OAK DAC & urgent action - Hall

28 Dec 2013

Included below is the East Bay Express' unbelievable exposé on the Domain Awareness
Center being built in Oakland. While it is extraordinarily shocking what the plans are, it
is within the dystopia scope of what civil rights advocates have been concerned about. But
I think it is also amazingly shocking how much has been exposed and documented about it
already.
These developments require a powerful response and should be a top priority for awareness
raising in 2014. Not just protests, but serious and thoughtful articulation of the
profound implications of this turning point of freedom in this country and specifically
this city.
http://m.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-real-purpose-of-oaklands-surveillan…
The Real Purpose of Oakland's Surveillance Center
City leaders have argued that Oakland needs a massive surveillance system to combat
violent crime, but internal documents reveal that city staffers are also focused on
tracking political protesters.
by Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston| December 18, 2013
Oakland's citywide surveillance system, the Domain Awareness Center, or DAC, gained
national notoriety earlier this year when some city residents voiced strong concerns about
the project's privacy and civil rights implications. City officials and supporters of
the DAC have responded by contending that objections over privacy and civil rights issues
are overblown and that the true purpose of the surveillance center is to help Oakland
finally deal with its violent crime problem. But thousands of pages of emails, meeting
minutes, and other public documents show that, behind closed doors, city staffers have not
been focusing on how the DAC can lower Oakland's violent crime rate.
So what is the real purpose of the massive $10.9 million surveillance system? The records
we examined show that the DAC is an open-ended project that would create a surveillance
system that could watch the entire city and is designed to easily incorporate new
high-tech features in the future. And one of the uses that has piqued the interest of city
staffers is the deployment of the DAC to track political protesters and monitor large
demonstrations.
Linda Lye, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California,
was alarmed when we showed her emails that revealed that the Oakland Police Department has
already started using the DAC to keep tabs on people engaged in First Amendment activity.
"The fact that the focus so far has been on political protests, rather than the
violent crime that's impacting Oakland residents, is troubling, and telling about how
the city plans to use the DAC," she said.
"Information is always fundamentally about control," she added. Once it's
fully operational, the DAC will give Oakland officials an unprecedented ability to monitor
peoples' movements, associations, and activities.
The Domain Awareness Center is being built in stages and will merge OPD's existing
license-plate scanners and gunshot detectors with video feeds from hundreds of
surveillance cameras — many already in place and some to be installed in the future by
several different agencies throughout the city — into a central hub. Oakland police will
monitor this "flood of data," as one DAC project presentation called it.
Originally limited to monitoring the Port of Oakland, the DAC has since expanded to
encompass the entire city.
The Oakland Privacy Working Group, an activist coalition opposed to the DAC, obtained
thousands of pages of emails and other public records related to the project from the city
via a California Public Records Act request. The privacy group then shared the documents —
which cover the period from August 2012 through September 2013 — with us.
While the emails reveal a great deal about the DAC, they are also notable for what they do
not talk about. Among the hundreds of messages sent and received by Oakland staffers and
the city's contractor team responsible for building the DAC, there is no mention of
robberies, shootings, or the 138 homicides that took place during the period of time
covered by the records. City staffers do not discuss any studies pertaining to the use of
surveillance cameras in combating crime, nor do they discuss how the Domain Awareness
System could help OPD with its longstanding problems with solving violent crimes. In more
than 3,000 pages of emails, the terms "murder," "homicide,"
"assault," "robbery," and "theft" are never mentioned.
The records also show that the Oakland City Council's attempt to rein in the features
of the DAC that pose the most serious threats to civil liberties, and to craft a privacy
and data retention policy, may be too little, too late. City staffers have apparently
found a way to work around the intended policies of the council. Moreover, the documents
reveal that, behind the scenes, the Oakland Police Department, despite its long and
troubling record of violating people's civil rights, is in charge of designing the DAC
and the policies that will govern its use.
Furthermore, records show that the DAC already has so-called "video analytic"
capabilities. Video analytics include features like automated vehicle and pedestrian
tracking, motion recognition, and a "virtual fence" that determines when people
approach or attempt to breach fences surrounding Port of Oakland property. The documents
also reveal that the DAC contractor, SAIC, now called Leidos Holdings, Inc., over-billed
the City of Oakland by upwards of $160,000 by purchasing expensive software and gadgets
that SAIC staff kept for themselves, and by filing invoices for work that wasn't done.
Several Oakland staffers caught this and deducted the charges, but only after forcing SAIC
to exhaustively account for labor, tools, and $94,000 in goods received for which there
were no receipts provided.
It's unclear just how much of Oakland will be put under continuous, pervasive
surveillance by OPD with the DAC, but internal city records show that plans to incorporate
cameras inside Oakland's public schools and Oakland Housing Authority properties are
very much alive. So, too, are plans to feed in surveillance footage from hundreds of other
cameras already in place around the city through OPD's commercial camera lending
program, local transit agencies, and a planned surveillance system the Downtown Oakland
Association and the Lake Merritt Uptown District Association business improvement
districts intend to build.
And cameras are just the beginning: Documents mention monitoring "social media,"
"web feeds," and "text messaging."
Large surveillance centers are becoming increasingly common nationwide: They now exist in
New York City; Chicago; Baltimore; Washington, DC; and Hudson County, New Jersey.
Political leaders typically contend that such centers are necessary to combat terrorist
threats and reduce crime.
But Rajiv Shah, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago who
conducted a study on the efficacy of Chicago police's crime cameras, said surveillance
systems aren't guaranteed to help police reduce crime. They do, however, serve
political goals of looking tough on crime.
In Chicago, the camera network was set up during the mid-2000s with no public input or
oversight. And local officials justified it by pointing to the dual threats of terrorism
and crime. But the latter, Shah said, is a red herring. "It's not really about
solving crime," he said. "That's just something that's tacked on at the
end to make it easier for the public to swallow." From a political perspective, he
said, the questionable efficacy of networking cameras comes in second to the political
currency of claiming credit for a brick-and-mortar project geared toward fighting violent
crime. "It's like every local politician: 'I'll do something to create
more jobs. I'll do something to reduce crime. I'll set up a camera
system.'"
In Oakland, city leaders have also pointed to the city's high crime rate as the
primary reason for building a surveillance center. Supporters of the DAC have also argued
that the possibility of infringing on people's privacy or civil rights pales in
comparison to the need to address violence in the city. "There are so many people in
West Oakland who feel terrorized by gunplay and prostitution, gangs or just straight
violence," said Councilmember Lynette Gibson McElhaney, whose district encompasses
downtown and West Oakland.
There are a large number of residents in Oakland — poor, rich, black, white, Latino, and
Asian — who desperately want something to be done about the violent crime that has taken
thousands of mostly young African-American and Latino men to the grave over the past
thirty years, and McElhaney said these communities support surveillance cameras.
But it's unclear whether residents understand how the DAC is going to be used. Civil
rights attorney Jim Chanin, an Oakland resident who has been an integral part of the team
involved in federal oversight of OPD for the past decade, said he's concerned about
the police department's track record of misconduct and its history of
disproportionately targeting people of color. "Under the right circumstances, [the
DAC] could solve some crime, and help deter bad behavior by police, since they're
still not using their [chest mounted cameras] properly," Chanin said. "However,
if done wrong, the surveillance center will be a titanic waste of money. It will invade
people's privacy and become a bureaucratic nightmare from managing so much data.
"There are fundamental problems with how OPD collects and handles evidence," he
continued. "They can't even deal with the resources they have now."
Professor Shah's observations about the use of networked surveillance systems for
purposes other than crime-fighting is borne out by official documents and correspondence
tracing the evolution of Oakland's Domain Awareness Center. Public records show that
city staffers are interested in using the DAC to monitor political protests. This aspect
of the DAC first became public in August when Renee Domingo, director of Oakland's
Emergency Management Services Division and the head of the DAC project team, published an
article in the government trade publication Public CEO justifying the need for the
surveillance hub. "Oakland's long history of civil discourse and protest adds to
the need [for the Domain Awareness Center]," Domingo wrote. "The Oakland
Emergency Operations Center has been partially or fully activated more than 30 times in
the past three years to respond to large demonstrations and protests."
Other records echo this political mission. In meeting minutes from a January 2012 meeting
of the San Francisco Maritime Exchange's Northern California Maritime Area Security
Committee, Domingo and Mike O'Brien, director of security for the Port of Oakland,
described the DAC system as a tool that would help control labor strikes and community
protests that threaten to slow business at the port. Following security reports from the
US Border Patrol and the FBI, Domingo told the committee that Oakland law enforcement was
"hoping that things would quiet down with the Occupy movement in the new year,"
according to the official minutes. Domingo thanked the Maritime Exchange for its support
of Oakland's port security grant projects, which includes the DAC.
O'Brien went further, explaining that the port's Emergency Operations Center
(which now feeds into the DAC) "made use of seventy new security cameras" to
track the protesters, and added that the system will ensure that "future actions [do]
not scare labor away."
Dan Siegel, a longtime civil and workers' rights attorney in Oakland, said the city
staffers' focus on political unrest, even at the port, is disturbing.
"There's a huge difference in protecting the port from potential acts of
terrorism than from spying on port workers and others who may have political or economic
conflicts with port management and the companies that operate the terminals," said
Siegel. "What we see taking place is a complete blurring of that line where port
security now includes tracking Occupy, longshore workers, and now recently the Port
Truckers Association."
During construction of the first phase of the DAC, from roughly August 2012 to October
2013, city staffers repeatedly referred to political protests as a major reason for
building the system. Emails to and from Lieutenant Christopher Shannon, Captain David
Downing, and Lieutenant Nishant Joshi of OPD and Ahsan Baig, Oakland's technical
project leader on the DAC, show that OPD staffers were in the surveillance center during
the Trayvon Martin protests this year, and that they may have been monitoring marches in
Oakland. In the same chain of emails, Shannon asked if the Emergency Operations Center and
the DAC control room's layout had "changed much since May Day," referring to
yet another large political rally in Oakland when the DAC appears to have been used by OPD
to monitor demonstrations.
On July 25, Baig requested that SAIC produce a demonstration video of the DAC's
capabilities to show off at the next City Council meeting. "Try your best. I need the
Demo ASAP, it shouldn't be more than 3 mins.," wrote Baig. "Check out
http://www.occupyoakland.orgwebsite to understand the background."
On July 31, dozens of Oakland residents attended a city council meeting to speak out
against the DAC. The next day, Jerry Green, an employee of Radio IP, an Oakland
contractor, emailed Baig a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle article entitled,
"Oakland OKs Money For Surveillance Center," that described the protest. The
title of Green's email was "these upset citizens must have something to
hide." Baig responded simply, "Yep..."
Law enforcement surveillance (both federal and local) of demonstrators has been a constant
in Oakland since the killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 sparked chaotic street demonstrations.
Police infiltrated organizing meetings, sent undercover officers to mingle in crowds
during several demonstrations, and recorded the protests with multiple video teams. Police
took a similar approach during Occupy Oakland. Police also compiled yearbook-style photo
dossiers of prominent demonstrators, regardless of whether they had committed a crime or
not.
Siegel took issue with the DAC's focus on First Amendment activity. "The
communications among Oakland city staff and DAC contractors demonstrate their intent to
create a surveillance system that goes far beyond what might be used to detect terrorist
threats and help the OPD solve serious crimes," he said.
"Instead, they are building a system that will be used to monitor political
demonstrations and identify individuals involved in protests. The city's contractors
betray their true attitudes by describing people opposed to state surveillance as
'upset citizens' with 'something to hide.'"
In August 2012, when port officials were brainstorming the extent of the DAC's
surveillance powers, they hired a company called GuidePost Solutions to help. GuidePost
Solutions has an office in Oakland, but is headquartered in Manhattan. Its executives
include former officials from NYPD, the US Attorneys' office, the New York City
District Attorneys' Office, and other law enforcement agencies. The DAC blueprint that
GuidePost Solutions and the port devised to send to potential contractors as a Request for
Qualifications (RFQ) drew the attention of Oakland police.
Lieutenant Michael Poirier read the plan and criticized it as being "too Port
specific."
"While the DAC will of course serve the Port, I see the majority of information
in/out will be 'live' on City streets," Poirier wrote in an email to port
staffers and to Raymond Kolodzieczak of GuidePost Solutions. "This RFQ does not have
the focus of 'live' operational information center."
Poirier recommended revising the project description to reflect OPD's plan to make the
DAC a citywide system that includes "any City camera, shotspotter, LPR [automated
license-plate readers]," and he even added, "City Databases (planning, permits,
business tax, city GIS etc)" as information to be fed into the DAC.
Poirier ended his lengthy email stating, "If the RFQ goes out as is, I think the
vendor will be 'surprised' when the true nature/function (operational mode) of the
DAC is requested."
In public comments to the city council in July, Lye of the ACLU questioned whether there
were any privacy policies in place to govern how the DAC would collect and store data.
There were not. Lye met with city staffers to discuss the numerous ways the DAC could
serve to undermine civil rights. She said she opposes construction of the DAC, and that
her participation in those policy meetings should not be taken as ACLU's endorsement
of the project. Councilmembers Dan Kalb and Libby Schaaf subsequently spearheaded a
resolution requiring the city to develop a privacy and data retention policy, and for the
rules to be in place by March, before the DAC becomes fully operational.
But the city is drafting the policy after the DAC has already been outfitted with the
hardware and software necessary to store massive amounts of information, including video
footage. In a July 26, 2013 email from SAIC employee Neill Chung to port and city staffers
concerning the privacy policy requested by the council, Chung asserted that the DAC
"[does] not record or store any video." He then wrote exactly the opposite:
"The [DAC] operators do have the ability to save a snapshot from a video and save it
to the local workstation where they can then distribute the image," and further that
they can also save and distribute video. "The [DAC] operators will have the ability
to export a video clip and save it to the local workstation where they can then distribute
the video."
In the same email conversation chain, Oakland project leader Baig referred to the DAC as
having "TB of data storage," meaning terabytes. Standard DVDs hold 4.7 gigabytes
of data, enough for a couple hours of high-definition digital footage. Many hours of
lower-resolution video footage could be saved in just a few gigabytes. There are 1024
gigabytes in 1 terabyte. If Baig's claim that the DAC has terabytes of video storage
capacity is correct, then the DAC is already outfitted with hardware to store the
equivalent of at least 435 full-length movies. And the DAC's hardware likely has many
more hours of storage capacity than that.
After the council approved Kalb and Schaaf's resolution requiring creation of a
privacy policy, city staffers appear to have strategized a way to work around the
council's intentions so that they can build upon these DAC features. In an email
exchange on July 26 between Domingo and Amadis Sotelo, a lawyer in the City Attorney's
Office, the two discussed their revisions to the privacy policy. Sotelo remarked that the
resolution language under consideration "limits you from being able to develop and
implement data retention at later times."
"Is that your intention?" Sotelo asked Domingo.
"No, we want the flexibility to do this after Council approves the Policy,"
replied Domingo.
Baig then cut into the email exchange, asking Domingo, "How are you going to change
after the Council approval?"
Domingo responded, "We've done this before recently. Amadis and I will handle
it."
"It looks like city staff thinks they have flexibility to alter the policy after
council approves it," said Lye of ACLU. "That raises huge questions."
City staffers involved in the project and the email exchanges didn't return our phone
calls and emails during the month we spent reporting this story. The project's
contractors also declined to speak to us. Councilmembers Kalb and Schaaf also did not
respond to repeated requests for comment.
Siegel reviewed the above email exchange and many other records at our request. "I
think they're trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the city council and the ACLU
about what data is stored and what's not," he said. He added that other records
show that whether or not the city's policies end up allowing the DAC to centrally
warehouse video, the footage will still be saved and accessible. "They'll have
incident markers, links that allow them to pull up footage from its source," he said.
"So what difference does it make if they're storing it in the DAC or not?"
The city's data retention policy is currently being drafted by the Oakland Police
Department under the supervision of Deputy Chief Eric Breshears and the City
Attorney's Office.
Oakland resident Mary Madden, a member of the Oakland Privacy Working Group, opposes the
DAC unequivocally. She said OPD's role in the surveillance system's construction
and in drafting privacy policies raises even more problems. "If Oakland would like to
give the impression of caring about privacy, they should have the privacy guidelines
crafted by an independent privacy expert, who understands the complex issues at stake, as
well as the full DAC system and all its components," she said. "OPD has a
history of not following their own rules, as the federal monitor pointed out. Examples
include the crowd control policy and use of lapel cameras, so how can we trust OPD to
follow their own privacy rules for the DAC?"
Once the Domain Awareness Center's Phase 2 construction is finished in July 2014, the
center could link an untold number of public and private video cameras from businesses,
traffic intersections, public housing properties, highways and onramps, transit stations,
sports facilities, and public schools into a centralized hub. The DAC will also collect
OPD's automated license-plate reader data, ShotSpotter gunshot detectors, and social
media feeds — all to be monitored on a live basis.
July 2013 emails between SAIC project manager Taso Zografos and Chris Millar, a contractor
hired to help oversee the DAC, identify sources of data and surveillance capabilities that
would be built into the DAC in several phases. According to the emails, the first phase of
"prioritized integrations" included the port's vehicle tracking system and
its mapping systems, weather and seismic warnings, and video from BART and the Oakland
Airport. The second group of "prioritized integrations" included police and fire
dispatch, automatic vehicle location systems for OPD and OFD vehicles, video from Caltrans
and California Highway Patrol cameras, and unspecified informational links between the DAC
and two law enforcement "fusion centers" — hubs in which law enforcement
intelligence is centralized — including the Northern California Regional Information
Center. Oakland officials are also considering applying for grant funding for the DAC on
the basis that it also operates as a fusion center. Such a designation could open up the
DAC for funding sources additional to the federal grants that have bankrolled it to date.
According to the emails, "potential integrations" into the DAC include video
feeds from the Oakland Coliseum, Oakland's red-light cameras, AC Transit, BART, city
libraries, City Hall, Oakland Housing Authority properties, buildings owned by the Oakland
Unified School District, and OPD's automated license-plate readers.
If the public housing, school, and public transit cameras are incorporated into the DAC,
Oakland's communities of color could be placed under disproportionately intense
surveillance. "In many instances, surveillance issues aren't just privacy issues;
they're also racial justice issues," said Lye. "This means we're going
to have complete surveillance of communities of color when they're going about their
lives and doing nothing wrong whatsoever."
A critical component of the Domain Awareness Center will be "video analytics,"
or software that can interpret raw information from video streams and identify certain
behavior or characteristics. The port already uses motion-detection software and image
recognition around port property as part of a virtual fence that alerts staffers if
someone is approaching facilities that are off-limits to the public. Emails between city
and port officials in May revealed that port staffers have programmed port cameras to send
email alerts when the video analytics detect cars engaged in street racing on Middle
Harbor Road. The new technology has not put a halt to the chaotic and occasionally violent
races.
The most controversial form of video analytics is facial recognition software that is
programmed to automatically identify persons based on unique facial features. Source
databases for facial recognition programs include employee records, DMV photos, and
mugshots from law enforcement booking systems. The city council voted in July to bar the
use of facial recognition during the DAC's current funding phase. However, facial
recognition for closed-circuit television systems is rapidly gaining popularity among law
enforcement. In January 2013, the Los Angeles Police Department began testing mobile
surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition software in the San Fernando Valley,
with the intent of identifying known or wanted criminals. The Chicago Office of Emergency
Services has also experimented with facial recognition programming for its 24,000
networked cameras, using Cook County's 4.5 million booking photos as the data source.
In May, Chicago police officers made their first arrest with the help of facial
recognition technology.
Shah of the University of Illinois-Chicago noted that the combined use of facial
recognition technology and license-plate readers, which would be possible if the former
technology is used in conjunction with the Oakland surveillance center, have the potential
to take individual tracking to an unprecedented level. "Facial recognition and LPR
directly tie to someone — [it's] what causes the most concern," said Shah.
The DAC is only one of several surveillance systems in progress in Oakland. In June 2012,
then-Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan and then-Assistant Chief Anthony Toribio met with
representatives of the Total Recall Corporation, a firm marketing a surveillance system
called CrimeEye. Total Recall's cameras can zoom in from great distances, and can
store footage for as long as a police department wants. If OPD opts to buy this camera
unit and software package, a single unit at the intersection of 14th Street and Broadway
could have a range east to Lake Merritt, north to the Paramount Theater, and south and
west to Interstate 880, according to materials the company provided to the city that we
obtained.
In August, then-Oakland Chamber of Commerce Vice President Paul Junge and city staffer Joe
DeVries exchanged emails about incorporating cameras owned and operated by the Downtown
Oakland Association and Lake Merritt Uptown District Association business improvement
districts into the Domain Awareness Center during phase three of the DAC construction in
June 2014. DeVries also mentioned the possibility of including cameras installed by
various neighborhood associations in the DAC.
Documents we obtained also reveal the Uptown and downtown BIDs are building their own
surveillance center, and have submitted a $30,000 grant application to the MetLife
Foundation to fund it. At some future date these cameras are also to be linked into the
DAC.
In an influential 2012 paper about police surveillance technologies, Georgetown University
law professor Laura Donohue observed that surveillance advances like facial recognition,
vehicle tracking, and networked video monitoring are altering the nature of American
society. "What we are witnessing is a sea change in how we think about individuals in
public space," Donohue wrote. While Oakland's elected officials and city staff
struggle with how to regulate this sprawling surveillance project, abstract issues such as
privacy and security have become immediate and concrete for many city residents.
But the courts, as Donohue noted, are decades behind the newly ubiquitous surveillance
methods. In one recent case — US v. Jones — that bought the law partly up to speed, the DC
Court of Appeals ruled that law enforcement officers violated the Constitution by placing
GPS trackers on vehicles without warrants. (This ruling was later upheld by the US Supreme
Court.) In the unanimous US v. Jones decision, DC Court of Appeals Justice Douglas
Ginsberg wrote of the incredible power modern technology affords law enforcement: "A
person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly
churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient
receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups —
and not just one fact about a person, but all such facts."
The DAC, if completed as it's currently designed, will make Judge Ginsberg's
scenarios a reality in Oakland.
Included below is the East Bay Express' unbelievable exposé on the Domain Awareness
Center being built in Oakland. While it is extraordinarily shocking what the plans are, it
is within the dystopia scope of what civil rights advocates have been concerned about. It
is also amazingly shocking how much has been exposed and documented about it already.
These developments require a powerful response and should be a top priority for awareness
raising in 2014. Not just protests, but serious and thoughtful articulation of the
profound implications of this turning point of freedom in this country and specifically
this city.
sent from eddan.com