35 civil rights organizations (including Oakland Privacy) joined a sign-on letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to desist from marketing facial recognition technology to the government.
Public records requests reveal that the company has developed and sold a prototype product called “Rekognition” to police departments in Florida and Oregon.
The company specifically describes the purpose of the technology to be “person-tracking.”
This Security Ledger podcast features a 15 minute interview with Robert Xiao, the Carnegie Mellon researcher who discovered the Location Smart wireless phone tracking leak.
On May 15th, the City Council of Richmond, CA voted 6-1 to enact a Sanctuary City Contracting ordinance, sponsored by Councilmembers Jovanka Beckles and Ada Recinos.
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The Sanctuary City ordinance (model legislation can be found here) was developed by the 19-member Deport ICE coalition which seeks to strengthen sanctuary protections in California cities.
Immigration rights activists from Pasos, supported by the San Jose/Sacred Heart chapter of Showing Up For Racial Justice, visited the Livermore, CA headquarters of license plate reader manufacturer Vigilant Solutions on the afternoon of Friday, March 11.
After a rally, activists attempted to deliver a letter to Vigilant asking them to void their January 2018 contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Vigilant employees would not answer the doorbell, so the letter was taped to the front door. Oakland Privacy and the DeportICE coalition sent a rep to the Vigilant delegation.
San Francisco Chronicle coverage of the delegation.
One week after the 1st reading of Oakland’s benchmark Surveillance Equipment Regulation Ordinance, here are links to and brief excerpts from all (or at least most…) of the coverage from the media.
Oakland Privacy’s goal of blanketing Northern California with community control of surveillance laws is coming true. But California has 57 counties and 482 cities. What if they all implemented surveillance transparency at once?
That is what Senate Bill 1186 will do.
