At the March 14 meeting of the DHS Approval Authority in Dublin, the Urban Shield SWAT drill and weapons show was suspended for 2019, after the Alameda County Board of Supervisors endorsed a 60-recommendation package to demilitarize the disaster preparedness…
The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project is a public records project that seeks to find out and transparently report on surveillance equipment in use in the State of California. The project has filed over 200 public records requests with…
This spring, the city of San Francisco will consider Oakland Privacy’s signature surveillance transparency regulation legislation, but with a twist. The Stop Secret Surveillance Act, introduced on January 29, 2019 by Supervisor Aaron Peskin and Board of Supes prez Norman…
**Update: Assembly Bill 1747 was introduced in the CA Legislature to specifically forbid the use of any state databases for immigration enforcement. In 2018, then State Senator Ricardo Lara authored a bill, SB 244, that was signed into law. The…
Every year, law enforcement agencies go to the Homeland Security till and ask for some new crime fighting gadgets. Here’s the list of what Bay Area law enforcement agencies want in 2019. *Sonoma County wants an LRAD (long range acoustical…
Following community pressure after the October 3 death of Chinedu Okobi a 36 year old Black man who was tasered by San Mateo County Sheriffs after being stopped for “walking erratically”, San Mateo’s Board of Supervisors is convening a community…
In the first substantive ruling on whether Senate Bill 1421 applies to investigatory and disciplinary records on use of force and misconduct incidents that occurred prior to January 1, 2019, Contra Costa Superior Court judge Charles Treat ruled that it…
25 civil liberties and immigration organizations, including Oakland Privacy released an open letter to Congress calling on negotiators not to provide additional funding for border surveillance technologies as part of the “grand compromise” deal around border security. The letter specifies…
On January 29th, San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin introduced the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance in the City and County of San Francisco. The surveillance transparency measure follows the November 2018 passage of Proposition B, a “Privacy First” initiative approved by…
Type Investigations, formerly the Investigative Fund, looked into what happens when a city goes ahead and builds a Domain Awareness Center without a transparency ordinance in place. St Louis did that with their “Real Time Crime Center”. Here is what…