In the coming weeks, Alameda County will be putting forward for a public vote their inventory and usage policys for the county sheriff’s large arsenal of military equipment. ALCO, partially as a result of their operation of the large correctional facility at Santa Rita, is one of the most militarized police departments in California. This is not news to participants in Bay Area protests.
There are two particular areas for focus.
The 2023 legislative season in CA’s state capital has come to a close. Oakland Privacy intervened on your behalf on over 65 bills (a world record), piping up in support, opposition or demanding changes. Our final batting average in sign/veto requests to Governor Newsom was 20-4 (i.e. 20 times the governor did what we asked, 4 times he did not). Our own sponsored bill, AB 1463 (license plate readers) stalled in Senate Judiciary, but will come back for a second try in 2024. It is 3 stops from the governor’s desk!
Some highlights and lowlights to follow:
The Chrome Privacy campaign sought to intervene in Google’s reworking of advertising cookies to increase user privacy. Um….. that didn’t work. Google’s long-running “Privacy Sandbox” is more like a privacy tar pit. It does inhibit the activities of third party cookies in the browser, but only in the interests of the company itself acquiring and stockpiling more data from its web browser.
The good news? You don’t have to use Chrome. There are better options across the technology spectrum including Firefox, Safari, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi – and it is time to make the switch. We wish Google had listened because Chrome is a fast browser. But they choose to throw privacy overboard and it is time for users who care about privacy to throw Chrome overboard.
We tried. A petition with 40,000 signatures did not deter Google. Here is our short video and webinar presentation from June of 2023 before the “Sandbox” (ugh) landed.
The AMEMSA Justice Collective is a new statewide coalition that seeks to advance civil rights protections for Asian , Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities. The AJC is directed by and accountable to AMEMSA communities and seeks to organize in a grassroots, bottoms-up manner. The AJC project was initiated by Hammad Alam, a brilliant privacy lawyer with the Asian Law Caucus. Oakland Privacy was honored to be asked to help develop the coalition as a trusted ally.
As an initial project, the AJC seeks to develop and advocate for transparency legislation for federal-local partnerships. Such partnerships, which include the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI Safe Streets programs, among others, often serve as an unregulated frontier in policing, since many local criminal justice reforms don’t include the local/federal partnerships. See the fact sheet below for more on the AJC’s work and how you can support it.
* Note: We must share here that AJC’s founder Hammad Alam tragically passed away in early October. His death is a great loss for the privacy and anti-surveillance community, to the Muslim and South Asian communities writ large who he lived to serve, and enormously painful to those of us who knew him as a friend and an unspeakable loss for his family, including his wife and six month old daughter. If you would like to make a donation in his honor to help his wife and daughter, you can do so here.
With the explosion of surveillance data being harvested across many different sectors, fusion centers were built to consolidate the multiple streams of surveillance data into information-sharing hubs that include local, state, federal, and private entities. Each state has at least a primary fusion center but can also have other regional fusion centers focused on major metropolitan areas within the state. In California, the primary fusion center is the California State Threat Assessment Center and the state also has regional fusion centers: NCRIC (Northern California), CCIC/STAC (Sacramento), LAJRIC (Los Angeles), OCIAC (Orange County), and SDLEC (San Diego).
In September 2023, anti-surveillance activists from across the country (Chicago, Portland, and Northern and Southern California) came together to discuss gunshot detection and leading manufacturer Shotspotter (now known as “SoundThinking”). The panel was hosted by POP Pasadena and featured Mohammed Tasajar from ACLU-Socal, Aje Amaechi from Freedom to Thrive in Portland, Ed Vogel from the Lucy Parsons Lab in Chicago and Tracy Rosenberg from Oakland Privacy.
You can watch the coversation here!