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.…