Tonight’s City Council Zoom meeting started uneventfully with a fair amount of the public in attendance. For the first hour the Council was disposing of all of the routine items, while the members of the public waited patiently for them to get to the general budget discussion, Just as they were about to get going all hell broke out.
First someone in the scrolling chat started typing in racist, nasty messages. The clerk quickly scrambled to evict the crasher and then they decided to shut down the Chat feature to text’ed howls from members of the public who were commenting there. Once the Chat was closed things settled down and the Council began again. That only lasted for a few minutes until the whole meeting quickly unraveled with some number of Zoom bombers yelling over everyone, drawing genitals on the shared screen and creating general mayhem. The whole meeting had to be quickly shut down.
They quickly re-constituted a new Zoom meeting with just the councilors invited – and it’s now up and running and can be viewed here on NewTV.
Looks like the city needs to do some tech work figuring out on how to lock down Zoom, while still having the public present and able to participate in a controlled way. It definitely can be done and will need to be.
Thanks Jerry. I was wondering what what was going on because I waited for half an hour waiting to be let into the meeting, but nothing happened and I just quit. I thought the problem was with my computer system. One of our Highlands Area Council meeting got “Zoom Bombed a few months back. The content was degrading and sick. I’ll catch the rerun on NEWTV tomorrow.
Perhaps if the councilors were less condescending to their youthful constituents we might be willing to teach them how to avoid zoom bombers….we figured that out months ago, it’s time the council listens to us and ALL of our demands.
Young Newtonian, I’m very interested how you’ve come up with a foolproof way of preventing the different permutations of zoom-bombing. Yes, there are some obvious oversights they made (annotations need to be turned off, make sure screen sharing is under control, etc).
Perhaps some of your methods could be found in one of the many articles on the topic, such as here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/style/zoom-security-tips.html
However, for a public meeting, the URL of the meeting and the password (if any) are usually posted publicly. Studious or persistent malcontents can just look them up. Meeting rooms are hard to manage since the screener doesn’t know everyone, and screening is time consuming. It’s also a challenge to run a meeting where the chair has to unmute people (which provides greatest control).
One way to improve filtering for open meetings, which would also save some clerical time, is to have people change their screen names to include their addresses, but then you’ve got to teach the public how to do that. The bar for participation is already high.
Another option is for people to email their contact information to the meeting clerk if they want to speak. We need to be careful about requiring names just to listen to a meeting, since that’s not something we require during in-person meetings.
As for the rest of your comment and its tone, I get your frustration. However, I guess I’ve come to think that life’s too short for posturing, no matter what your age or status. Just tell people what you know and be done with it. Knowledge is best a tool, not a weapon.
Mike, I think there were some councilor comments dismissive of the outpouring of youth voices, prior to yesterday’s meeting, which might account for the expression of frustration.
You raise important points about public access vs security trade offs. Might there be a meeting RSVP that extends into the meeting, and an enabling of the waiting room to approve late arrivals? The cost is in staffing but it’s probably something one person could manage.
Waiting room was already enabled, most of the issues from last night are fixable:
-Global mute should have an option to prevent people from being able to unmute themselves.
-Chat and annotations can be disabled, they did do the former and the latter should prevent drawing on the share.
-Screensharing can be limited to the host only, maybe already set as I didn’t see anyone hijacking the screen.
Only other option I can see glancing through their security best practices would be that you can force users to register beforehand, maybe limit it to email address if there are concerns around requiring names.
Dear all
I’m very sorry for the mess that was our meeting last night regarding racist comments and our video zoom bombers. After the meeting, I emailed with our Clerk and found out that the City’s license for zoom does not include all the features needed to make our meetings more secure. I immediately wrote to the IT Director and asked how much the additional features cost and to purchase them immediately. We met until 11 pm last night and the meeting was viewable on Vimeo and NewTV. We will make sure that the public knows when meetings are also available on NewTV. Since the COVID pandemic, many of our Council and Committee meetings have been available on NewTV. I have a meeting with NewTV later this week to make sure that the public will have access to all our committee meetings even after we start meeting in City Hall again. It is clear that there is tremendous interest in our work and we are better for it. Our discussion with the Chief and Ms. Lemieux was productive. We invited him to come back as not all questions were asked last night. He accepted the offer and we will know today which night he will be back.
Yes!
@CouncilorAlbright, while gracious and appreciated, there is no need to apologize. Technology has its benefits, but its not without faults. I also appreciate what technology offers in allowing the public transparency in the overall city government. The use of Zoom has made the process not only more intimate but much more enjoyable than crowding into City Hall during Northland, which segues into this final point…
The 2 minute egg timer is strictly adhered at times of PUBLIC comment, yet I think my 5 o’clock shadow has grown into a ZZ Top-esque beard in the time Councilors Crossley and Noel completed their comments and questions. Does a citizen need to run for office to be heard?
Regardless of his or her “revolutionary” message and demands, I don’t think Young Newtonian understands the difference between an open public meeting and a high school or college class in which individuals are enrolled in advance.
Brava, Susan! “I have a meeting with NewTV later this week to make sure that the public will have access to all our committee meetings even after we start meeting in City Hall again.” Something good has come out of the Covid crisis. This is an excellent addition to public coverage of City Hall meetings!
And thanks to Matt Lai for doing the impossible, i.e., connecting a Village 14 topic to ZZ Top!
While this doesn’t directly relate to the main topic of this blog post, I want to reiterate something that has always nagged at me:
Why do we make people wait AN HOUR going through routine business before the part of the meeting our residents are actually interested in? Who has that kind of time? We should either put the routine business at the end, or make it clear what time the parts people want to watch are going to happen, and then stick to the timeframe.
@Bryan: Interesting that you brought that up. I was complaining to my kids last night – the agendas that were posted said that Committee of the Whole would begin at 7:00 and that the Full City Council meeting would begin at 7:45 p.m. See here: http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/104118 and here: http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/104128. A little confusing.
As fun as it is to dunk on younger people, there’s plenty of ways to limit the risk of Zoom-b0mbing as Young Newtonian suggests. The City Council could, and should, have disabled the chat all together, instead using just the Q&A feature to the administrator if they wanted public comments. Similarly, if they set it as a webinar, everyone but the councilors would have been view only, negating the yelling and drawing. I’m no IT whiz, I’ve just used Zoom before.
The key issue is: “the City’s license for zoom does not include all the features needed to make our meetings more secure” There is no way to safely run a large, open to the public meeting that allows public comment using Zoom Meeting. The features needed are in the Webinar add-on. Why the City wouldn’t have that add-on is the mystery.
@Jim – For last night’s meeting a Zoom webinar would have worked fine – i.e. the anonymous guests are only watching. The much more difficult situation is a public meeting where members of the public are allowed to have the microphone. The only way that I can think of that would make that reasonable (but not 100%) secure, is to have people who wish to speak sign up sometime before the meeting with their contact info and be pre-vetted. Only they would be allowed inside on the stage of the webinar with the councilors when it was their turn.
The problems with that is its creating a new chunk of administrative work before each meeting and it would preclude somebody from deciding to speak publicly as a result of something they hear at the meeting … and I think that’s not uncommon.
I would like to mention that after they reset and restarted last night’s meeting, I found it very informative. Police chief MacDonald, and Newton CFO Maureen Lemieux answered a lot of detailed questions from the councilors about both the police budget and operations. As is almost always the case, things are more complicated that they appeared (to me) at first glance.
Tomorrow there is a citizen organized Zoom meeting that some City Councilors will be attending to hear citizen concerns. That will be followed either Wednesday or Thurs evening with another official City Council meeting where last night’s discussion will continue.
Didn’t this happen at NS and the principle was so rattled he cut off all class zooms for the week? I apologize if my old memory isn’t accurate.
I think the library upgraded its zoom account early on in the shutdown to make it more secure. I’m not certain about that, but if so, why did the rest of the city’s departments not do the same?