Early Wednesday morning, privacy and civil liberties advocates in California celebrated a small victory after the Oakland City Council voted to delay a decision in hiring a contractor to finish building the so-called “Domain Awareness Center” by two weeks.
The council’s decision came after members of the public testified for more than four hours on why the surveillance hub should not be in their back yard.
“I am worried about the sort of mission creep on this and it needs to be contained, especially when we are not even close to having a real privacy policy,” said Council President Pat Kernighan. She noted the city is “marching down the generalized path of adding [Bay Area Rapid Transportation] cameras and other kinds of cameras. I just don’t think we’re ready for that.»
Councilmember Lynette Gibson McElhaney added, “I’m deeply troubled by the revelations of (Edward) Snowden. I am fearful of the abuse of this technology once it is deployed, and so for me, I cannot vote for this.”
According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, members of the Oakland City Council were specifically interested in obtaining additional information on what kinds of information the surveillance center would collect, and wanted justification for why the city would utilize cameras, weather alerts, dispatch systems and police records to monitor residents.
“We scored a significant momentum victory tonight,” said Brian Hofer, media contact for Oakland Privacy, a group fighting the construction of the Department of Homeland Security-funded DAC, in an email to MintPress. “The council voted to postpone by two weeks the final vote on all issues, in order to allow the Staff to educate them on certain questions and issues. The general Council consensus, as evidenced by their various motions, public comments, and questions, was to return this project to its original state.”
News of the City Council’s delayed vote on Phase 2 of the DAC comes after the Oakland Privacy Working Group announced earlier this month it would file a taxpayer lawsuit against the city of Oakland, if city officials continued to construct the center, citing a violation of the First and Fourth Amendment rights of Oakland residents.
Scheduled to go live in October 2014 and funded almost exclusively by a $10.9 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, the DAC will link cameras around the city with ShotSpotter gunshot detectors, license plate readers, Geographic Information Systems mapping, social media feeds and more.
Though the city says the goal is to monitor the city around the clock for crime and to improve emergency response times, many privacy advocates and residents have raised concerns about the center’s mere existence, emphasizing safety is not the true goal of the center.
“We have access to a large group of internal documents obtained through a Public Records Act request,” Hofer told MintPress earlier this year. He added that thousands of internal emails from City of Oakland staff show the true intent of the DAC is monitoring political demonstrations.
DAC opponent concerns may have finally been heard Tuesday night, as Councilwoman Desley Brooks, among other city leaders, said there is work that needs to be done before the center begins to operate in order to ensure residents their privacy is protected.
“I think that we need to bring this back a little bit,” Brooks said. “I think we need to pay close attention to what we are doing here and not be in such a rush.”
Linda Lye, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which opposes the center, also applauded the Council’s decision to delay hiring a contractor to finish building the surveillance center.
“Democracy is absolutely working,” Lye said.
While some city council members may become increasingly skeptical about the center, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan maintains that the DAC would not violate the privacy of local residents.
“This is an incident center — this is not an ongoing monitoring center,” Quan reportedly told the council. “It is technology that other cities have, this is nothing new. … We’re doing what most other big cities do to help their firefighters and help their police officers.”
Quan insisted that the project would help police officers and firefighters and encouraged council members to not scrap any part of the project.
“I’d like you to take a break and not act from fear either way because there are clearly are uses of this technology that will save people’s lives,” she said.