When you go all in, you generally don’t want to be called if you are unsure of the outcome.
It could have been a scene from a poker movie. Instead, it was real life drama played for $5M stakes at the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project is a public records project that seeks to find out and transparently report on surveillance equipment in use in the State of California.
The project has filed over 200 public records requests with several California cities and counties including Sacramento, San Diego, Monterey, Ventura, Fresno, Long Beach, Oxnard, Calexico and Bakersfield.
One of the items being researched is MOU’s with other law enforcement agencies. Calexico participates in Operation Stonegarden, a DHS program that deputizes police officers in border-adjacent counties to assist Customs and Border Patrol. California passed the California Values Act -SB 54 (“sanctuary state”) legislation in the fall of 2017 limiting the state’s role in immigration enforcement. Imperial County’s MOU was signed after SB54 was enacted by former Governor Jerry Brown in October of 2017.
This spring, the city of San Francisco will consider Oakland Privacy’s signature surveillance transparency regulation legislation, but with a twist.
The Stop Secret Surveillance Act, introduced on January 29, 2019 by Supervisor Aaron Peskin and Board of Supes prez Norman Yee, adds a total ban on the use of facial recognition software by city government.
This is the first time a SERO ordinance has pre-emptively declared that the use of a particular kind of surveillance tech is, ipso facto, unacceptable for use by the government.
So said truly one of many speakers during a seven hour meeting in Oakland on the 26th of February, 2019, at which Urban Shield had a heart attack. The Alameda County Board of Supervisors kept their word from a year ago and voted to end Urban Shield “as it is currently constituted,” approving recommendations from the Ad Hoc Committee it created that would give Urban Shield a new heart, a new name, and a new purpose.
Thank the Board of Supervisors for their vote right now!
**Update: Assembly Bill 1747 was introduced in the CA Legislature to specifically forbid the use of any state databases for immigration enforcement.
In 2018, then State Senator Ricardo Lara authored a bill, SB 244, that was signed into law. The bill protected documents submitted to get a driver’s license or state identification card from disclosure to any third party, including ICE or CPB, without a subpoena, court order or a written certification describing the specific circumstances of a health or safety emergency and why there wasn’t time to get a court order.
The law was particularly important because, 5 years earlier, California had implemented AB 60, which authorized the State to issue drivers licenses and ID cards to undocumented residents.
Every year, law enforcement agencies go to the Homeland Security till and ask for some new crime fighting gadgets. Here’s the list of what Bay Area law enforcement agencies want in 2019.
*Sonoma County wants an LRAD (long range acoustical device or sound cannon) and a mobile surveillance tower for “large events”.
*San Mateo County wants an armored tactical transport van for their SWAT team.
*Oakland wants an armored firefighting vehicle
*San Francisco’s Sheriff wants a drone and a mobile surveillance robot
*Santa Cruz wants a drone with an infrared camera.