Last fall, tenants at the Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment complex in Brooklyn, received an alarming letter in the mail. Their landlord was planning to do away with the key-fob system that allowed them entry into their buildings on the theory that lost fobs could wind up in the wrong hands and were now also relatively easy to duplicate.

Instead, property managers planned to install facial recognition technology as a means of access. It would feature “an encrypted reference file” that is “only usable in conjunction with the proprietary algorithm software of the system,” the letter explained, in a predictably failed effort to mitigate concerns about privacy.

As it happened, not every tenant was aware of these particular Orwellian developments. New mailboxes in the buildings required new keys, and to obtain a new key you had to submit to being photographed; some residents had refused to do this and so were not getting their mail.

In order to let neighbors who might not have seen the letter know what was potentially coming, five tenants convened in the lobby of one of the two buildings on a late October morning to spread the word. A few days later, those five tenants — like most of the residents at Atlantic, black women — received a notice from property management with pictures of the gathering taken from a security camera; they were told that the lobby was not “a place to solicit, electioneer, hang out or loiter.”