Oakland Privacy was honored to receive a 2021 James Madison Award from the Norcal Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists for our lawsuit and advocacy with the City of Vallejo and their purchase of a cell site simulator.
As SPJ stated: The advocacy of Oakland Privacy‘s activists pushed the City of Vallejo to follow California law on its use of surveillance technology. At a live-streamed meeting during the early days of the COVID pandemic, Vallejo’s city council approved the police’s deployment of a cell-phone surveillance tech known as a Stingray – without creating a usage policy in a public process, as is required by state law. On Mike Katz-Lacabe’s initiative, Oakland Privacy, Solange Echeverria, and Dan Rubins sued the city, and then, after winning a preliminary ruling, Oakland Privacy fought for revisions to the Stingray policy that were then incorporated by the city council at public meetings. Those changes included banning using the Stingray on First Amendment activity like protests and requiring that quarterly logs of the technology’s usage be released to the public.
You can see all of the winners who have advanced transparency in Northern California and listen to Mike Ktaz-Lacabe’s speech on behalf of Oakland Privacy and co-plaintiffs Dan Rubins and Solange Echeverria here.