We know very well that if trends continue, we will have no privacy left.
Moving towards a cashless society means every purchase we make can and will be tracked, analyzed and stored. Driverless cars will insure – if ALPRs and facial surveillance haven’t already – that we won’t be able to go anywhere without our origins, routes and destinations tracked. The “Internet of Things” ultimately will ensure that every device we interact with will record our use of it. Computers that respond to our verbal commands could be recording everything we say. It is not even beyond the realm of foreseeable technological possibility that our very thoughts could be analyzed.
On October 12th, KGO-FM consumer affairs reporter Michael Finney sat down with Oakland Privacy’s Mike Katz-Lacabe to answer the question of whether it matters if your doorbell is a spybot. Here is their conversation.
A surveillance watchdog’s job is never done. As we try to convince cities, counties, transit districts and whoever else is watching us, to implement comprehensive oversight, the one-on-one method prevails
El Cerrito may be considering a full transparency ordinance, but until they do, we have to negotiate 1) community input into the use policy for the drone 2) City Council review of the policy for the drone 3) voluntary release of annual logs of drone use.
We did. Our letter to the council is below. Now let’s make it the law every time.
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
Bay Area activists continue to picket and protest at the headquarters of Palantir Technologies, the Palo Alto software company powering the Trump Administration’s deportation regime.
On one of the hottest days of the year, protestors rallied at the company’s Palo Alto building, covered the ubiquitous security cameras with umbrellas, and marched to (one of) Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s houses in Palo Alto to deliver a petition with 140,000 signatures asking Palantir to stop working for ICE.
The Associated Students at UC Berkeley have passed a resolution demanding that UC Berkeley terminate their contract with SSTI, Inc, the Newark-based manufacturer of Shotspotter gunshot detection microphones.
