and also that that data is now being used in nefarious ways by the tech sector but also by a government that has shown its willingness to use every means available to punish its opponents and those whose race or gender don’t fit the regime’s narrowly defined norms. I’m sure Chief Hudon spoke in good faith when he said Lowell restricts outside access to the data collected by city surveillance cameras but believing that requires one to think the best of the AI companies and the billionaires who own them which is a leap of credibility that defies everything we’ve seen over the past 20 months. Since our elected representatives at the national level have been neutered (or worse) by the campaign cash flowing from these same billionaires, there is no hope for top-down protection from Congress. Consequently, it’s up to individuals in communities to speak out against this as part of a bottom-up effort to combat the growing authoritarianism we face. I’m not anti AI, but AI is just a tool that can be used for good or evil and right now, the balance is tipping the wrong way, so when it comes to data centers and surveillance cameras, I think the right path at the community level is to slam on the brakes.

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Tuesday’s council meeting lasted 3 hours and 30 minutes, so other issues were covered and discussed, but I’ll halt my council coverage right now.

There will be no council meeting this Tuesday, which is also the day of the state primary election. In next Sunday’s newsletter, I’ll report on the results of the voting.

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This week in Seen & Heard, I reviewed a great book that provided a British view of the American Revolution; reminisced about the glory days of local sports TV recounted in an article about Bob Lobel and Mike Lynch; reviewed the classic novel, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; and noted the obituary of Bill Rasmussen, a co-founder of ESPN.

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I’ll be leading several Lowell history tours in the coming weeks for anyone who is interested:

Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 10am – Walking tour of the Tyler Park Historic District. The tour is free with no registration required. Just meet at the park. This tour is part of the Friends of Tyler Park “Autumn Market.” (For GPS purposes, Tyler Park’s address is 748 Westford Street.)

Saturday, September 26 & Sunday, September 27, 2026, both at 10am – Walking tour of Lowell Cemetery. The tour takes 90 minutes and begins at the Lawrence Street entrance to the cemetery. It is free and requires no registration. The same tour is offered on both days.

Saturday, October 17, 2026 – “Secrets of Lowell Cemetery” tour which is part of the of the Poe in Lowell Festival. Edgar Allan Poe came to Lowell at least three times to lecture but also to spend time with a female friend who is buried in Lowell Cemetery. Learn their story and the stories of others involved in their orbit. This tour is free and begins at the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery (77 Knapp Avenue).