Two weeks after criminal justice reporter Ali Winston revealed the City of New Orleans Police Department had a secret predictive policing program with Palantir Software that neither the public nor the City Council knew about, outgoing mayor Mitch Landrieu cancelled the contract.
Read more at The Verge.
After twenty months of review by multiple citizen commissions, privacy advocates, city staff, and elected officials, on March 13, 2018, the Berkeley City Council unanimously approved a powerful new law aimed at protecting privacy rights.
Based on a model created by the ACLU, the ordinance requires that all surveillance technology proposals first undergo a public discussion to determine the potential benefits, costs, and concerns of such an acquisition and its use in the community, and that the benefits outweigh the costs and concerns. Accountability and ongoing oversight are maintained with annual reporting requirements that will provide the community with information about how the equipment is being used.
With the historic vote, Berkeley became the first city in the nation to enact this type of ordinance. The County of Santa Clara unanimously passed a similar ordinance in 2016, becoming the first entity in the nation to take such an approach. The city of Davis is expected to enact a similar version on March 20.
James Schwab, spokesperson for the ICE Northern California headquarters located at 630 Sansome Street in San Francisco has resigned from his position. Scwab said the Trump Adminstration including Acting ICE Director James Homan and AG Jeff Sessions made false and misleading statements about the Northern California “revenge on sanctuary cities” raids by ICE at the end of February 2018.
Schwab said to the San Francisco Chronicle: ““I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts. I asked them to change the information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time and I quit.”
He continued, ““I didn’t feel like fabricating the truth to defend ourselves against (Schaaf’s) actions was the way to go about it,” he said. “We were never going to pick up that many people. To say that 100 percent are dangerous criminals on the street, or that those people weren’t picked up because of the misguided actions of the mayor, is just wrong.”
Read the complete story here.
In a shocking move, Contra Costa sheriff David Livingston kicked immigrant support group CIVIC (Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement) in what the group says is a retalitaory action after they drew attention to conditions in the jail, which houses immigrant detainees on a contract with ICE.
90 organizations, including Oakland Privacy, signed a letter objecting to the expulsion of CIVIC from the West County Immigration Detention Center.
The City Council is on the verge of implementing significant reforms aimed at protecting the civil liberties of all Berkeley residents, including immigrants.
Full article here.
The vote will be held at the March 13 City Council meeting at Old Berkeley City Hall 2134 Martin Luther King Jr Way in Berkeley. The meeting begins at 6pm. The item is expected to be heard between 7pm and 9pm.
Take action to tell the Berkeley City Council you support surveillance transparency.
A public records request by Oakland Privacy member Mike Katz Lacabe for pictures from the Urban Shield 2017 counterterrorism drill revealed Homeland Security Investigations/ICE participated in Urban Shield, despite there being no listing for HSI or ICE in the participant list.
East Bay Express coverage: Alameda County Sheriff Hosted ICE at Urban Shield
Telmundo coverage: Activista: Agentes De ICE Entrenados A La Bahia
“It’s easy to look at it this way: The Department of Homeland Security equals ICE equals training at Urban Shield equals terrorizing communities,” Alameda County spokesperson Sgt. Ray Kelly said. “It’s a lot more complicated than that”.
