Tag Archives: Tracy Rosenberg

Surveillance, Surveillance Reform

New “Toolkit” from the ACLU & Oakland Privacy Can Help You Get A Surveillance Ordinance Passed

via Oakland Privacy

The ACLU has just announced a new Surveillance Ordinance Toolkit!

Two years in the making – and in collaboration with Oakland Privacy – this toolkit from the ACLU provides the critical information for part three of the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project’s goals:  To help folks present the information to their own local city councils to help get a surveillance policy in place for how any surveillance equipment is allowed to be used on its citizens.

Since the November 2017 Aaron Swartz Day weekend, our police surveillance project has taught activists how to use our templates with muckrock to file public records requests – with a city’s police and sheriff departments (in the spirit of Aaron Swartz’ many FOIA requests via muckrock) so that they will have to give any relevant documentation when specific types of surveillance equipment have already been purchased.

The last, and most complicated of our project’s three goals involves figuring out what to do exactly once you have evidence of the surveillance equipment’s existence.  Ideally, once a piece of surveillance equipment has been identified, a city council can start working on  in the process of implementing a use policy, based on an ordinance, which regulates how that equipment is allowed to be used. But what’s the best way to present that evidence to a  city council for it to act upon?

Thanks to Tracy Rosenberg, we have provided some easy to use templates for obtaining information direct from a city’s own police and sheriff departments, so that the information could be taken to the City Council. Now, the ACLU & Oakland Privacy have created a toolkit for the process of taking that information to the City Council.

From the Oakland Privacy article:

Getting a surveillance transparency ordinance or a facial recognition ban passed in your town can seem like an overwhelming task. It’s not. You can do it!

Oakland Privacy and ACLU of Northern California sat down to write a step by step guide based on the dozen ordinances in place across the country, including 8 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This free guide includes loads of advice on coalition-building, public education, strategy, research, messaging and advocacy and samples of useful documents.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, FOIA Requests, Surveillance, Surveillance Reform

Oakland Privacy’s Tracy Rosenberg at the 2019 EFF Pioneer Awards

The EFF has made a full transcription of the entire 2019 Pioneer Awards available here.

Video of Tracy Rosenberg’s speech on YouTube here.

See video/transcriptions for Mike Katz-Lacabe and Brian Hofer.

oakland privacy

EFF’s nash Sheard presents a 2019 Barlow Award to members of Oakland Privacy (Left to right: Nathan “nash” Sheard, Tracy Rosenberg, Brian Hofer, Mike Katz-Lacabe)

Tracy Rosenberg’s speech:

Thank you, Mike, and hi, everyone, and thank you so much for this wonderful award. We are honored.

We’re splitting up the speaking here because Oakland Privacy is a coalition and is a collective, and that’s important to us. We have no hierarchy after all these years, and I’ve been doing this for five years. All that I get to call myself is a member. That’s all I am.

I want to highlight, there are people in the audience that are not coming up on stage. J.P. Massar, Don Fogg, Leah Young. There are people that are not here whose names I won’t mention since they’re not here, but it’s always a coalition effort.

And this week I’ve been jumping up and down because the broader coalition that includes EFF and Consumer Reports and ACLU and a bunch of other people, we just stood down the Chamber of Commerce, the tech industry, and pretty much every business in California in order to keep the Consumer Privacy Act intact.

There were six people on a whole bunch of conference calls, you don’t want to know how many, and somehow we actually did it. It’s official as of today. There is power in coalition work.

I’m incredibly grateful to Oakland Privacy because I was incredibly upset about the encroaching surveillance state, and I didn’t know what to do. And in the end, in 2013, Oakland Privacy showed me what I could do, and I will never be able to repay the group for that.

I was thinking back to our first surveillance transparency ordinance in Santa Clara. EFF actually came down, and they took a picture of me speaking at that meeting and put it on their blog, and I thought, I wish I could put into words what lay behind that picture, which was 11 stinking months of going down to Santa Clara and sitting in that room with the goddamn Finance and Governmental Operations Committee where they were trying to bury our ordinance because let’s face it, the powers that be don’t want transparency. And every month standing there and saying, “I’m not going to let you do that. I’m just not.”

We succeeded. It became law, I think it was June 7th, 2016, which doesn’t feel like that long ago. And now there are 12. Eight of them are here in the Bay Area, a couple in Massachusetts, Seattle, and somehow Nashville did it without us and more power to them.

So I think that’s pretty much what I kind of want to say here. I mean, what Oakland Privacy does fundamentally is we watch. The logo is the eye of Sauron, and well, I’m not a Tolkien geek, but I deal with what I am a part of. Hey look—I went to a basement, it was all guys. It is what it is. It’s a little more gender-balanced now, but not entirely. But the point is that eye kind of stands for something important because it’s the eye of “we are watching,” and in really mechanical terms, we try to track every single agenda of God knows how many city councils there are in the Bay Area. I think we’re watching about 25 now, and if a couple more of you would volunteer, we might make that 35.

But the point is, and every time there’s a little action going on locally that’s just making the surveillance state that much worse, we try to intervene. And we show up and the sad truth is that at this point, they can kind of see us coming from a mile away, and they’re like, “Oh, great. You guys came to see us.” But the point is, that’s our opportunity to start that conversation. Oakland is a laboratory, it’s a place where we can … And Oakland’s not perfect. All that you need to do is take a look at OPD and you know that Oakland’s not perfect. Right? But it’s a place where we’ve been able to ask the questions and we’re basically trying to export that as far as it possibly can, and we go there and we ask the questions.

And really, the most important part to me and the part that gives me hope is we get a lot of people that come to the basement to talk to us and basically share with us how dystopia is coming, which we know. It’s here. There’s no hope, right? But when those people find the way to lift up their voices and say no, that’s what gives me hope. So thank you. Thank you and Brian Hofer is also going to make a final set of comments. Thank you.

 

ASD Police Surveillance Project, Surveillance, Surveillance Reform

Berkeley Delays Implementing Surveillance Policy Despite Ordinance Passed Over A Year and a Half Ago

New Interview with Tracy Rosenberg of Oakland Privacy and the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project (ASDPSP) about Berkeley’s delay in implementing its Surveillance Policy.

Come to our premiere “First Fridays” event in Berkeley on September 6th, 6-7:30pm: A Raw Thought Surveillance Salon (use the discount code “AaronSwartzDay” for a super-discounted ticket :-) TICKETS

The bottom line is that, in July 2017, although several members of the city council promised that the data collected by Berkeley’s license plate readers would never be shared with law enforcement, some badly worded language was also approved, during the same meeting.

That same bad language (for regulating license plate reader data) is now in danger of being accepted as part of the new Surveillance Policy – not as a placeholder until the policy is implemented (as we previously stated).

Turns out that the Oakland Privacy and the ACLU had to write a letter to the City of Berkeley earlier this year, threatening to sue the city, if the city council did not start “creating draft policies & putting them through the approval process.” So, this latest attempt of pushing through bad language from two years ago is just the city council making good on its word of getting started. ^_^

The problem is that we really need to start from scratch writing Berkeley’s surveillance policy, not pick up where we left off, using the bad language proposed in July of 2017.

From the Interview:

ASDPSP: So, in March of 2018, Berkeley passed a surveillance transparency ordinance. The ordinance required that a surveillance policy framework be put in place, similar to the one that currently exists for the City of Oakland (note that the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is excluded), and is in the process of being put in place for the City of San Francisco.

Tracy: Correct.

ASDPSP: And to date, after a year and a half, a surveillance use policy framework for the data collected by Berkeley’s automated license plate readers has still not been put into place by the City Council?

Tracy: Correct.

ASDPSP: And the reason for this is that that process has been delayed by certain members of the City Council, such as Dee Williams-Ridley, the City Manager, and also by Berkeley Police Chief Greenwood?

Tracy: Yes. They have not been quick to get things moving.

In July of 2017, the City Council (with 3 dissenting votes) expanded the City’s license plate reader “pilot program” by adding 15 additional readers and making the program permanent.

But at that meeting, the purpose of the ALPR equipment was clearly defined as parking enforcement and the issuing of parking citations.

ASDPSP:  So we have basically been using the honor system, and have no guarantees that the data won’t be handed over to law enforcement agencies in the future, since there is still no specific policy in place ensuring that parking is the only way that the data will be used? And without a policy in place, there are loopholes allowing the cops to use the data in other ways?

Tracy: Yes, at a Police Review Commission subcommittee meeting on August 7th, a proposed license plate reader policy included some very broad permanent additions for the way that law enforcement can use the data, such as “Supporting a patrol operation or a criminal investigation” and “Canvassing license plates around any crime scene.”

Also proposed was authorizing sharing the data with any outside law enforcement or prosecutorial agency for any official law enforcement purpose (absent federal immigration enforcement officials).

ASDPSP: Whoa. Hold on there. That’s exactly how we don’t want license plate readers to be used.

Tracy: Yup. Certainly at a minimum, not parking. And pretty much the way most law enforcement agencies currently use license plate readers. For broad law enforcement purposes without probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

 

FOIA Lawsuits, Journalist's Toolbox, Police Misconduct, Surveillance

SB-1421; When Will We Get The Records?

By Tracy Rosenberg (Oakland Privacy and The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project)

SB 1421 isn’t perfect…But even with its limitations, the bill provides more law enforcement personnel transparency than has been possible in California for decades.

When then-governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1421 in October of 2018, police misconduct records were expected to start flowing on January 1.

That isn’t what’s happened, although small quantities of records have started to come out from certain cities, including Burlingame, Oakland and Berkeley.

To recap, SB 1421, one in a long line of bills that for more than a decade have tried to crack open California’s restrictive police officer’s bill of rights, turned records of investigations and discipline after incidents of lethal force or sustained incidents of sexual assault, evidence planting or lying, into public records that could be gotten with a public records request.

SB 1421 isn’t perfect. It freezes records when there are internal investigations going on and when lawsuits are in progress, which can cause lengthy delays before there is public transparency. And in cases where sexual assault, perjury and evidence-planting allegations aren’t sustained internally or in a court, records will still be sealed. But even with its limitations, the bill provides more law enforcement personnel transparency than has been possible in California for decades.

Even this modest of a change was met with outrage and rebellion by many of the state’s police unions, which have relied on the obscurity of misconduct proceedings to protect member cops from accountability for the crimes they commit.

Police unions ran into court all over California, asking for stays and injunctions in San Bernardino County, Ventura County, Los Angeles, Orange County and in Contra Costa County. Because you can’t unrelease a record after it has already been released, the courts have had to issue temporary stays while considering the issue, but at the now four courts where the cases have been fully argued, Contra Costa, LA, and now Orange County and San Diego, the police unions have lost big.

Arguing that cops involved in lethal incidents or caught lying and/or planting evidence relied on their investigative hearings hidden from view has drawn skepticism from judges, who have continued to insist that the public’s right to know outweighs the police right to hide and that illegal and criminal behavior from the police is not protected behavior that the State should help to conceal.

All the lower court rulings have been appealed, so there will be a few more months of legal jousting, but in the end, the records are going to flow. At least the ones that are left, since a few enterprising police unions have been convincing their City Councils to revise document retention protocols in order to pitch them. The first and second district of the Court of Appeals have upheld the lower court decisions releasing misconduct records and the California Supreme Court has resisted every request to intervene so so far it is public records 6, police unions 0. Those results are expected to be the same in any further legal suits.

For more background on SB-1421, here are a few references:

  1. SB-1421 Peace officers: release of records. (California Legislative Information Page) https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB1421

  2. ACLU Northern California: Lifting the Veil of Secrecy: Police Misconduct & Use of Force (SB 1421) Author: Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/legislation/lifting-veil-secrecy-police-misconduct-use-force-sb-1421

  3. KQED’s California Report, January 2, 2019: State Supreme Court Denies Attempt to Block New Access to Police Misconduct, Shooting Records https://www.kqed.org/news/11715442/state-supreme-court-denies-attempt-to-block-new-access-to-police-misconduct-shooting-records

Aaron Swartz Day 2018, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2018, Announcements, Art, Internet Archive, Music, Virtual Reality

Early Bird Passes Now Available For This Year’s San Francisco Event

New! Saturday’s Hackathon Schedule!

(From left to right) (Top Row) Aaron Swartz, Cindy Cohn, Brewster Kahle, (Bottom row) Barrett Brown, DJ Spooky

Get your “Early Bird All Access Pass” Here

After Tuesday August 14th at Midnight, Get your Tickets here

These Early Bird Passes are only available until midnight on August 15th.

Hello everyone in Aaron Swartz Day-land. We are expecting a full house this year for our San Francisco Hackathon and subsequent Reception & Evening Event. This will be our largest event to date, and many of our speakers are flying in from out of town.

For these reasons, in order to supplement our finances for this year’s grand extravaganza, we have decided to sell some “Early Bird All Access” Passes.

So, until midnight on August 15th, you can buy an “Early Bird All Access Pass” for only $20! (For up to 100 passes, while they last.)

Each “Early Bird All Access Pass” Includes:

1) Admission to both days of the Hackathon ($25 value) (Don’t panic. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. See the note at the bottom of this announcement :)

2) Admission to Reception and Evening Event ($50 Value)

3) Admission to After Party – 10:30 pm-2am ($20 Value) – Location TBD

8pm – Evening Event – Special Guests Speaking or Performing (or both):

DJ Spooky (Multimedia Artist, DJ/Musician, Author, Historian, Educator)

Barrett Brown (Author of the upcoming book: My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir, Pursuance Project, Journalist, Former Political Prisoner)

Lisa Rein (Aaron Swartz Day, Creative Commons, The Swartz-Manning VR Destination, ASD Police Surveillance Project, ASD Solar Survival Project)

Daniel Rigmaiden (Cell Phone Surveillance Expert, Exposed Stingray to the Public)

Cindy Cohn (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive)

Steve Phillips (Pursuance Project, Noisebridge)

Mek Karpeles (Open Library, Internet Archive)

Plus More Special Guests – We will be making daily updates here!

HACKATHON INFORMATION:

Saturday & Sunday – 10am – 6pm

New This Year: On site VR, Robotics & 3-D Printing Demonstrations.

Hackathon Speakers Confirmed So Far (Many more coming):

Barrett Brown (Author of the upcoming book: My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir, Pursuance Project, Journalist, Former Political Prisoner)

Steve Phillips (Pursuance Project, Noisebridge)

Cyrus Farivar (Author of “Habeus Data,” Technology Journalist, & Radio Producer)

Daniel Rigmaiden (Cell Phone Surveillance Expert, Exposed Stingray to the Public)

Tracey Jaquith (Internet Archive)

Tracy Rosenberg (Oakland Privacy.net, Media Alliance)

Dave Maass (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Matteo Borri (Robots Everywhere LLC, NASA (Mars Rover Contractor), ASD Solar Survival Project)

Lisa Rein (Aaron Swartz Day, Creative Commons, The Swartz-Manning VR Destination, ASD Police Surveillance Project, ASD Solar Survival Project)

Mek Karpeles (Open Library, Internet Archive)

Get your “Early Bird All Access Pass” Here

After Tuesday, August 14th at Midnight, TICKETS HERE

Above: Lisa Rein and Barrett Brown at San Francisco’s Noisebridge Hackerspace.

As always, please write aaronswartzday@gmail.com if you need a free ticket. There are student discounts too, but you need to write us first to get the code.

 

ASD Police Surveillance Project, Journalist's Toolbox, Surveillance, Surveillance Reform

Summer Update: The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project

See Tracy Rosenberg, Daniel Rigmaiden & Lisa Rein discuss the Solar Survival Project – LIVE, on November 10, 2018 at the San Francisco Hackathon.

TICKETS HERE

We’ll be posting “Summer Updates” all week regarding our endless hackathon projects that we kept going from last year’s event.

The first is our new quick tutorial with templates for our Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project – or #ASDPSP.

These templates enable you to compel the Police and Sheriff Departments for a given City and County to hand over all documentation on all known surveillance equipment. (Including documentation and information regarding all software used and any data it collects and stores.)

If you’re wondering what the situation is exactly with all of the surveillance equipment (and the data about the public that is being collected via this equipment) – in most major cities across the country –  you’ll want to read my latest interview with Tracy Rosenberg of Oakland Privacy.org, entitled “The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project #ASDPSP – Reports Back: Here’s #WhatWeFound In Sacramento.”

Tracy created the templates, and explains even more about the different types of equipment our templates ask about.

Here are the first two detailed interviews with Tracy on this topic:

Interview with Oakland Privacy’s Tracy Rosenberg On The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project

How a little “working group” stopped Oakland from becoming a mini-fusion center for the Department of Homeland Security.

The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project  is all about developing a larger strategy for determining what types of surveillance equipment a city’s police and sheriff departments have already purchased and whether or not a surveillance policy is in place to monitor that equipment – regulating how that equipment is used against their citizens.

This project started during Aaron Swartz Day 2017’s Sunday hackathon. Before that event was even over, it was clear that it had been really successful and we were all very pumped and had decided to just keep going until next year.

The results of doing so are just starting to pour in, and I’m going to be doing my best to give you the full story – both here on the Aaron Swartz Day website, and over on Mondo 2000, over these next few months, leading straight into this year’s event.

We just added two new templates (Zip file of all templates in .PDF, Zip file of all templates in .DOC) to our tutorial – one for Police Departments (City) and one for Sheriff Departments (County) – that include the use of facial recognition software, since it came out recently that Amazon has been literally giving away its facial recognition software to law enforcement, in the hopes of getting a number of early implementations. Not a bad marketing strategy, and we’re not saying the software shouldn’t be used; just that there should be a surveillance policy framework in place that regulates how it can be used against citizens.

Special thanks to Muckrock, without which this project would not be possible.

 

 

Aaron Swartz Day 2018 - Projects, ASD Next Phase Events, ASD Police Surveillance Project, History, Journalist's Toolbox, Surveillance, Surveillance Reform

Tracy Rosenberg Explains How to Compel Police & Sheriff Departments To Admit What Surveillance Equipment They Already Have

See Tracy Live at this year’s San Francisco Hackathon!

TICKETS HERE

Lisa Rein has written a pair of articles in Mondo 2000 with Tracy Rosenberg from OaklandPrivacy.org.

Tracy explains the importance of the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project, and its mission of filing public records requests en masse, in order to retroactively determine what kinds of surveillance equipment and software a city’s Police and Sheriff Departments already have.

We will have a complete tutorial with templates and step-by-step instructions, so you to start doing this yourself, next week.

For now, please read these articles to get a better idea of why this project is so important, for all of us, right now.

How a little “working group” stopped Oakland from becoming a mini-fusion center for the Department of Homeland Security.

(How The Occupy Oakland Privacy Working Group became Oakland Privacy)

 

and

Interview with Oakland Privacy’s Tracy Rosenberg On The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project