In March of 2018, the small East Bay city of San Pablo delayed a $2.4 million dollar expansion of their Vigilant Solutions license plate reader surveillance system after community distress about Vigilant’s contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A third of the city’s population are non-citizen immigrants per census data.
Mike Katz-Lacabe reports that Homeland Security fusion center NCRIC, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, collected 79.2 million license plates from a variety of Northern California cities from June of 2018 to May of 2019.
The City of Piedmont sent 22.4 million license plate scans or 2,036 license plate scans per resident per year.
More than 100 civil and human rights organizations, including Oakland Privacy, wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to demand a vote on the Save The Internet Act, a bill which would restore Open Internet protections and passed the House of Representatives earlier this year.
The letter calls on Senator McConnell to “enact the will of the hundreds of millions of people who support Open Internet protections and broadband competition, and the millions who have taken action demanding them, by allowing Senators to act on the Save The Internet Act”.
You never know what you’re going to find at a convention. At the 2019 IACP technology convention (International Association of Chiefs of Police), Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Dave Maass found a facial recognition brochure from San Jose-based Vintra.io, which tagged both the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and the Sacramento Police Department as customers of their facial recognition software – Fulcrum AI.
Update: Privacy Law Scholars Conference drops Palantir as a sponsor.
Update: A week after Oakland Privacy sent our letter, Mijente started a petition to Berkeley Law School. The petition is here.
Update: The Privacy Law Scholars Conference and Berkeley Law School responded to our letter and offered to let Oakland Privacy-affiliated activists attend the conference on a no-fee basis and to faciliate a meeting with Palantir Technology. Oakland Privacy respectfully declined. We reiterate that corporations complicit in violations of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, United Nations charters and basic principles of racial justice and human rights should not be acceptable sponsors of academic privacy law conferences hosted at the University of California at Berkeley.
Oakland Privacy sent a letter to the Berkeley Law School’s Center for Law and Technology, the host and co-administrator (with George Washington Law School) of the 2019 Privacy Law Scholars Conference objecting to event sponsorship by Palantir Technologies.
The letter states that Palantir’s projects which include the FALCON asset forfeiture database, ICE’s Investigative Case Management System (ICM) and the recently discontinued LASR predictive policing program for the LAPD, “represent the cutting edge of high-tech surveillance wielded against the public and are used to track, profile, detain and incarcerate targeted groups, often in violation of due process and the Bill of Rights, and always in violation of basic principles of racial justice and human rights.”
A 70-strong coalition of social justice and civil rights groups led by M-Power Change, Asian-Americans Advancing Justice and CAIR California (including Oakland Privacy). sent a letter to CA Governor Gavin Newson asking him to end the reinstatement of a washed-over version of the DHS Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, now repackaged as a California state program called Preventing Violent Extremism. (PVE).
The letter states “PVE programs are deceptively framed as public health and youth programs that offer social services to marginalized communities. Such a framing masks the true objectives; to surveil, profile and collect intelligence on Muslim, immigrant and Black and Brown communities…. These programs stigmatize the very communities they purport to help, making them less likely to seek legitimate social services for fear it will lead to unwarranted law enforcement scrutiny.