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!
The San Leandro City Council voted 4-3 to reject, for now, a police proposal to double the number of license plate readers in the East Bay town from 41 to 82. The initial 41 were approved in 2022, but just recently were fully installed,
The Council discussion was lengthy (over an hour and a half). We have pulled a few video clips with particularly interesting Q+A below.
Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), a program developed by the Obama administration, sought to combat radicalization, then defined almost entirely as Muslim-based violent extremism, through using schools and social service agencies to “identify” potential terrorists based on somewhat poorly defined characteristics. The program drew significant opposition on several fronts, including the vague indicators of incipient terrorism, the community-destroying elements of reporting and mutual suspicion, and the criminalization of innocuous behavior.
Versions of CVE continued to circulate through the Homeland Security apparatus, including Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), a state copycat version that was defunded, TVTP (Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention) and the Bay Area UASI (Urban Areas Security Initiative), whose then-law enforcement training program Urban Shield heavily featured exercises illustrating attacks by Islamic extremists. (Urban Shield was discontinued).
In the post-Urban Shield environment, the training program from Bay Area UASI, called BATEP, is undergoing some changes. The somewhat sparse website is here. Oakland Privacy volunteer Devyn Nordstrom decided to check out a free workshop on Terrorist Use of the Internet. The class materials can be seen here.
A summary of the evolution of the terrorism prevention programs over the past decade by Devyn can be read below.
The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to vote on July 25th to install hundreds of thousands of dollars of Automated License Plate Reader equipment (ALPRs) across Berkeley, in the hope of deterring auto thefts and violent crime.
The proposal specifies a two year test period for the equipment, but fails to specify any parameters or methodology for the test, nor any criteria for success or failure. As such, this will not be a scientific test, it is flimflam, smoke-and-mirrors: a procedure that guarantees “success” defined after-the-fact regardless of reality.
But this is not the worst of it. A massive, nationwide test of ALPR efficacy has already been conducted, spanning the last decades. And it failed.
As organizations that believe in the power of the right of privacy as an enabler of free speech and freedom of the press, we call on all governments to:
Read the full letter here.
In the Chicago lawsuit filed by Michael Williams, a Chicago resident who served 9 months in jail before charges against him were dismissed, gunshot detection manufacturer Shotspotter released a 19-page operational document to the plaintiffs. The document was the only response made available for a discovery request for all guidelines, manuals and scientific materials.
The document, which you can read in its entirety below, sets out criteria for the company’s technicians to overrule machine judgments about what is, and is not, gunfire. According to the company’s sworn testimony in 2021, such reversals occur approximately 10% of time.
Among the factors to be considered are: a sideways Xmas tree shape to the sound waves, 100% certainty in the mind of the human reviewer that gunshots did or did not occur, proximate incidents, and the location and time when the incident occurred. Human reviewers are given a brief interval of a minute to overrule the machine’s judgment.