[sudo-hall] OAK DAC & urgent action

[eddan.com]

Fantastische! Einen guten Rusch!

Do you have a copy of the question we put together for the city Council meeting? If there is an opportunity, it would be most excellent to flesh that out into a slide presentation, with data.

sent from eddan.com

> On Dec 28, 2013, at 8:37 PM, aestetix <aestetix at aestetix.com> wrote:
> 
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> FWIW, they will be doing an outreach to constituents sometime in
> January to discuss privacy concerns. I'm apparently on the list,
> unsure what that means. If I hear anything more I'll let everyone know.
> 
> Cheers,
> aestetix
> 
> PS: greetings from Germany!
> 
>> On 12/29/13 4:46 AM, eddan.com wrote:
>> 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-surveillance-center/Content?issue=3789180&oid=3789230
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 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
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________ Hall mailing list 
>> Hall at lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/hall
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