The Capitol buildings and grounds are quintessential places for free speech and protest, accessible by people from all walks of life who gather there to express their views, demonstrate, picket, and hold vigils. But if those places are permanently fenced off, the public and our constitutional right to assemble and protest will be in jeopardy. 

That is why the ACLU and the ACLU of the District of Columbia are urging leaders of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate not to permanently fence off the Capitol, which would turn its architecture into a national symbol of fear and hostility towards the public’s presence. The seat of a government of, by, and for the people must not be fenced off from the people.

As a former U.S. Senate staffer who once roamed the same Capitol hallways breached by the insurrectionists and white supremacists on January 6, I certainly understand the impulse driving the calls for permanent fencing. But for us as Americans, what we will sacrifice and lose under this proposal will come at too great of a cost. A permanent fence around the Capitol would only compound the harms inflicted by the insurrectionists’ attempt to subvert our democracy. 

The Capitol complex, where all our elected lawmakers come together to legislate in the open view of the public, has been recognized around the world as a celebrated symbol of democracy. If Congress were to permanently retreat into a militarized zone ringed by fencing topped with razor wire, it would send the kind of message that heads of autocratic regimes send by cloistering themselves away from their populaces in armored fortresses. 

As Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Congressmember representing the District of Columbia, put it, the fencing that is currently installed around the Capitol complex “makes the United States look like a totalitarian regime trying to keep its own people out.” 

https://twitter.com/EleanorNorton/status/1366487883213905922

Permanently fencing off the Capitol would also inflict other concrete harms to our democracy. The public will suffer diminished access to public grounds with unique importance in the exercise of their constitutional rights to assemble and to petition the government. 

That exclusion will be especially acute if people want to participate in spontaneous protest in response to rapidly unfolding events—such as the protests for racial justice that arose last summer. The independent press’s ability to report on the affairs of Congress will deteriorate as well, given that journalists must be able to travel to and from the Capitol without excessive delays or burdens to do their jobs.

For residents of the District of Columbia like me, the permanent fencing proposal will also inflict a unique kind of damage by further militarizing and restricting access to one of the city’s most cherished public grounds. Permanent fencing will only worsen the atmosphere of living in an oppressive police state where even local children are barred from sledding on the slopes surrounding Capitol Hill. Because armed officers are constantly patrolling the fenced area, the proposal also raises strong concerns about the resulting increase in interactions between law enforcement and people who live and work in D.C., particularly people of color. The current fencing even obstructed the city government from enacting new laws, as physical copies of its newly enacted legislation must be delivered by hand to Congress.

Fiercely defending our most cherished liberties is the right response to our democracy coming under threat. Indeed, this is precisely the moment when we must hold true to the values of openness, public service, and public participation that our Capitol embodies. All members of Congress should step forward to publicly affirm these principles and reject permanently fencing off the Capitol from the people. 

The New York Police Department is receiving a lot of attention for testing robot “dogs,” which it has deployed in several situations, including to deliver food in a hostage situation and to scout out a location where the police feared a dangerous gunman might be lurking. The state police in Massachusetts have also experimented with these robots, as our ACLU colleagues there uncovered, and police in Hawaii have acquired one. What are we to think of these robots from a civil liberties perspective?

There’s definitely something spooky about all the robots made by Boston Robotics, a company that has become famous for videos of its increasingly agile humanoid and animal-oid robots. Add to that spookiness an awareness of our nation’s levels of police violence, racism, brutality, and unnecessary killings — and the shameful state of the law that enables those abuses — and this robot police dog, dubbed “Digidog,” definitely evokes some primal science-fiction fears.

But behind that visceral uneasiness are a number of very real issues.

One of the things that makes these robots so unnerving is that everybody implicitly understands that the possibility of weaponizing them will continue to hang out there like a tempting forbidden fruit for law enforcement. (We’ve written in more detail elsewhere about the concerns with weaponized police robots.) There is also the fear that they could evolve from a remote-controlled tool to an autonomous decision-maker that makes actual law enforcement decisions of some kind. That would bring up the many issues around bias and inaccuracy in AI decision-making. The ultimate nightmare, of course, would be robots that are armed and made autonomous.

Those kinds of futuristic concerns give us good reason to feel uneasy about these robots. But there are other more immediate concerns around the costs and benefits of these high-tech devices. Anybody can come up with a Hollywood scenario where a new technology saves the day. But the real questions are how frequently such scenarios come up, how dangerous are they, how effective is the solution, how expensive is it, what negative side effects might its adoption bring, and are there alternative, less invasive solutions that would work just as well?

Communities should ask those questions. Viewed narrowly, there’s nothing wrong with using a robot to scout a dangerous location or deliver food to hostages. But communities should take a hard look at expensive, rare-use technologies at a time when the nation is increasingly recognizing the need to invest in solving our social problems in better ways than just empowering police.

Finally, full transparency and meaningful limitations are crucial. When a powerful new surveillance or other police technology is introduced — especially one that is probably flexible enough to be used in many ways, good and bad, that we haven’t even thought of — it’s important that there be public conversations every step of the way. It’s vital for the public to know the answer to questions such as: What are the plans and policies around how it will be used? How does it actually end up being used? And none of those conversations can happen without transparency and independent oversight.

One of the ways communities can make sure that happens is by joining the growing list of cities that have passed “Community Control Over Police Surveillance” (CCOPS) legislation, which requires police to be transparent about their use of surveillance technologies and ensures that community members, through their city council representatives, are empowered to decide if and how such technologies are used.

Last year, New York City joined the cities that have passed that kind of legislation with its Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. Unfortunately the information that the department has released about Digidog has been highly inadequate. Instead of publishing detailed policies for the robot dog, for example, the NYPD swept the technology into an overbroad category with other camera technologies. The policy is vague about when the technology can be used, lacks deployment oversight and documentation requirements, and contains weak data protection and training sections. The health and safety sections completely disregard Boston Dynamics’ own requirements of a minimum two-meter distance to the robot due to the risk that “fingers may break or get amputated if caught in joints while Spot’s motors are active.” And the policy even makes false statements about the machine learning and video analytics capabilities of the Digidog.

The deployment of advanced technologies like robots all too often happens faster than our social, political, and legal systems can adjust. This kind of robotics technology threatens to veer off in all manner of spooky directions; clear and forthright policies, overall transparency, and democratic debate and input are vital.