ARTICLE 21

SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY OVERSIGHT BY-LAW

Special Town Meeting, Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Proposed amendments to Article 21 for the October 6, 2026 Special Town Meeting. Clean text incorporating the proposed amendments and corrections restoring the petition text as filed.

To see if the Town will vote to amend the General By-laws of the Town of Tewksbury by adding thereto a new chapter, entitled “Surveillance Technology Oversight,” as follows:

SECTION 1. TITLE AND PURPOSE

1.1 This by-law may be cited as the Town of Tewksbury Surveillance Technology Oversight By-law.

1.2 The purpose of this by-law is to establish how the Town acquires, operates, and oversees technology that collects information about people; to set the conditions any such system, and any agreement governing it, must meet before acquisition or use; and to define a category of data, Aggregated Surveillance Information, whose handling requires the strictest treatment. This by-law is written to safeguard the right of individuals to privacy, balanced with the need to promote and provide safety and security, while preserving the Town's ability to obtain the operational capabilities its departments need. It is the policy of the Town that no Surveillance Technology be operated so as to accomplish the passive, indiscriminate collection and retention of information about persons going about their daily lives.

SECTION 2. DEFINITIONS

2.1 “Surveillance Technology” means any software, electronic device, system utilizing an electronic device, or similar, used, designed, or primarily intended to collect, retain, process, or share audio, electronic, visual, location, thermal, biometric, olfactory, or similar information specifically associated with, or capable of being associated with, any individual or group.

2.2 Surveillance Technology includes, but is not limited to: automatic license plate readers and other systems that convert images of vehicles or plates into computer readable data; international mobile subscriber identity catchers and other cell site simulators; electronic toll readers; closed circuit television cameras, except as provided in Section 4; biometric surveillance technology, including software and databases performing facial recognition or other remote biometric recognition; audio recording, monitoring, or acoustic detection hardware and services, including gunshot detection and location systems; video and audio monitoring or recording technology, including surveillance cameras, vehicle cameras, and wearable body cameras; social media monitoring software; passive scanners of radio networks; long range Bluetooth and other wireless scanning devices; thermal imaging or forward looking infrared devices or cameras; radio frequency identification scanners; electronic database systems containing Surveillance Data about identifiable persons; and software designed to integrate or analyze data from Surveillance Technology, including target tracking and predictive systems.

2.3 “Surveillance Data” means any electronic data collected, captured, recorded, retained, processed, intercepted, or analyzed by Surveillance Technology that is operated by the Town, at the direction of the Town, or under any agreement with the Town.

2.4 “Aggregated Surveillance Information” means Surveillance Data, or data derived or inferred from Surveillance Data, that is retained, linked, combined, or analyzed, with other Surveillance Data or with any other record, from any source, such that it reveals, or can be used to reveal, an identifiable person's movements, associations, habits, or activities over time, regardless of which entity holds, stores, or processes it.

2.5 Anonymity boundary. Data is not Aggregated Surveillance Information if it is not linked and not reasonably linkable to any identifiable person, directly or indirectly, including through a device, account, or vehicle. Aggregate summary reports that do not reveal the activities of any individual are not Aggregated Surveillance Information, and nothing in this by-law restricts publishing them.

2.6 “Town Entity” means any department, board, commission, office, or division to which this by-law applies under Section 3.

2.7 “Legal process” means a warrant, court order, subpoena, or similar instrument issued by a court or other authority with power to compel, whether served on the Town or issued on the Town's application. A request with which compliance is voluntary is not legal process.

2.8 Construction. Each definition in this section operates independently. The invalidity of any one defined term shall not affect the operation of any other defined term, and each remaining provision of this by-law shall be read using the defined terms that remain.

SECTION 3. APPLICATION AND REACH

3.1 This by-law applies to every Town department, board, commission, office, and division, and to every person acting for or on behalf of any of them, including contractors and volunteers.

3.2 This by-law applies without regard to which department operates the technology, what the technology is called, how it is funded, or whether it was obtained by purchase, lease, loan, grant, donation, trial, pilot, or at no cost.

3.3 This by-law shall not apply to any board, committee, officer, or agency of the Town to the extent that its application would be inconsistent with authority conferred on that board, committee, officer, or agency by general law. A Town Entity asserting that any provision of this by-law does not apply to it under this section shall state the assertion in writing to the Select Board, identifying the specific provision of general law relied upon, the specific provisions of this by-law claimed inapplicable, and the extent of the claimed inapplicability. Assertions under this section shall be included in the annual report under Section 9.

SECTION 4. EXCLUSIONS

4.1 The following are not Surveillance Technology for purposes of this by-law, subject to Section 4.2: routine office and information technology equipment in widespread use for ordinary Town business; Town databases and enterprise systems containing records kept in the ordinary course of business; information technology security and cybersecurity systems; physical access control and employee identification systems; infrastructure and mechanical control systems; geographic information and mapping systems; systems used to monitor Town employees, contractors, and volunteers in the course of work or internal investigations; cameras on Town property solely for building security; videoconferencing and public meeting broadcast equipment; dispatch, records management, booking, and emergency operations systems; parking systems; manually operated handheld recording devices; and devices that cannot record, transmit, or be remotely accessed.

4.3 Nothing in this by-law prevents the creation, transmission, or retention of data that cannot, by enhancement, manipulation, or combination, be used to identify a person or to reveal an identifiable person's activities over time.

SECTION 5. PROHIBITIONS

5(a) Wireless device identifier collection. The Town shall not acquire, operate, or contract for passive scanners of radio networks, long range Bluetooth or other wireless scanning devices, or any system that collects, retains, or analyzes device identifiers, including MAC addresses, Bluetooth identifiers, subscriber identities, and advertising identifiers, for the purpose of identifying, counting, or locating persons or their devices.

5(b) Biometric surveillance. The Town shall not acquire, operate, or contract for technology that performs facial recognition or other remote biometric recognition (the automated or semi-automated identification or verification of an individual, or the capture of information about an individual, based on the individual's face, voice, iris, gait, or other biometric characteristic, or the use of such characteristics to infer emotion, associations, activities, or location) and no Town Entity shall apply such recognition to Surveillance Data. Nothing in this subsection prohibits, limits, or conditions: (i) a facial recognition search performed or requested by a law enforcement agency through a written request submitted to the registrar of motor vehicles, the department of state police, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation in accordance with G.L. c. 6, § 220(b); (ii) the acquisition or possession of personal electronic devices that use facial recognition technology for the sole purpose of user authentication; (iii) the acquisition, possession, or use of automated video or image redaction software that cannot perform facial recognition or other remote biometric recognition; or (iv) the receipt of evidence related to the investigation of a crime derived from a biometric surveillance system, as provided in G.L. c. 6, § 220(e).

5(c) Purchase of personal data in lieu of legal process. The Town shall not purchase, license, or otherwise obtain for consideration from a data broker or other commercial source any location history, device identifier data, or personal information about identifiable persons that the Town could otherwise obtain only pursuant to legal process issued on the Town's application.

5(d) Default external enrollment. No Surveillance Data of the Town shall be enrolled, by default or by vendor configuration, in any multi-jurisdiction, regional, or national search network, sharing network, or common data pool. Sharing pursuant to an agreement the Town has lawfully approved, or pursuant to legal process served on the Town, is not enrollment by default or by vendor configuration.

5(e) Unauditable systems. The Town shall not operate Surveillance Technology whose complete access, query, and disclosure records are not available to the Town on demand, in machine readable form, covering every user, Town or non-Town, who has queried, accessed, or received Surveillance Data of the Town.

5(f) Unverifiable configuration claims. The Town shall not rely on a vendor's representation about the configuration of a system holding Surveillance Data of the Town, including sharing settings, retention settings, geographic restrictions, and access controls, unless the Town, or a third party retained by the Town, can independently verify the representation.

5(g) Automated scoring of persons. No software or computational process, including one using machine learning or other artificial intelligence techniques, shall be used by the Town to rank, score, or flag identifiable persons for investigative or enforcement attention on the basis of Surveillance Data. This subsection does not prohibit the comparison of Surveillance Data against a list of specifically identified persons, vehicles, or objects, each entered on an individualized, documented predicate, where the comparison produces a match or no match and no score, rank, or prediction.

5(h) Bulk querying of external data pools. No Town Entity shall query, search, or otherwise obtain Surveillance Data about identifiable persons from any multi-jurisdiction, regional, or national search network, sharing network, or common data pool, except by a query for specifically identified data, made for a stated purpose, individually attributed and recorded, under an agreement the Town has lawfully approved, or by receipt pursuant to legal process. Standing, automated, or bulk access to any such pool is not a query for specifically identified data.

SECTION 6. APPROVAL REQUIRED BEFORE ACQUISITION, NEW USE, OR AGREEMENT

6.1 The Town shall obtain Select Board approval before: (a) acquiring or borrowing any Surveillance Technology, whether or not the acquisition is made through the exchange of monies or for other or no consideration; (b) using new or existing Surveillance Technology for a purpose, in a manner, or in a location not previously approved; or (c) entering into an agreement, written or oral, with any entity that is not a Town Entity to acquire, share, or otherwise use Surveillance Technology or the data it produces.

6.2 Approval under Section 6.1 shall be granted or denied in an open meeting. The request and its supporting submissions shall be filed with the Select Board and posted publicly at least fourteen days before the meeting at which the Board acts. The Select Board shall approve a request under Section 6.1 only upon written findings that the benefits of the technology to the community outweigh its costs; that the approved uses will safeguard civil rights and civil liberties; that no alternative with lesser cost or lesser effect on civil rights and civil liberties would be as effective; that the uses and deployments will not be based on discriminatory or viewpoint-based factors and will not have a disproportionate adverse effect on any community or group; and that the technology, as configured by the use policy, will not indiscriminately collect and retain information about persons going about their daily lives. Approval shall take the form of a written technology use policy adopted by the Board, stating the approved uses, locations, and configurations and the retention period for each category of Surveillance Data; the approval extends to what the policy states, and to no others. Further submissions and procedure shall be as the Select Board provides by regulation under Section 10.

6.3 Exigent circumstances. Nothing in this by-law prevents the use of Surveillance Technology where the head of a Town Entity, or a designee, holds a good faith belief that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury requires it. Any such use shall cease when the emergency no longer requires it, shall be reported to the Select Board in writing not more than seven days after its commencement, and shall not be used to infringe on lawful protected activity.

6.4 Evidence obtained by warrant. Nothing in this by-law limits the receipt of evidence derived from Surveillance Technology pursuant to a warrant issued in the investigation of a crime.

SECTION 7. AGGREGATED SURVEILLANCE INFORMATION: DUTIES

Where Surveillance Technology produces, consumes, or holds Aggregated Surveillance Information, the following apply in addition to Section 6.

7.1 Ownership, including derivatives. The Town holds sole ownership of its Aggregated Surveillance Information and of everything derived from it, including indexes, embeddings, models, aggregates, scores, and inferences. No agreement of the Town shall grant any entity that is not a Town Entity a license to such data or its derivatives that survives termination, and no agreement shall characterize data derived from Town-collected events as any other party's property.

7.2 External access only by legal process or approved agreement. No entity that is not a Town Entity shall query, search, receive, or be given access to the Town's Aggregated Surveillance Information except pursuant to legal process served on the Town, or under an agreement approved by the Select Board in an open meeting. No agreement approved under this section shall authorize blanket, reciprocal, or network-wide access to the Town's Aggregated Surveillance Information. Legal process shall be served on the Town and responded to by the Town, not by a vendor on the Town's behalf.

7.3 Complete audit access. The Town shall have unconditional access to complete access, query, and disclosure records for any system holding its Aggregated Surveillance Information, in machine readable form, covering every query and access by any user, with the identity of the requester, the requester's organization, the stated reason, the query parameters, and the timestamp. No claim of vendor confidentiality, trade secret, or third-party privacy shall limit the Town's access to records of activity against Surveillance Data of the Town.

7.4 No shared stores, no model training, and service-only use. The Town's Aggregated Surveillance Information shall not be ingested into any shared or multi-tenant data store, any common index spanning other customers or jurisdictions, or any machine learning training corpus, whether or not the result is described as anonymized or aggregated. An entity that is not a Town Entity that holds or processes the Town's Aggregated Surveillance Information under an agreement may use it solely to provide the contracted service to the Town, and for no other purpose. The anonymity boundary in Section 2.5 governs any claim that data has left the category.

7.5 Breach notice. Any agreement of the Town governing a system that holds its Aggregated Surveillance Information shall require notice to the Town, within a defined period not to exceed seventy-two hours, of any unauthorized access to, acquisition of, or disclosure of such data, or of any security incident affecting the system holding it, sufficient for the Town to meet its own obligations under the data breach notification laws of the Commonwealth.

7.6 Deletion with certification. On expiration of the applicable retention period, Aggregated Surveillance Information and its derivatives shall be deleted from primary systems, indexes, and any derived artifact. Where the information resides on backup media that cannot be selectively altered, deletion is accomplished by rendering it inaccessible to search, query, and restoration in ordinary operations and by its destruction in the ordinary rotation or expiration of that media; destruction of the cryptographic keys necessary to read the information satisfies this section. Information deleted under this section shall not be restored to any system or queried except under a documented legal hold. The Town shall obtain written confirmation identifying what was deleted or rendered inaccessible, from which systems and media, and on what date.

7.7 Retention. No approval under Section 6 shall issue without a stated retention period for each category of Surveillance Data the technology produces, consumes, or holds, and each stated period shall be the shortest period consistent with the purpose approved. Expiration of a stated period is the expiration of the applicable retention period for purposes of Section 7.6. Absent a stated period, and during any period in which no approval under Section 6 is in effect for the technology, retention of Aggregated Surveillance Information shall not exceed seven days. Nothing in this section requires the destruction of any record whose retention is required by state or federal law or by legal process.

7.8 Data return and continuity. Any agreement governing a system holding the Town's Aggregated Surveillance Information shall provide for the return of the Town's data, on request and on termination of the agreement for any reason, in an open, documented, non-proprietary format, and shall not condition the Town's access to its own data on renewal or continuation of the agreement.

7.9 Custody. The Town's Aggregated Surveillance Information shall remain in the custody and under the control of the Town. No entity that is not a Town Entity shall hold, store, or process it, except processing strictly necessary to deliver a service under an approved agreement, performed transiently and without retention, copying, or derivation by that entity.

SECTION 8. REACH THROUGH CONTRACTING

This by-law does not regulate any entity that is not a Town Entity. Where data within Section 7 is held, stored, or processed by another party, the duties in Section 7 attach through the Town's own contracting: no approval under Section 6 shall issue for any agreement that does not carry them, and no Town Entity shall enter or renew such an agreement without them. No approval under Section 6 shall issue for any agreement that incorporates terms subject to modification by any party other than the Town without a new approval under Section 6; incorporated terms apply as in effect on the date of approval and shall be attached to the approved agreement.

SECTION 9. REPORTING

9.1 For each Surveillance Technology in use, the Town Manager, or a designee named in writing filed with the Select Board, shall report to the Select Board, at least annually and in public session: how the technology was used; whether and how often its data was shared with or accessed by any entity that is not a Town Entity, naming each recipient entity, the categories of data, and the legal standard applied; whether and how often any Town Entity queried or received Surveillance Data from any system, network, or data pool not operated by the Town, with the purposes and the agreement or legal standard relied upon; a summary of complaints and their disposition; audit results and any violations found, with the action taken; and total annual cost and funding source. Each report under this section shall be included in the Annual Town Report, shall be filed with the Town Clerk as a public record, and shall be reviewed by the Select Board at a public hearing held at its first regular meeting following publication of the Annual Town Report.

9.2 Independent examination. The Town Manager, or the designee named under Section 9.1, shall annually cause the access, query, and disclosure records described in Section 5(e) and Section 7.3 to be examined by a qualified person or firm not otherwise engaged in the operation or supply of the audited system, and the results of that examination shall be included in the report under Section 9.1.

9.3 Insufficient information. If the Town cannot produce information required by Section 9.1, the report shall say so and explain why. If the information that cannot be produced includes the access, query, or disclosure records of any system, the Select Board shall take up the continued operation of that system at its next meeting.

9.4 Complaints. The Town Manager, or the designee named under Section 9.1, shall maintain a procedure by which any person may submit a complaint concerning the use of Surveillance Technology, and shall summarize complaints and their dispositions in the report under Section 9.1.

SECTION 10. IMPLEMENTING REGULATIONS

10.1 After public notice and public hearing, and not more than one hundred eighty days after the effective date of this by-law, the Select Board shall promulgate regulations to effectuate the purposes of this by-law, and may from time to time amend them, including: enumerating and refining the exclusions within the categories stated in Section 4.1; prescribing the contents of technology use policies and impact statements and the procedure for approvals under Section 6; prescribing infrastructure, retention, and verification requirements for systems holding Aggregated Surveillance Information; and prescribing report formats and schedules under Section 9. Regulations under this section shall be consistent with this by-law and with state law and shall be filed with the Town Clerk.

10.2 Failure by the Select Board to promulgate regulations under this section, or a legal declaration of their invalidity by a court of law, shall not suspend or invalidate the effect of this by-law, and the absence of regulations shall not suspend, delay, or excuse compliance with any other section.

SECTION 11. ENFORCEMENT

11.1 Data collected or derived in violation of this by-law shall be considered unlawfully obtained and shall be deleted upon discovery, subject to applicable law.

11.3 Any violation of this by-law constitutes an injury, and any person may institute proceedings for injunctive relief, declaratory relief, or an action in the nature of mandamus in any court of competent jurisdiction to enforce this by-law. An action instituted under this paragraph shall be brought against the respective Town department and the Town and, if necessary to effectuate compliance with this by-law, any other governmental agency with possession, custody, or control of data subject to this by-law.

11.4 Violations of this by-law by a Town employee shall result in consequences that may include retraining, suspension, or termination, subject to due process requirements and provisions of collective bargaining agreements.

11.5 Nothing in this by-law shall be construed to limit any individual's rights under state or federal law, to authorize anything state or federal law prohibits, or to prohibit anything state or federal law requires.

SECTION 12. SEVERABILITY

If any provision of this by-law, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is declared invalid or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction or by the Office of the Attorney General, the remaining provisions, and the application of the provisions to other persons or circumstances, shall continue in full force and effect.

SECTION 13. EFFECTIVE DATE AND TRANSITION

13.1 This by-law takes effect as provided by G.L. c. 40, § 32, upon approval by the Attorney General (or the lapse of the review period) and publication or posting as required by that section.

13.2 Existing technology. Within ninety days of the effective date, the Town Manager, or the designee named under Section 9.1, shall file with the Select Board an inventory of all Surveillance Technology in use. Within one hundred eighty days of the effective date, the Town Manager or that designee shall submit for approval under Section 6 each Surveillance Technology already in use.

13.3 Default on inaction. If a submission for existing Surveillance Technology is not made within the period in Section 13.2, or is made and not approved within one hundred eighty days of submission, authority to continue using that technology expires, and the Select Board shall take up the question of continued use at its next meeting.

13.4 Nothing in this by-law requires the Town to breach an agreement in force on the effective date. Where such an agreement conflicts with this by-law, the Town shall seek conforming amendment or exit to the extent permitted by law, and shall report to the Select Board on the result.

; or to take any other action relative thereto.