Update: On October 15th, the Berkeley City Council approved an amendment to their surveillance transparency ordinance banning the use of facial recognition technology, except when from an outside source, unsolicited and tied to a specific individual crime. The Council also approved a pilot deployment of 15 IKE kiosks in the DT, Telegraph and Lorin neighborhoods. After negotiations with privacy advocates, the kiosks were modified to remove pinhole and booth cameras, to scramble MAC address information collected from passing devices and to share no data with third parties without explicit municipal consent.
In August of 2018, violating pretty much every single word of the surveillance transparency ordinance passed unanimously by the City Council in March of 2018, Berkeley’s city manager Dee Ridley-Williams borrowed Avilgon hi-tech cameras from the Homeland Security federal fusion center NCRIC. The IP-enabled cameras are equipped with advanced analytics including appearance search recognition and movement detection. The NCRIC cameras were secretly installed in Civic Center Park (across from City Hall) to spy on a previously announced right wing protest and expected counterprotests. Staff at Homeland Security’s federal fusion center had log-in credentials for the cameras and access to the footage. Berkeley later bought and installed the same camera brand in San Pablo Park a few months later.
WhoWhatWhy podcast on the Berkeley evasion of surveillance transparency with OP’s Tracy Rosenberg
With NCRIC’s robust facial recognition capacities and close collaboration with the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, all individuals in, at, near or by the park or other parts of Downtown Berkeley on August 5, 2018 should assume their identities are known to the Trump Administration and the FBI.
Tenth Amendment Center: Smoking Gun: Feds Partner with Local Police to Facilitate Warrantless Surveillance
