The City Council took a 16-minute recess Monday after its meeting’s public comment period got Zoombombed. That is, the official use of the Zoom video conferencing platform was joined by people who jeered, yelled insults and, at around a half-hour in, put up an image of men engaged in oral sex alongside the faces of people waiting to talk about a homeless shelter and safe behavior during a coronavirus pandemic.
As the image appeared, video technicians for the 22-CityView broadcast service cut away to Sullivan Chamber, where city clerk Anthony Wilson could be seen leaning suddenly away from his laptop in surprise.
“I’m going to call a recess, because there’s some inappropriate visuals coming through that we need to take care of,” Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui could be heard saying from her office in City Hall.
A recess followed in which Siddiqui was seen onscreen coming to the chamber’s dais for discussion – unheard by people watching online – with Wilson, an audiovisual technician and councillor Marc McGovern, who was only at City Hall because the evening’s technology wasn’t going smoothly even without the inadvertent X-rated broadcast.
Tentative tech steps
Since coronavirus made meeting in person biologically and politically unhealthy, most councillors have attended by voice only, while public comment has been handled via the popular Zoom software, which lets speakers’ faces be seen. On Monday, councillors were in the meeting via Zoom, and there was an order on the agenda to use the service to get the council’s committees back to work too.
But there were frequent problems Monday in which people couldn’t be heard or hear what was happening, continuing off and on throughout the night’s 5.5-hour meeting – some likely due to a learning curve on use of the mute button either by Wilson, as administrator, or by participants at home trying to talk. McGovern sprinted to City Hall to sit at his desk because he couldn’t make himself heard long enough for Wilson to know he was attending remotely.
On the other hand, Monday also saw the unveiling of live transcripts, putting the meeting’s spoken words on a separate screen where the action could be followed by the hearing impaired – a step the city has struggled to take since announcing closed captioning would be part of a flawed audiovisual upgrade in the summer of 2014. Wilson found a way to make full stenographic transcripts available starting in February, but they trailed meetings by weeks as clerks became familiar with the process.
“We’re going to get Zoombombed”
Zoombombing has been a plague of the newly virtual world introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic, but a widely discussed one, with the technologically adept learning ways to prevent it and the company issuing software patches and changes in protocols to help prevent it. Resident Saul Tannenbaum, eyeing the Zoom address being used by the city, called it at 5:32 p.m. just as the meeting got started: “We’re going to get Zoombombed, aren’t we?” And later offered advice online on avoiding the problem – unlikely to have been seen by city staff.
Councillor Patty Nolan was disappointed by the technological stumble, saying, “We’ve had four weeks to work on this.” And others were left shaking their heads online: “Our grandparents can make Zoom work, but somehow the City of Cambridge can’t?” asked a Twitter user identified as Etienne Martone.
When the recess was over – and the councillor’s night of experimenting with Zoom – the mayor apologized for the racism, lookism and porn to which people had been exposed.
“We will move forward and go from here. There may be issues that come up,” Siddiqui said, returning to expressing regret more than four hours later as the meeting wrapped up. “We will work diligently to make sure that never happens again. Because none of us want to see that or hear that.”
A stronger
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There’s another important point that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle. Since the second remote Council meeting, they have been leaving Zoom on after public comment ends and just muting everybody except the Sullivan Chamber. For those of us who don’t have cable and don’t have good internet because the City Manager continues to refuse to even consider studying the possibility of maybe thinking about municipal broadband, the ability to hear the meeting on a telephone means that we can listen to the meeting live. The technological barrier is so low that I could do it on my black, rotary dial phone because I have a fax machine on the same line to do the touchtone bits required to sign in. Given that most attendance is remote, the sound is really the only important part anyway.
Yet last night, a night that saw a number of homeless people participating in public comment, people who obviously don’t have cable and who may well not have the technology needed to use the video player on the City’s meeting portal (which is next to useless on my computer because it spends most of the time buffering in between two-second bits of sound) or the livestream of the TV broadcast of the meeting (which works slightly better for me, although last night it went on extended buffering jags of half an hour or so), they decided to turn Zoom off with no notice after public comment was over. I understand being discombobulated by the porn and the rude commentary, but that’s no excuse for essentially ejecting people from this important public meeting.
I’m done cutting this crew slack. If they can’t do an essential job of keeping government going, then we need to find someone who can.
Just look at the knuckleheads in that photo…these are our civic leaders…too stupid to use masks properly…..