Data Privacy

34 Organizations Unite To Release Principles For Privacy Legislation

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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.”

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Immigration and ICE

Who’s Behind ICE – Empower LLC Report from Con Mijente, NIP and IDP

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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.

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Police Militarization, UASI

Rebooting Alameda County Emergency Preparedness

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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.

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Homeland Security

National Park Service Proposed Limit on White House Protests

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New proposed rules from the National Park Service would make it substantially harder to hold rallies, demonstrations or protests in Washington and specifically on the streets and sidewalks surrounding the White House.

Among the changes suggested are a prohibition on 80% of the public area outside the White House, including Lafayette Park, a traditional site for protests for more than a hundred and fifty years. The NPS also proposes charging event organizers for the costs of monitoring and interfering with their protests, including charging  enhanced fees for barricades and surveillance and changing the permitting process to not require an answer until as little as 40 days beforehand, making it very difficult to organize large nationwide protests.

The comment period closes on Monday October 15th at 11:59PM EST, so there is still time to make your voice heard here.

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Immigration and ICE

Oakland Police Commission Rejects Closing of ICE Raid Untruthfulness Complaint

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On October 11, the Oakland Police Commission voted 5-1 to reject CPRA investigator Anthony Finnell’s investigation report and closing of the complaint filed in November of 2017 by Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission chair Brian Hofer and several co-complainants of untruthfulness by Oakland Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick in statements made about the August 2017 West Oakland ICE raid. East Bay Express: Oakland Review Agency Exonerates Police Chief Over False Statements Regarding ICE Raid.

The raid by Homeland Security Investigations on a home on 27th Street in West Oakland,which followed the termination of an OPD/ICE cooperation agreement, led to several charged hearings in Oakland and an eventual change in policy to avoid all cooperation with immigration enforcement and all divisions of ICE. Originally claimed to be a human trafficking operation, the raid was later revealed by diligent investigative work by Indybay reporter Dave ID, privacy chair Hofer and others, to have resulted in no criminal charges of any kind and the attempted deportation of a young undocumented Guatemalan man. 

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