Immigration and ICE, License Plate Readers

Richmond Cancels Vigilant Solutions ALPR Contract

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Update: On June 25, the Richmond City Council voted 5-2 not to renew their contract with Vigilant Solutions.

Richmond Standard

The decision by the Council represents the first Bay Area municipal contract cancelled as a result of the passage of a sanctuary contracting ordinance. The lengthy debate over the course of the entire month of June ended with Oakland Privacy, the Richmond Progressive Alliance and immigration advocates convincing the majority of the council that Vigilant Solutions was a bad actor and that municipal funds should be directed to an alternate vendor that is not under contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. By ending the contract, Richmond temporarily ceased their license plate reader program until a new RFP is issued and a replacement vendor located. Richmond joins Culver City and Half Moon Bay on the list of California municipalities that have not gone ahead with Vigilant contracts and the City of Alameda, which did not expand its Vigilant system in February of 2018 over ICE contracts.

In May of 2018, the City of Richmond with the support of the Richmond Progressive Alliance and DSA East Bay, passed the nation’s first Sanctuary Contracting ordinance. The small East Bay City had a limited number of contracts and the chief one was for license plate readers with Vigilant Solutions, now a division of Motorola. The contract was set to expire in …. June of 2019.

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Immigration and ICE, License Plate Readers

San Pablo Cops Sending License Plates to Border Patrol

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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.

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Immigration and ICE, License Plate Readers

79 Million Bay Area License Plates to Homeland Security

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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.

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Net Neutrality

100+ Groups Demand A Senate Vote on Net Neutrality

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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”.

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Facial Recognition

Alameda County Facial Recognition

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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.

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Immigration and ICE

Palantir Should Not Sponsor Privacy Conference at Berkeley

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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.”

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