Homeland Security

Section 702 Re-Authorization Time Again

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Ever since the Section 702 addition to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 2008, privacy advocates have sought its abolition or significant reforms. Section 702 permits warrantless surveillance of the contents of the communications of Americans if one part of the communication is a non-US person.

The FISA Court has declared that “compliance problems with the FBI’s querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.”

As a cherry on top, notorious immigration extremist Stephen Miller has recently been a lead advocate for a clean or unchanged Section 702 authorization.

70+ civil rights groups have once again demanded that Congress significantly reform Section 702 if it is re-authorized by (among other things) closing the backdoor search loophole, prevent the purchase of data broker information by intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement agencies, remove the expanded definition of an electronic communications service provider and add amici access and participation to FISA Court proceedings.

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Data Privacy

What Advocates Look For in Privacy-Related Legislation

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Privacy advocates throughout California got together last week to tell Sacramento politicians about what advocates look for in privacy-related legislation and regulation.

Asian- Americans Advancing Justice, Tech Equity, EFF and UC Law Center for Constitutional Democracy tackled the biggest loopholes that make privacy laws and rules weaker than they should be.

Check out the video!

Data Privacy

Privacy Fallacies: Legislative Briefing

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Privacy advocates throughout California got together last week to tell Sacramento politicians about five things they think are true about privacy, but aren’t.

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Consumer Reports, COSPR, ACLU and Oakland Privacy tackled themes like consent is enough, enforcement can be an afterthought, regulations harm innovation, children’s privacy is more important than adult privacy, and it’s a great idea to pay us chump change for our data.

Check out the video.

License Plate Readers

Courts Weigh In On ALPR

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In quick succession, two courts weighed in on the license plate reader problem – in very different ways.

In Schmidt v Norfolk, the one you’ve probably heard of, a federal court declined to reconsider the “no right to privacy in a public place” axiom in the wake of Carpenter, Beautiful Struggle and other cases starting to look at it in a different way. The judge however did leave the door open to a different conclusion in the future.

In Bartholomew v Parking Concepts, the case you haven’t heard of, the CA Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling to determine that an ALPR operator not having the written privacy policy that is required by SB 34 (2015) is all by itself a privacy harm for which an injured plaintiff can sue. The unanimous decision by a 3 judge panel concluded that if a plaintiff cannot access the information about what is being collected, how it is being stored and who has access to it that they are entitled to by law, then they have been sufficiently harmed to file a lawsuit. This ruling makes SB 34 immediately a more enforceable and more useful regulatory tool.

You can read both court decisions below.

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License Plate Readers

Automated License Plate Reader Use Doesn’t Add Up

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by Tracy Rosenberg

In June of 2025, Oakland Privacy received a Flock audit log from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office detailing the activity in their cloud database of license plate reader scans from the department’s owned cameras. After keyword searches of the hundreds of thousands of entries, a handful of hits for out of state shares and references to searches “for” Customs and Border Patrol got (rightfully) most of the attention and formed the basis for this Cal Matters story by Khari Johnson.

But in looking in a more leisurely fashion at the rest of the data – and we are not picking on the Riverside County Sheriff in particular, these logs are very similar throughout the state – we wanted to pose some questions about the plain old regular legally compliant use of this technology. In short, we don’t completely understand what they are looking for.

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Data Privacy

How CA Tried to Address Algorithmic and Surveillance Pricing (Part 2)

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by Samuel Leitch

In 2022, a time when rents continued to soar impossibly, the company RealPage boasted that it could help landlords increase profits even further.1 How was this possible? By pooling nonpublic pricing data from clients, RealPage’s software can offer landlords recommendations on the highest possible rent that they can set for a given residential unit. Although it would be illegal for these landlords to communicate directly to agree upon rent prices, critics of RealPage claim that this software simply acts as an algorithmic middleman for price setting. RealPage is no small player, either: Greystar, the largest apartment manager in the United States, will have to pay $7 million to nine different states for its use of RealPage’s software.2

This scenario is an example of algorithmic price fixing, where through the use of software, competitors may coordinate outcomes that would otherwise be illegal under antitrust law.

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