---
title: "At AI’s Birthplace, MIT Professors Answer the Cameras With Rhinestones"
description: "After months of weekly bedazzling and faculty protest, MIT dropped plans to let AI watch its roughly 4,600 campus cameras in real time"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-01T04:01:00Z
modified: 2026-11-02T01:17:10Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/at-ai-s-birthplace-mit-professors-answer-the-cameras-with-rh-27b08f
language: en
tags: ["ai", "surveillance", "security", "protest", "mit", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# At AI’s Birthplace, MIT Professors Answer the Cameras With Rhinestones

*After months of weekly bedazzling and faculty protest, MIT dropped plans to let AI watch its roughly 4,600 campus cameras in real time*

By Jan Sokol · November 1, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/at-ai-s-birthplace-mit-professors-answer-the-cameras-with-rh-27b08f

## In brief

- MIT professors have been decorating campus security cameras with rhinestones and googly eyes every week since summer
- MIT added more than 500 cameras after November 2025, at a cost of over $3 million, for about 4,600 in total
- Faculty and graduate students objected to a plan to have Ambient.ai monitor the camera feeds in real time
- On October 21, MIT’s Glen Shor said the institute will not use AI to observe or analyze campus activity
- A review of Brown’s December 2025 shooting found it was highly unlikely more cameras would have prevented the attack

Every week since the summer, a few professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have gone out across their campus with rhinestones and googly eyes and stuck them onto security cameras. The cameras go on working. That is deliberate. [As the Boston Globe reported](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/11/01/business/mit-surveillance-cameras-ai-hacking/), the MIT version of the protest leaves the machines alone, which sets it apart from the activists elsewhere who have sabotaged the Flock license-plate cameras now fought over in towns across the country.

The decorating is done by three tenured professors, with staff and students carrying supplies, according to [Cambridge Day](https://www.cambridgeday.com/2026/10/07/mit-professors-bedazzle-cameras-protest/). On one Tuesday in early October, their fifth outing, they dressed eight cameras in about an hour, several of them along the Infinite Corridor. MIT Police once told them to stop, and they stopped. The institute has removed the glitter more than once. Each time, the professors put it back. They have given themselves a name long enough to work as satire in its own right: the Initiative to Beautify the AI-capable Surveillance… In Collaboration with Big Brother Tech Companies.

“We had to come up with another way of having a more open and democratic dialogue around surveillance on campus,” said Catherine D’Ignazio, an associate professor of urban science and planning.

## The house where the machine was born

The setting makes the protest pointed. In 1959 Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy founded the laboratory that became today’s MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Minsky spent years helping turn what looked like science fiction into a working field. The argument now being made on that campus is that the people who brought the technology into the world also set the example for how it gets used.

![A hand decorates a surveillance camera with colorful gems and googly eyes in a vaulted hallway.](https://rews.cc/img/5eea067a5ede0c7ff9d84d433871986064ac5a38.webp)

“What precedent does this set for the broader community, if MIT were to start implementing this?” asked Eric Lu, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in biological engineering and president of the Graduate Student Council. “When \[MIT\] speaks, people listen.”

## A shooting in Providence

The trigger came from another campus. On December 13, 2025, a gunman killed two students at Brown University, and later killed an MIT professor at his home in Brookline. Part of how investigators located him was a Flock camera that had recorded him on a street in Providence.

MIT had already started installing new cameras that November to close gaps in coverage, according to the institute’s FAQ page. More than 500 were added and the work finished in September, at a cost of more than $3 million, Cambridge Day reported. About 4,600 cameras now cover a campus of 168 acres, which works out to roughly 27 per acre. The new cameras come with AI features that are switched off. Turned on, they could sort people by clothing color, gender, age and whether they wear a mask. D’Ignazio described the sort of query that would make possible: “Show me all the people wearing a hijab who are moving around campus on this particular day.”

Then the administration went a step further. It looked into hiring Ambient.ai, a surveillance company, to watch the feeds in real time and alert officers to active threats. A pilot ran staged scenarios to see whether the system would flag them. MIT says the pilot has ended and all its data has been purged from Ambient.ai’s portal.

![A large surveillance camera casts a teal beam over five pedestrians outlined by coral tracking boxes on a stone walkway beside classical columns.](https://rews.cc/img/a92f9afe017ac4757272a0ff48f8f255ef9ca7bc.webp)

## The objections

Faculty members asked what would happen to the video, who could get at it, and how often the system would mistake one person for another. They complained that the community had not been consulted. An advisory group of faculty, staff, students and postdocs started meeting at the beginning of the academic year, but it could only advise on AI and could not reopen the camera expansion. D’Ignazio and other faculty who had raised concerns applied to join and were not chosen.

Some questioned whether the technology works at all. “Is there data out there that surveillance cameras are the best way to cope with those crimes?” asked Marah Gubar, a professor of literature and comparative media studies who took part in the decorating. The Graduate Student Council sent administrators a resolution asking for student input and for research to justify any use of AI surveillance. “So whatever you assess as a risk now, you don’t know what that’s going to look like in a month,” Lu said, calling AI “unproven ground.”

## The retreat, and what stays

On October 21, Glen Shor, MIT’s executive vice president and treasurer, told a faculty meeting that AI surveillance was off the table. “MIT will not be using AI in any way to observe or analyze campus activity,” he told the Globe. “Security camera footage plays an important role in helping the MIT Police understand and resolve safety issues and incidents such as theft, vandalism, and property damage that have been brought to their attention.”

![An open drawer holds a computer chip marked with a brain and connected to a USB cable, while three surveillance cameras overlook it.](https://rews.cc/img/b46919b6d0f0b7df8f8a63d2037b24cc480a2224.webp)

Without the AI, the 4,600 cameras are all still there. Daniel Shen, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer science and chief steward of the MIT Graduate Student Union, said the size of the network alone creates a “chilling effect” and dampens “people’s willingness to engage in expression or political expression on campus.” According to a presentation the institute gave to faculty, footage can be used in student discipline with written approval from a senior administrator. Shen said people felt safe on campus before the extra cameras arrived. History professor Tanalís Padilla warned of “a chilling effect on a campus culture of creativity, of silliness, of hacking.”

A reflection, offered only as that: an institution that installs a camera rarely takes it down. Once the equipment is up, the argument moves on to what software it should run.

## The count in Providence

Brown had [more than 1,200 cameras](https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/18/us/brown-university-surveillance-cameras-shooting-suspect) when the shooting happened, CNN reported. A university report says it had about 1,950 by late August, and it does not use AI. A spokesperson said Brown has put $65 million into campus safety since 2014. The [external review Brown commissioned](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/28/metro/brown-university-shooting-external-report-findings/) found camera coverage thin where the shooting took place and said more cameras could have helped identify the gunman sooner. It also found it [“highly unlikely”](https://katv.com/news/nation-world/brown-university-mass-shooting-report-barus-and-holley-engineering-building-response-public-safety-police-cameras-campus-august-28-2026) that the attack could have been prevented. The university has posted [answers on the reviews](https://evertrue.brown.edu/safety-security-faqs) for its community.

Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has a name for this circle. “If crime goes down, you say it is working, and if crime goes up, you say you need even more cameras,” he said. “The way you make people safer is by addressing deeper-seated social issues that cause violence.”

The cameras along the Infinite Corridor are still recording. Some of them have googly eyes, at least until the next time the institute removes them.