Recent public records requests have confirmed that as of February 2018 at least three Bay Area Sheriff Departments were sharing license plate reader scans they collected with the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol via the Vigilant Solutions platform LEARN. The three confirmed Departments are Contra Costa, Marin and San Mateo. See sharing reports below.
After watching police body camera videos of her brother’s death by taser at the hands of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, Ebele Okobi posted on Facebook about the death of 36 year old Chinedu Okobi.
“They were shocking because they contradicted, in every single particular, the statement that the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office released and to which San Mateo District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe referred in multiple news outlets after my brother’s murder.”
Washington – Today, 34 civil rights, consumer, and privacy organizations join in releasing public interest principles for privacy legislation, because the public needs and deserves strong and comprehensive federal legislation to protect their privacy and afford meaningful redress.
Irresponsible data practices lead to a broad range of harms, including discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and advertising. They also lead to data breaches and loss of individuals’ control over personal information. Existing enforcement mechanisms fail to hold data processors accountable and provide little-to-no relief for privacy violations.
The following can be attributed to JP Massar, Organizer at Oakland Privacy:
“We must not only watch the watchers, and regulate the sellers of our information. We must begin to unravel the information panopticon that has already formed. This is a start.”
With over 1,000 attendees, the CAIR-SFBA Banquet is the largest annual gala for the Muslim community in the Bay Area.
And we got not one, but two, “Certificates of Special Congressional Recognition” to boot. Now, if only Congress would actually protect our privacy…
New report pulls together all the extant pieces of the deportation machine and the information technology that fuels it, highlighting the roles of Amazon’s cloud storage and Palantir’s ICM and Falcon software, Forensic Logic’s Coplink data brokers Thomson Reuters and Vigilant Solutions, and biometrics company Gemalto, among others.
On March 27, 2018, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution ending Urban Shield, as currently constituted, after the September 2018 expo and drills. A new Ad-Hoc task force was assembled to recommend how the County should use its Urban Areas Security Iniative (UASI) emergency preparedness grant funding from the Department of Homeland Security going forward. You can find out more about the new task force here.
It will be meeting on November 5, 14 30 and December 14, once each in the districts of Supervisors Carson, Chan, Miley and Valle. (An October 19 meeting was held in Supervisor Haggerty’s district in Fremont). All meetings are open to the public.
Oakland Privacy prepared some recommendations for how to reboot the County’s emergency preparedness training drills that formerly were called Urban Shield. You can read our recommendations below.
OP member Tracy Rosenberg attended the 2018 Urban Shield exposition and some SWAT and CERT training drills and wrote up a report back here.