[sudo-discuss] Breaking: Oakland to lead country in diverting anti-terror funding to ubiquitous warrantless surveillance

[GtwoG PublicOhOne]

Re. the police using Facebook and Google, and Stephen Spiker's question
"what happens when someone doesn't like me and has access to all that
information?":

Right now 41% of employers use Facebook to screen job applicants and
monitor employees.  That creates an _enormous_ chilling effect on speech. 

And, credit agencies are also using Facebook to assign
creditworthiness-by-association.  If your "friends" have bad credit,
your own credit rating goes down.  That creates an _enormous_ chilling
effect on freedom of association. 

With all the anarchists, left-libertarians, and civil liberties hawks
onboard here, where's the outrage about those abuses? 

Or have we become smug in our status as geeks, whose economics are
secure even if we wear the circle-A flag into the office and into job
interviews?  Do we care about Joe Average Worker whose job may be
dangling by a thread, whose boss may be a diehard Fox Newz enthusiast,
and who might end up unemployed and out in the streets for voicing an
"unpopular" opinion online...? 

Is that a paradigm example of why Marxists consider the "intelligentsia"
to be an unreliable class as far as solidarity with workers is
concerned?  Are we better than that?, or not?

--

The primary difference between NSA and Google is that you can vote for
NSA's boss every four years, but Google has better marketing. 

The root issue is _collection_.  Data that aren't collected, can't be
abused.  If you're on Facebook, if you use GMail or Google Voice, or if
you carry around a "smart" phone with a battery that can't be removed,
you're already subjected to a degree of surveillance that NSA reserves
for members of Al Qaeda. 

If you don't like the Oakland Police getting access to the data, the
place to start is with the mega-corps that collect the data. 
Complaining about the police using data that huge corporations collect,
without complaining about the mega-corps collecting the data, is a
self-contradiction. 

Lastly, shot-spotters shouldn't be controversial, even among those of us
who support the personal rights interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.  A
gunshot on a city street means one of two things: a criminal has just
shot a victim, or a criminal's would-be victim has just shot their
attacker in self-defense.  Either of those things merits getting the
police and paramedics on the scene, pronto. 

-G.


=====



On 13-10-13-Sun 7:13 PM, Eddan Katz wrote:
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/privacy-fears-as-surveillance-grows-in-cities.html
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/privacy-fears-as-surveillance-grows-in-cities.html?_r=0>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> October 13, 2013
>
>
>   Privacy Fears as Surveillance Grows in Cities
>
>
>             By SOMINI SENGUPTA
>             <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/somini_sengupta/index.html>
>
> OAKLAND, Calif. --- Federal grants of $7 million awarded to this city
> were meant largely to help thwart terror attacks
> <http://aapa.files.cms-plus.com/PDFs/FY2009PSGPGuidanceFINAL.pdf> at
> its bustling port. But instead, the money is going to a police
> initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data
> from around town --- from gunshot-detection sensors in the barrios of
> East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars
> patrolling the city's upscale hills.
>
> The new system, scheduled to begin next summer, is the latest example
> of how cities are compiling and processing large amounts of
> information, known as big data, for routine law enforcement. And the
> system underscores how technology has enabled the tracking of people
> in many aspects of life.
>
> The police can monitor a fire hose of social media posts to look for
> evidence of criminal activities; transportation agencies can track
> commuters' toll payments when drivers use an electronic pass; and the
> National Security Agency, as news reports this summer revealed,
> scooped up telephone records of millions of cellphone customers in the
> United States.
>
> Like the Oakland effort, other pushes to use new surveillance tools in
> law enforcement are supported with federal dollars. The New York
> Police Department, aided by federal financing, has a big data system
> that links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers,
> radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists. Police
> in Massachusetts have used federal money to buy automated license
> plate scanners. And police in Texas have bought a drone with homeland
> security money, something that Alameda County, which Oakland is part
> of, also tried but shelved after public protest.
>
> Proponents of the Oakland initiative, formally known as the Domain
> Awareness Center
> <http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center/_files/Port%20of%20Oakland%20DAC%20Report.pdf/_info/>,
> say it will help the police reduce the city's notoriously high crime
> rates. But critics say the program, which will create a central
> repository of surveillance information, will also gather data about
> the everyday movements and habits of law-abiding residents, raising
> legal and ethical questions about tracking people so closely.
>
> Libby Schaaf, an Oakland City Council member, said that because of the
> city's high crime rate, "it's our responsibility to take advantage of
> new tools that become available." She added, though, that the center
> would be able to "paint a pretty detailed picture of someone's
> personal life, someone who may be innocent."
>
> For example, if two men were caught on camera at the port stealing
> goods and driving off in a black Honda sedan, Oakland authorities
> could look up where in the city the car had been in the last several
> weeks. That could include stoplights it drove past each morning and
> whether it regularly went to see Oakland A's baseball games.
>
> For law enforcement, data mining is a big step toward more complete
> intelligence gathering. The police have traditionally made arrests
> based on small bits of data --- witness testimony, logs of license
> plate readers, footage from a surveillance camera perched above a bank
> machine. The new capacity to collect and sift through all that
> information gives the authorities a much broader view of the people
> they are investigating.
>
> For the companies that make big data tools, projects like Oakland's
> are a big business opportunity. Microsoft built the technology for the
> New York City program. I.B.M. has sold data-mining tools
> <http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ecm/offers/partners/ecmu-rca4law.html> for
> Las Vegas and Memphis.
>
> Oakland has a contract with the Science Applications International
> Corporation, or SAIC, to build its system. That company has earned the
> bulk of its $12 billion in annual revenue from military contracts. As
> the federal military budget has fallen, though, SAIC has diversified
> to other government agency projects, though not without problems.
>
> The company's contract to help modernize the New York City payroll
> system, using new technology like biometric readers, resulted in
> reports of kickbacks. Last year, the company paid
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/nyregion/contractor-in-citytime-payroll-scandal-to-pay-record-500-million.html?pagewanted=all> the
> city $500 million to avoid a federal prosecution. The amount was
> believed to be the largest ever paid to settle accusations of
> government contract fraud. SAIC declined to comment.
>
> Even before the initiative, Oakland spent millions of dollars on
> traffic cameras, license plate readers and a network of sound sensors
> to pick up gunshots. Still, the city has one of the highest violent
> crime rates in the country. And an internal audit
> <http://www.oaklandauditor.com/images/oakland/auditreports/0pd%20tech.pdf> in
> August 2012 found that the police had spent $1.87 million on
> technology tools that did not work properly or remained unused because
> their vendors had gone out of business.
>
> The new center will be far more ambitious. From a central location, it
> will electronically gather data around the clock from a variety of
> sensors and databases, analyze that data and display some of the
> information on a bank of giant monitors.
>
> The city plans to staff the center around the clock. If there is an
> incident, workers can analyze the many sources of data to give leads
> to the police, fire department or Coast Guard. In the absence of an
> incident, how the data would be used and how long it would be kept
> remain largely unclear.
>
> The center will collect feeds from cameras at the port, traffic
> cameras, license plate readers and gunshot sensors. The center will
> also be integrated next summer with a database that allows police to
> tap into reports of 911 calls. Renee Domingo, the city's emergency
> services coordinator, said school surveillance cameras, as well as
> video data from the regional commuter rail system and state highways,
> may be added later.
>
> Far less advanced surveillance programs have elicited resistance at
> the local and state level. Iowa City, for example, recently imposed a
> moratorium on some surveillance devices, including license plate
> readers. The Seattle City Council forced its police department to
> return a federally financed drone to the manufacturer.
>
> In Virginia, the state police purged a database of millions of license
> plates collected by cameras, including some at political rallies,
> after the state's attorney general said the method of collecting and
> saving the data violated state law. But for a cash-starved city like
> Oakland, the expectation of more federal financing makes the project
> particularly attractive. The City Council approved the program in late
> July, but public outcry later compelled the council to add
> restrictions. The council instructed public officials to write a
> policy detailing what kind of data could be collected and protected,
> and how it could be used. The council expects the privacy policy to be
> ready before the center can start operations.
>
> The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California described
> the program as "warrantless surveillance" and said "the city would be
> able to collect and stockpile comprehensive information about Oakland
> residents who have engaged in no wrongdoing."
>
> The port's chief security officer, Michael O'Brien, sought to allay
> fears, saying the center was meant to hasten law-enforcement response
> time to crimes and emergencies. "It's not to spy on people," he said.
>
> Steve Spiker, research and technology director at the Urban Strategies
> Council, an Oakland nonprofit organization that has examined the
> effectiveness of police technology tools, said he was uncomfortable
> with city officials knowing so much about his movements. But, he said,
> there is already so much public data that it makes sense to enable
> government officials to collect and analyze it for the public good.
>
> Still, he would like to know how all that data would be kept and
> shared. "What happens," he wondered, "when someone doesn't like me and
> has access to all that information?"
>
>
>
>
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