At today’s Alameda County Board of Supervisors meeting, 5+ hours of discussion ended with a decision that Urban Shield as currently constituted would end after the 2018 war games and exposition. The 4-1 vote, with Supervisor Scott Haggerty more or…
by Admin I’d like to tell you that my heart broke when I heard about the Parkland shooting in February. But how many times can the heart break? Considering how frequently mass shootings occur in the US, it’s hard to…
by J.P. Massar The future is here. An unholy mix of 1984, Minority Report and cyberpunk. In westernmost China, and increasingly everywhere in a country composing one seventh of humanity, the omnipresent surveillance state is a reality. Nithin Coca, in…
by Eric Neville As society is ignorant of its technology, we steer our democracy blindly. As we willfully conceal information from ourselves, we put blinders on society. Yet we need to craft our public policy to address the perpetually moving target that is…
These photos were produced by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in response to a public records request for photos of the 2017 war games exercise. These are culled from over 300 photos showing officers from the Homeland Security Investigations division…
The City of Davis gave a unanimous thumbs up to surveillance transparency on March 20 at the first reading of the ordinance that requires approval prior to equipment acquisition, use policies defining acceptable and unacceptable uses and annual audits on…
On March 19, a $2.9 million dollar expansion of San Pablo’s license plate reader system (already extensive) and a switch of vendors to troubled Vigilant Solutions was removed from the meeting consent calender, and then indefinitely postponed after local youth,…
Information services and journalism mega-corporation Thomson Reuters has signed another contract to provide data to ICE. This latest contract, which runs through 2023, is with ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and tracks 500,000 alien residents in the United…
Two weeks after criminal justice reporter Ali Winston revealed the City of New Orleans Police Department had a secret predictive policing program with Palantir Software that neither the public nor the City Council knew about, outgoing mayor Mitch Landrieu…
After twenty months of review by multiple citizen commissions, privacy advocates, city staff, and elected officials, on March 13, 2018, the Berkeley City Council unanimously approved a powerful new law aimed at protecting privacy rights. Based on a model created…