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.
At the May 14 meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the City of SF became the 10th jurisdiction in the country to adopt a comprehensive oversight protocol for the acquisition and use of surveillance tech. The 8-1 vote was one shy of unanimous, as Supervisors Ronen and Walton who were both indisposed, are co-sponsors of the Act.
The Stop Secret Surveillance Act, sponsored by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, requires board approval of existing and new equipment, use polices and civil rights impact reports to be created for each methodology and annual reports summarizing use, all available to the public.
San Francisco’s Stop Secret Surveillance Act also bans the use of intrusive facial recognition software by the City, which has been demonstrated to be dangerously inaccurate and racially biased. San Francisco has become the first municipality in the nation to ban its use.
The use of automated license plate readers by law enforcement agencies has become ubiquitous over the last decade. It is probably the most extensive mass surveillance program in the United States. The terrabytes of car images, of whch 99.5% or more will never be connected with any criminal action, have led to problematic storage and sharing methodologies including the use of federal fusion centers like NCRIC and privately held databases like Morotola’s LEARN database (formerly owned by Vigilant Solutions). Such databases have been accessed by numerous federal agencies including ICE and Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force and even the IRS.
Now the State of California is taking another look at license plate readers, after mandating publicly posted usage policies. Assembly privacy chair Ed Chau has unveiled AB 1782 which would subject all ALPR operators and end users in the State to significant limitations on the retention and sharing of license plate reader data.
UC Berkeley’s legal clinic has worked with numerous stakeholders to prepare a privacy principles document and implementation guide for the City of Oakland.
Here are the final drafts of both documents.