Oakland accepts federal funds for controversial VAST surveillance setup
Oakland accepts federal funds for controversial vast surveillance setup
Promises to get data retention, privacy policies in place later.
by Cyrus Farivar - July 31 2013, 9:00am CAST
This sign was seen outside the Oakland City Council meeting on Tuesday evening.
OAKLAND, CA—At a regularly scheduled city council meeting last night, the Oakland City Council unanimously accepted a $2 million federal grant that would create a round-the-clock "Domain Awareness Center" (DAC) in the West Coast port city. In doing so, Oakland thrust itself into the forefront of the national debate about surveillance and its limits—and two dozen vociferous protestors shouted "shame, shame, shame!" as the council voted after midnight to accept the money.
A May 2013 DAC slide (PDF) from a presentation by the Port of Oakland shows that the system would combine not only existing surveillance cameras and thermal imaging devices at the Port of Oakland, but also the Oakland Police Department's license plate readers, ShotSpotter gunshot detection devices, CCTV cameras, surveillance cameras at Oakland city schools, and dozens of other cameras from regional law enforcement agencies, including the California Highway Patrol. According to that schedule, the DAC should be fully operational by the end of June 2014, and it will aggregate more than 1,000 camera feeds.
Enlarge (in original)/ The Port of Oakland's own May 2013 slide describes combining over 1,000 cameras.
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"I think it's a travesty that the (Department of Homeland Security) has tapped our firefighters to be spies for the surveillance state," said Mary Madden of the group Alameda County Against Drones.
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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/oakland-accepts-federal-funds-for-controversial-vast-surveillance-setup/
Some protestors became louder as the night went on.
Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also said that the city's privacy assurances are not good enough.
"A thousand sensors that feed into one place is not the same as 1,000 identical sensors that each feed to 1,000 different places without exchanging information," he told Ars. "A network of cameras is rather unlike a bunch of un-networked cameras. Other variables include retention of the data, access to the data, or disclosure of the data. Much of the fight over privacy today is about aggregation and/or organization of already-collected data."
