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Berkeley Adopts First Military Controlled Equipment Regulation in the U.S.

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The City of Berkeley has moved ahead with an oversight and transparency ordinance for controlled military equipment like armored vehicles and assault rifles. To the best of our knowledge, they are the first city in the country to do so. The effort was spearheaded by council woman Kate Harrison, supported by mayor Jesse Arreguin and council members Ben Bartlett and Terry Taplin and passed unanimously. Similar legislation is on tap in Oakland and on a statewide level, in David Chiu’s Assembly Bill 481.

Controlled equipment regulation requires council-approved use policies for a list of military and military-style equipment, approval prior to acquisition, and annual reporting on use metrics. The law follows a startling increase in proto-military equipment owned by municipal police departments over the past two decades, and several academic studies showing the use of such equipment neither prevents crime nor increases officer safety, but instead can escalate violence and excessive use of force incidents.

License Plate Readers

Who’s Looking at Your License Plate Data?

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There are 32 agencies that submit license plate reader data to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), the regional fusion center for Northern California. However, many more agencies are able to access that data once it has been sent to the NCRIC.

According to records received in response to a public records request, 71 agencies queried the NCRIC license plate database between February 21 and March 21, 2021. While the agencies looking up license plates at the NCRIC are generally law enforcement agencies located in Northern California, a few of these agencies may stand out as somewhat unusual. The United States Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General had the 11th highest number of queries to the license plate reader database. Other agencies included the National Park Service, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and the US Postal Inspection Service.

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Transparency Ordinance

City of Vallejo Debating Citizen Advisory Group on Surveillance

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Update: On April 27, the Vallejo City Council voted unanimously to move ahead with a citizen advisory board on surveillance and policing technology. The council plans to finalize adoption at the July 13 city council meeting after the adoption of the municipal budget.

The city of Vallejo, a small city on the southern tip of Solano County, has the distinction of hosting one of the highest rates of police killings in the country. The city is currently facing a potentially catastrophic set of civil lawsuits for police violence including the shooting deaths of Willie McCoy and Sean Monterrosa.

Having added two new reform-minded members to the City Council, and changed mayors and police chiefs, the city is trying to chart a different path. Among the actions taken was the firing of Lieutenant Michael Nichelini, the president of the Vallejo Police Officers Assn, and a former OPD officer. Nichelini launched a 10 million dollar lawsuit in an attempt to get his job back, adding to the City’s legal challenges.

Police chief Shawny Williams, an alumnus of the San Jose Police Department, has expressed an intent to reform the police department with the increased use of high-tech, data-driven policing and has executed with the acquisition of a cell site simulator in the spring of 2020 and increases in the municipal use of ALPR.

After Oakland Privacy successfully sued the city to enforce the public transparency requirements for cell site simulator policies in CA law, we suggested to the Vallejo City Council that the city would benefit from a public venue to collect community input and provide comparative research and best practices on the acquisition and use of high tech policing surveillance equipment.

New mayor Robert McConnell took us up on the offer, and on April 27th, the Vallejo City Council will debate adopting an ordinance to create the country’s second citizen advisory committee on policing and surveillance tech.

Please join us on April 27th at 7pm on Zoom at the Vallejo City Council meeting and speak on the importance of citizen input to surveillance equipment decisions.

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Facial Recognition

Law Enforcement Agencies That Tested Clearview AI

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A leak out of notorious facial recognition vendor Clearview AI to Buzzfeed News has led to a list of some 1800 police agencies where officers “tested” or “tried out” the service, running images through the facial recognition service which is said to contain trillions of images scraped from social media.

The list groups the amount of test scans executed by each agency, several of which had publicly denied that they had ever used facial recognition. The list is a demonstration that local governments often have no idea what the law enforcement agencies they supervise are actually doing.

You can check out the list here.

Data Privacy

Berkeley Community Speaks Up (And Stops) High School Internet Monitoring Plan

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by Sara Zimmerman

Update: 3/31/2021 Berkeley High School parents were informed that the monitoring of what websites students visited has been put on indefinite hold. Parents will retain the ability to ban certain websites on school-issued devices.

Students at Berkeley High were alarmed in March 2021 to unexpectedly receive an email from Berkeley High principal Juan Raygoza informing them that, effective immediately, the school had enabled a monitoring app on all school issued chromebooks and devices. The monitoring app provided parents and guardians with access to students’ browsing history, recent top 5 websites, apps, and extensions.  The email stated: “Your parents are there to help keep you safe, and the app provides them with what they need to do that.  In order to bring you an effective digital learning environment, it’s important to open the lines of communication with the adults who have your best interest at heart.”

Students and parents responded quickly, urging Berkeley High to reevaluate this policy, at a minimum postponing implementation of this change and providing privacy protections regarding students’ past activities.  In response, Berkeley High sent an email to at least one parent stating that it was putting elements of the policy on hold for further review, turning off the monitoring features of the app but maintaining the ability for parents and guardians to block specific websites or cut off access to the internet.  However, no notice went out to the student population informing them about this change. 

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Oakland Privacy Receives James Madison Freedom of Information Award from Society of Professional Journalists

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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.