by J.P. Massar
Passing legislation is only half the battle. Without oversight by watchdogs, be they legislators or public-interest organizations or both, executives can easily ignore inconvenient laws that increase their workload or their budget. Without pushback, the interpretation of laws can be twisted to belay legislation’s intent.
All of this was in play in May of 2020 as the Berkeley City Council considered whether to sign on to a contract with CycloMedia to take snapshot, panoramic views of Berkeley’s streets. The City Manager had decided that this process did not fall under Berkeley’s Surveillance Ordinance, issuing two memos to that effect. Some City Councilors and Oakland Privacy advocates thought otherwise based on the plain English meaning of the ordinance.
As the matter came to a head at the May 26th, 2020 Council meeting, it became apparent that the City Manager was losing the semantic argument. City staff then resorted to standard fallbacks: the cost of delay and the lack of staffing resources. The pandemic and Berkeley’s budget crisis were also pulled into the fray, but the Mayor, Jesse Arreguin, and Councilors Sophie Hahn and Kate Harrison held firm, supported by Councilors Cheryl Davila and Ben Bartlett: before this contract could be signed, an Acquisition Report and Surveillance Policy must be presented to the Council, as required by law.
Oakland Privacy salutes Councilpersons Hahn and Harrison, and Mayor Arreguin, who insisted on holding the City of Berkeley to the law its own Council had passed unanimously two years ago.
This was not a matter of blind opposition to surveillance tech. No one had been opposed to the goal this contract sought to have happen: a semi-automated inventory of City-owned signs, lampposts, trafffic signals and the like. What Oakland Privacy opposed was the attempt to do an end-run around the Surveillance Ordinance’s provisions for acquiring such tech, and what would have been the consequent lack of any legal restrictions on its use. Just as laws that are never “intended” to be used for purposes other than those stated can – and often are – used in a far wider-ranging manner than ever envisioned, so can technology and databases be employed far beyond their acquisition rationale, often to the detriment of civil liberties.
There isn’t a lot of glory in holding up a City contract to make sure it doesn’t allow spying capability to slip through, but we think there’s some value, even if Franklin only talked about price.
Here is the transparency paperwork required by law that has now been filed prior to acquisition of the product.
Final-Combined-Supplemental-Re-CycloMedia