NEW LETTER: 40+ Rights Organizations Urge Lawmakers to Denounce Mask Bans, Citing Free Expression, Privacy, Discrimination Concerns

We, the undersigned, write with great concern about a growing number of bills criminalizing masking in public. Banning masks represents a serious threat to public health, privacy, and free expression, making everyone less safe and disproportionately putting our most marginalized community members at risk. As organizations on the front lines of the fight against surveillance, censorship, and injustice, we call on lawmakers to oppose all efforts to criminalize masks and reverse this dangerous trend before it’s too late.

At the time of writing, more than a dozen mask bans have been proposed at the local, state, and federal levels, presented as “anti-crime” bills. Still more jurisdictions are reviving and enforcing once-defunct anti-mask ordinances, some dating as far back as the mid-1800s. This bipartisan push comes in direct response to ongoing mass protests against the genocide in Palestine, during which protesters have maintained widespread masking to show solidarity and protect from surveillance, doxxing, COVID-19, and chemical irritants.

As we continue to see sustained death and disablement due to COVID and Long COVID, the public health and disability justice implications of criminalizing mask-wearing are disastrous alone. But to make matters worse, these bans violate our most fundamental civil liberties. We demand decisionmakers denounce mask bans on the following grounds:

Criminalizing masking violates our right to free expression. Proponents of mask bans have made it clear that they intend to use the threat of police contact and surveillance to intimidate protesters into silence. From model legislation by conservative think tanks to Democrat-led crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests, mask bans label people safely engaging in protected speech as dangerous, intimidating, and disruptive, giving police a blank check to target masked demonstrators under the assumption of criminal intent. This targeted suppression is already becoming a reality. With a new mask ban in Nassau County, NY facilitating the arrest of a protester simply for wearing a Palestinian scarf, it’s clear that the bans give lawmakers undue power to suppress protected speech they deem unsavory. This poses a serious threat to the right to gather and protest across issues if mask bans go unchallenged.

Mask bans force unwanted exposure to invasive police and commercial surveillance. Where anti-mask laws are already in effect, police are successfully weaponizing mask bans as a profiling and surveillance tactic, lauding the bans as an excellent pretext to stop and frisk. A new North Carolina ban allows nearly anyone to demand a person unmask to be identified, forcing exposure to bad actors and their cameras. And when police, airports, schools, stadiums, and more are all equipped with facial recognition technology, everyone is at risk for privacy violations. Laws that stigmatize or outright ban mask-wearing will only lead to more people  of color misidentified by faulty tech and more sensitive data stored in insecure databases and sold to law enforcement. And while masks don’t always prevent identification, mask bans set a dangerous precedent by criminalizing protecting one’s privacy, threatening our remaining agency to resist an increasingly dystopian surveillance landscape.

Banning masks reinforces systemic inequalities, making public space even less safe for disabled, Black, Brown, Muslim, queer, and trans people. While many proposed anti-mask bills contain health or religious “exemptions,” these give police arbitrary enforcement power and fail to stymie the inherently stigmatizing nature of the bans. Marginalized maskers already face police brutality, harassment, and assault. Banning masks will only foment this violence, encouraging anti-mask sentiment and racial profiling. Whether someone masks to protest safely, protect themselves and their community from COVID and Long COVID, deflect prying eyes and cameras, keep warm, or honor their culture or religion, no one should be forced to unmask and face discriminatory violence.

For these reasons, we urge lawmakers to:

  1. Oppose all anti-mask legislation where proposed, including refusing to accept anti-mask bills with health, religious, or other exemptions as acceptable compromises.
  2. Advocate for the removal of latent anti-mask ordinances from the books to avoid giving officials the power to weaponize them against political dissidents.
  3. Stand with public health, privacy, and freedom of speech and defend the right to wear a mask for any reason.

Mask bans won’t keep us safe. In fact, they threaten our civil liberties at a time when it’s more crucial than ever to defend them. We call on all lawmakers to oppose any and all criminalization of masking in public. Our rights to safety, privacy, and protest depend on it.

Signed,

18 Million Rising
1021 Members for Palestine
Access Now
Adalah Justice Project
API Equality-LA
Arkansas Black Gay Men’s Forum
Assembly Four
Disability Rights California
Erotic Service Provider Legal Education and Research Project
Faith Choice Ohio
Fiat Fiendum
Freedom Oklahoma
Housing Works
If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice
Jewish Voice for Peace
Lavender Phoenix
Long COVID Justice
Mask Bloc Louisville
Mask Bloc Sunset San Francisco
Mask Together America
Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition
MEAction NY
MediaJustice
Muslim Advocates
Oakland Privacy
PDX Privacy
Restore The Fourth
Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project
Secure Justice
Senior and Disability Action
Strategies for High Impact (S4HI)
SWOP Behind Bars
The Wayside
Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT)
Transgender Law Center
UAW Labor for Palestine
UltraViolet
Unite All Workers for Democracy
United We Dream
Woodhull Freedom Foundation
Yale Privacy Lab