Uncategorized

Refocusing License Plate Readers

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Senate Bill 210 passed the California Senate Judiciary Committee on March 23 by a 9-1 vote.

A bill has been introduced in the CA State Legislature to refocus California’s ubiquitous automated license plate readers from tracking the movements of every driver in California in a mass surveillance exercise. The bill is sponsored by Media Alliance, Oakland Privacy and EFF.

Senate Bill 210 from Senator Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) would require operators of license plate reader systems to quickly purge any scans that do not match hot lists of vehicles of interest.

This defines the program as one of finding the location of vehicles of interest, not surveilling every driver in the State. SB 210 also requires annual audits to ensure compliance.

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Oakland Privacy’s Year in Bullet Points – 2020

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Some of the things Oakland Privacy had a hand in in 2020:

  • Deeply involved in the successful effort to get Santa Cruz to pass a facial recognition and predictive policing ban.
  • Initiated and concluded a successful lawsuit against Vallejo re: Stingray approval and use by Council.
  • Filed a lawsuit against Oakland for egregiously violating the Public Records Act.
  • Lobbied for and saw AB 1185, Sheriff Oversight, passed and signed into law.
  • Pushed for and got the AC Transit Board to approve a policy on its surveillance cameras for its rapid-transit platforms.
  • Participated in an opposition campaign to the faux commercial privacy ballot initiative, Prop 24. (it passed nonetheless).
  • Advised activists in Portland, Oregon on their campaign which ultimately resulted in passing a ban on both government AND commercial use of facial recognition, a first.
  • Helped defeat a proposal for massive use of surveillance cameras across Berkeley.
  • Produced a report on Ring camera usage via the ‘Neighbors App’ in San Francisco.
  • Pushed for and succeeded in cutting/eliminating the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ program in California
  • Helped initiate successful public records lawsuits against the Sacramento and Fresno county sheriffs
  • Obtained and distributed much information via public records requests, including on law enforcement helicopters, cell site simulator logs and ALPR deployment locations.

Check out our doings for 2019.

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Drones, Predictive Policing

Oakland City Council Approves Drone Use and Bans Predictive Policing and Biometric Surveillance

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In a busy surveillance day at the Oakland City Council, the council approved a use policy for drone use in Oakland. The city currently does not own any drones, but has borrowed from the stable of drones owned by the Alameda County Sheriff. The approval of the use policy means that use would no longer trigger an individual exigent use report each time it happens, but would just be reported on annually. The City Council also mandated that the city’s general fund not be used to purchase drones, so it is expected that the city will pursue drone purchases with an upcoming COPS or UASI grant funding cycle.

The Council also also approved revisions to the surveillance transparency ordinance approved in 2018 that would expand the existing facial recognition ban to include allied forms of biometric surveillance and make official that the use of predictive policing software like Predpol would not be used in Oakland. The city had already declared that it would not use Predpol and similar predictive programs in 2015.

Transparency Ordinance

AB 1185 Letter to the Journal

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After a 2 year long process, AB 1185, which allows either a county board of supervisors (by vote) or county residents (by referendum) to set up a sheriff oversight board with subpoena power, is a law.

On the last day of the 2020 legislative session, AB 1185 author Kevin McCarty filed a letter to the journal specifying that the intent of the legislation was to grant supervisory authority to the County Board of Supervisors over all county officers, including the Sheriff.

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Ring, Video Surveillance

Ringing Alarm Bells

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A study of implicit bias in consumer surveillance device use in San Francisco

Noting the rapid spread of Ring/Law Enforcement collaborative agreements in Northern California, Oakland Privacy embarked on a study of the content that device owners in San Francisco post to the Ring smartphone application “Neighbors”.

Working with a sample set of 131 videos drawn from the city of San Francisco and scraped by researchers at MIT, our volunteers reviewed the videos (several times) and accompanying post content.

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