Do Most Cities Have Cameras In Thier Downtown Area

Police surveillance: The US metropolis that trounce Big Brother

By Brian Wheeler
BBC News, Washington DC

Published: 29 September 2016

Mass surveillance of citizens without their cognition is on the ascent in America. This is the story of how one city fought back - and is teaching others how to do the same.

A deprived port city, beyond the bay from San Francisco, with a history of loftier crime rates and radical politics, Oakland has seen its share of policing scandals over the years.

Surveillance of ordinary citizens and protest groups - from the Black Panthers in the 1960s to Occupy Oakland in the 2000s - is nothing new in California's 8th largest city.

"Constabulary-community relations in Oakland are terrible," says Ali Winston, a reporter with the Due east Bay Express. "They have been terrible for a long time."

But Winston and his colleague Darwin BondGraham were however not fully prepared for what they would detect in the summer of 2012, when they were going through court records and council papers.

"We saw some things that raised questions. Why are they running fibre optic cables out there? That kind of thing," says BondGraham.

Winston recognised the name of a security company on a council agenda and knew immediately what they were dealing with - a Domain Awareness Centre.

Image source, Getty Images

Occupy Oakland protesters shut down the city'southward port in 2011

Most cities, including Oakland, have cameras monitoring traffic intersections and public areas. Just a Domain Awareness Middle, or DAC, is far more than sophisticated. Information technology is still based effectually a banking company of screens, only the camera feeds are augmented by data from weather reports, shipping movements, social media churr, email records, emergency calls and other data sources.

The port of Oakland had been given federal funds in 2008 to build a DAC every bit part of a post-9/11 push to protect critical infrastructure from terrorist attack.

At some point, the city council decided to extend the system to cover the whole of Oakland and its population of 400,000 people.

"The feeling from the port seemed to be, 'We are building these really absurd systems, why don't nosotros make them urban center-broad?'," says BondGraham.

Hundreds of new cameras would exist installed beyond the city and data would exist incorporated from number plate readers, gunshot-detection microphones, social media, and, in later phases, facial recognition software and programs that can recognise people from the way they walk.

The urban center said it needed an early warning system to requite "first responders" a head start when dealing with emergencies like chemical spills and earthquakes, equally well as major crime and terrorist incidents.

Just privacy campaigners in the city were alarmed at the thought of the Oakland Police Section having access to an all-pervasive real-fourth dimension surveillance network - particularly one that did not have a policy on what information would be stored and for how long.

The public backlash began in the summertime of 2013, but as Edward Snowden'south commencement leaks about the National Security Agency'south spying activities were hit the headlines.

Epitome source, Reuters

Edward Snowden's revelations sparked a huge debate about privacy and data

Snowden ignited a "huge" public debate about privacy and data, says Brian Hofer, a former civil rights lawyer who led efforts to curb the DAC, which had barely registered every bit an event when the plan to aggrandize it citywide had first come before the urban center council.

Hofer was a relative latecomer to the Oakland Privacy campaign, deciding to get involved after reading a December 2013 article in the East Bay Express, based on thousands of leaked emails between city officials, which suggested that the real purpose of the DAC was not to combat violent law-breaking but to monitor and track political protesters.

He was among dozens of Oakland residents to speak out against the DAC at a marathon city quango meeting on iv March 2014, at which the fate of the organisation would exist decided.

Past now, stopping the Oakland "spy centre" had go a crusade celebre amidst former Occupy protesters. Some of them waited their turn, their faces covered by masks, to vent their anger.

The meeting as well heard from members of the African American customs, who argued that the DAC would be used to justify police violence in black neighbourhoods, and from Oakland's large Muslim community, who were concerned that the DAC would be used to spy on them.

What linked them all was a visceral distrust of the authorities and a feeling that they did non desire to live in a city where they would be constantly monitored as they went most their business. A PowerPoint presentation by city officials on the declared benefits of the DAC did nothing to mollify them.

With the city council tied on the issue, Oakland's then mayor Jean Quan, who had originally been in favour of the DAC, used her casting vote to dorsum a motion that would dramatically scale information technology back and so that it would be focused solely on the port, as originally planned.

The public gallery erupted with cries of "shame" - the majority of those present that night had wanted the DAC scrapped altogether.

Image source, Getty Images

Police-customs relations are under strain in Oakland

But others believe the city's leaders caved in too easily to the protesters.

"Occupy are the people that don't want the cameras," says Nancy Sidebothan, who chairs a neighbourhood law-breaking prevention commission in Cardinal E Oakland.

"It'south not the ordinary citizens. We want cameras. We want our safety. Because you lot can't walk down your street without worrying almost whether someone is going to randomly shoot at y'all. Every night you hear gunshots going off."

Oakland is a high-crime metropolis, averaging 109 homicides a year for the by 45 years. Many residents and businesses have invested in their ain security cameras and are happy to share their contents with law enforcement.

"If you don't want government to put cameras downtown, what are you hiding from, that you think is going to get picked up on a camera?" says Sidebothan.

Image source, Amanda Reddig Ferreira

Brian Hofer is chairman of Oakland'due south new privacy watchdog

Brian Hofer agrees that security cameras tin can prevent crime merely says in that location is no show that mass surveillance does. And he argues that police force departments only turn to "shiny gadgets" when relations with the public they are meant to protect, and on whom they rely as witnesses, accept broken down.

"Instead of trying to repair these relationships we are just throwing more than surveillance equipment at the problem. Nosotros are smart people here in Oakland. We accept Silicon Valley right up the road and we merely think all these new tools are going to solve our issues but it but doesn't piece of work."

The city council's conclusion to limit the DAC was a victory for Oakland Privacy and Hofer, who has since been elected chair of the city's offset Privacy Advisory Commission, which has been given the chore of scrutinising every new piece of equipment the police department wants to buy.

He says he has had a largely positive response from urban center officials and police chiefs, and is working with other Bay Area administrations to improve accountability. Oakland Privacy is also in talks with campaigners in New York and Baltimore - where concern nearly surreptitious police surveillance of poor, black neighbourhoods is, if anything, fifty-fifty higher than in Oakland - about how they tin fight back.

"It is not well-nigh prohibiting the apply of surveillance equipment, it is almost narrowing its scope," he says.

Hofer's committee began public hearings concluding calendar month into Oakland Police Section'south use of Stingrays - imitation telephone masts that tin exist used to track suspects.

Paradigm source, Getty Images

Campaigners beyond America are pushing for greater control of surveillance

This is a level of accountability that exists in few other places in the U.s., where, according to American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) national executive director Anthony Romero, surveillance equipment is "acquired in clandestine and used in secret" oft without the knowledge of elected officials, allow solitary the public.

Last calendar week the ACLU launched proposed legislation in 11 The states cities, including New York and Washington DC, that would, if passed, institute community control over police surveillance.

The initiative is inspired, in role, by the Black Lives Affair entrada, although many of the guidelines, such as an annual surveillance inspect, come straight from the Oakland Privacy playbook.

"People of color have long been the targets of government surveillance - but today'south technology makes it more concerning than ever," said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown University's Privacy and Technology Centre at the launch of the scheme.

"Communities are being confronted with the very real possibility that law enforcement is tracking them wherever they get - at work, school, places of worship and political gatherings.

"People need to feel prophylactic in their neighbourhoods, and this new effort is an of import pace in the process of taking back control."

Equipment catalogue

Many of the systems existence offered for sale to law enforcement agencies across the US, and around the world, were developed by defense giants for utilize on the battlefields of Iraq and Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. Here is a modest selection:

Stingray fake phone masts

About the size of a suitcase, Stingrays work by pretending to be a phone tower in society to strip information from nearby devices, enabling constabulary to rail suspects without a warrant. They are also capable of accessing the content of calls and texts. The next generation of the device, Hailstorm, is now on the market.

Police force cars mounted with automatic number plate readers are thought to be in use in many The states cities, gathering information on the location and movements of drivers. Inquiry in Oakland plant black neighbourhoods were being disproportionally targeted.

Crime prediction software

Software is being used by law in the Us and UK that analyses crime statistics to predict where it will happen next. Microsoft, IBM and Hitachi are among the big players moving into this market. The latest Hitachi "criminal offence visualisation" software - effectively a Domain Awareness Centre on your computer desktop - is being trialled in Washington DC and is demonstrated in this YouTube video. In that location is likewise growing business concern about the use of social media assay software, which monitors hashtags such as BlackLivesMatter and PoliceBrutality to place "threats to public safe".

Surveillance enabled lite bulbs

LED light bulbs marketed as energy-efficient upgrades to existing low-cal bulbs on urban center streets that tin can contain tiny cameras and microphones linked to a central monitoring station.

These use radar to peer through the walls of buildings - currently precise enough to evidence how many people are in a particular room.

X-Ray, or 'backscatter" vans

Mobile units that use X-ray radiations to see underneath vesture and car exteriors.

The employ of light aircraft to tape continuous loftier definition footage of a metropolis - recently discovered, and stopped, in Baltimore, following a public outcry. Police departments across the U.s.a., and in cities around the world, are also buying drones for surveillance.

Shotspotter microphones have been effectually for more a decade and are thought to be in use in at to the lowest degree xc US cities. They are designed to improve police force response times but there are concerns they could be used to listen in to conversations.

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