The number of cameras in Cambridge’s Central Square has roughly doubled since 2021; the total is now around 100 cameras – a fact known because the Massachusetts Pirate Party decided to map the area.
In the mapping events, participants plot the cameras’ locations, adding information about the type of camera, who owns it and what directions it faces.
The efforts “help us to understand how surveilled we are in public spaces” and contradicts claims that Cambridge needs more surveillance cameras, said James O’Keefe, co-founder and chair of the party. Representatives have come before the City Council several times in the past few years to address surveillance issues
It’s a natural topic for an organization founded in 2010 with a focus on copyrights (“pirating”) and nodding to the notion that pirate ships of yore were egalitarian and democratic. (O’Keefe is on the Pirate Council as “captain,” and he has a first officer and quartermaster.)
Active in Cambridge and Somerville and around the state, this chapter of the nationwide and worldwide party runs candidates, holds events and takes political positions to further the goals of cementing privacy for individuals and transparency for governments and corporations.
In Somerville, the party ran candidates for state Legislature against incumbent Democrat Denise Provost in back-to-back election cycles: Noelani Kamelamela in 2014 and Aaron James in 2016. Both campaigns focused on going door-to-door to identify supporters and turn them out to vote, and 11.9 percent of voters, or 1,454 people, supported Kamelamela; James got 2,680 votes, or 12.7 percent, according to Ballotpedia.
Provost has never been challenged by anyone but a Pirate, O’Keefe said. In fact, around two-thirds of Massachusetts state legislators do not have a challenger in the general election in any given election cycle, O’Keefe said, referring to data maintained by the state.
Ballotpedia recently named Massachusetts House and Senate races with contests last year as the least competitive in the country; the 10 percent of incumbents challenged in primaries is less than half the national average, State House News reported. At 20 percent, Massachusetts has the lowest rate of races featuring both Democrats and Republicans.
“We don’t believe that that’s republican; we don’t believe that’s democratic,” O’Keefe said. “We should always have choices in who we can elect, and so we want to give people greater choice.”
Running for office
There were 721 Massachusetts voters are registered Pirates as of early June, O’Keefe said, and the party has had some electoral wins.
Steve Revilak, a town meeting member in Arlington since 2015, is the first Pirate elected to public office (and O’Keefe’s first officer). He has worked on zoning issues; several years ago, when Arlington was considering an ordinance that would criminalize sleeping in a public park, Revilak and others successfully opposed the ordinance.
Although Joseph Onoroski, a Pirate candidate for the state Legislature in Lowell, did not win his election last November, he got 22 percent of the vote – the party’s highest showing for a Massachusetts legislative election. When going door to door, Onoroski found that voters were receptive to his reasons for running, including greater transparency, O’Keefe said.
“People want to see a change,” O’Keefe said. “They know the government isn’t really working.”
“We feel that, as we run candidates, more people will realize that we have the capability to shake things up and get policies that actually help people in place. Every year that we’re running more candidates and we’re running more successful campaigns will mean that we’re closer to achieving our objectives.”
Pirate Party values
Individual privacy informs much of the party’s work, and Pirates work on patents, copyrights and other intellectual privilege issues. Along with focus, it fights for corporate and government transparency in a state where the Legislature and governor are exempt from some public information laws, O’Keefe said.
“That’s unlike most of the other states in the United States, and that’s shameful,” O’Keefe said. “Unless there’s a compelling privacy reason for not providing data and the records that our government creates, they should all be there for anyone to look at at any time.”
Over the years, the Massachusetts Pirate Party has advocated for and taken positions on an expanded slate of issues. For instance, it believes sex workers are workers, with rights to match, and that consensual sex work should be decriminalized. Similarly, the party believes cannabis and other substances should be legal. “The war on drugs and the war on terror have been used as ways of harming people’s right to personal privacy,” O’Keefe said.
The party also believes that the government’s role is to ensure competition; this includes precluding corporations from forming monopolies, O’Keefe said.
“We have a fundamentally screwed up and unequal society, and that needs to be challenged, because the Democrats aren’t willing to do it,” O’Keefe said.
A stronger
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Apparently they are in favor of a sea change. Arrrrggggg….