Hamden Council, Too, Gets Zoom Bombed

The Hamden Legislative Council did not even open its meeting Monday evening before a ​“Zoom bomber” had exploded the online meeting’s ​“chat” function with racist and homophobic slurs.

Now two nights in a row of planned meetings have been rescheduled as the town figures out how to hold public input through the Zoom teleconferencing app without trolls taking over the meeting and blasting obscene messages into the public record.

The council meeting scheduled for Monday has been rescheduled for Thursday, April 23, at 6 p.m. A public hearing on the budget that was supposed to take place on Tuesday was rescheduled for Thursday at 7 p.m.

Only the hearing on the Board of Education’s budget, scheduled for Wednesday at 7 p.m., remains on the schedule as planned. Public comment must be emailed in. It will then be read by a council member to put it into the record.

“Zoom bombers” have been a problem for local governments and other organizations all over the country. Trolls can use the screen sharing function to blast obscene footage to innocent school board- and council-meeting goers, forcing public officials to shut their meetings down. Or, as happened on Monday, they can blow up the chat and Q & A functions if they can’t take over screens. The same night a Zoom bomber disrupted a meeting of the New Haven Board of Alders.

Monday’s Hamden ​“zoom-bomb” highlighted the challenges of running government business, which requires public input, over Zoom.

As soon as the slurs began to make Monday’s chat feature explode, Council President Mick McGarry shut down the chat. But the ​“Zoom-bomber” continued in the Q & A section.

As some of the most offensive terms in the English language blinked onto their screens, McGarry, Town Attorney Sue Gruen, and other members of the council discussed what to do. McGarry had successfully turned off the chat feature, but he could not figure out how to turn off the Q & A feature. If he started the meeting, whatever questions people typed in would have to become a part of the official record, he said, even if they consisted of a string of expletives.

Yet the council must have a public input session. Unable to figure out what to do, McGarry decided to close the meeting. The soonest it could be rescheduled for was 8 p.m. Tuesday, since the town must give 24-hours notice before a special meeting.

A notice of a new meeting was posted, with the same agenda, which includes an ordinance allowing Mayor Curt Leng to make expenditures to respond to the pandemic. The council was going to begin the public hearing on the budget that was scheduled for 7 p.m., and then recess the hearing at 8 to open the special meeting to take care of town business, then continue the public hearing on the budget after if need be.

But Tuesday afternoon rolled around, and plans changed once more. The town posted a notice saying the special meeting had been postponed again, this time to Thursday evening.

Then, a few minutes after 6 p.m., less than an hour before the public hearing on the budget was supposed to begin, McGarry sent an email to other council members saying that it, too, had been postponed.

Public input must now be emailed to [email protected] half an hour before Zoom meetings. ​“Form letters that are substantially similar” will be read only once, McGarry wrote in his email. Residents who email in the same letter will have just their support for the letter entered into the record.

McGarry said the council could have gone forward with the meeting Tuesday, ​“but we didn’t think that would be fair to not give people time to understand the new paradigm that we’re working under.”

He said he and town staff had made sure the emailed public comment model is legal. ​“Part of the reason this took the whole day is that we made sure that everything we did complied with the governor’s executive orders,” he said.