The Voice of San Diego has a report about the Midway District public meeting held March 6 by the city and the SDPD on the smart streetlight cameras and license plate readers police want. Here’s the first part of the report by Jesse Marx:
The city of San Diego kicked off a series of public meetings this week about a proposal to revive its streetlight cameras and merge the devices with license plate readers. Though police are promising to do essentially the same things they were in 2020, the technology is different.
In the years since the smart streetlights program went bust, the devices have advanced to enable other forms of surveillance that weren’t present to officials before.
While the city is taking its $4 million request to communities directly affected, and assuring it has no interest in the more sophisticated types of analysis available, there’s plenty of apprehension among activists. It’s not so much the process but the platform the city wants to buy that’s raising alarm.
“This hardware is, in fact, capable of some of the most egregious forms of mass surveillance that exists and that’s what we’re talking about putting up on the poles,” said Seth Hall, a member of the Trust SD Coalition, which championed the current rules and creation of a Privacy Advisory Board.
In recent days police officials have stressed that the single network will not be accessible to investigators in real time and will not incorporate facial recognition — even though that’s permissible now under state law. But the new platform can be outfitted with different software, even microphones, and it’s up to the city, as the Union-Tribune reported, to pick which features it uses.
For the balance of the article please go here.
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We may have been mistaken on the location of this public meeting and got it mixed up with a meeting in the Midway on March 7.
How exactly was this meeting noticed to the public? I never heard anything about it.
Ah, my mistake. Been pretty sick and not keeping up with The Rag.
There is a hearing planned for 11am – 1pm March 10th at the La Jolla Rec Center.
Make no mistake. This is a money for data play that will face tens of millions of dollars in violation of 4th amendment lawsuits that will cost the taxpayers for decades after one term Autocrat Wanna-be Gloria gets kicked to the curb; so he is pulling in as much lobbyist cash as he can get his greedy little hands on.
Lets summarize just how far the Politico-Surveillance State has gone in 2023:
1.) The Politico-Real Estate Complex continues to facilitate the Corporate Monopolization of Housing in California
2.) City’s and County government acquiesced all power to SANDAG.
3.) SANDAG does not have to answer to any constituents and has lavished themselves with unilateral unmitigated power and subsequent impunity operating with relatively little if any legislatively protected oversight and possess final say on every matter.
4.) Monopolization and heavy politico-real estate complex market manipulation fast tracks the construction of hundreds of thousands of high Density Luxury apartments to create the most volatile “build to rent” market in the U.S. But most importantly these high density projects are the CAUSE of homelessness through basic supply and demand principles, by REIT’s usurping all privately owned homes in an entire metropolitan city, the 2nd largest in California, no one can buy except the publicly traded corporations.
5.) This has led to the predatory development in our existing affordable areas to create more lucrative development projects for the out of state oligarchs and more money for the DNC and RNC.
6.) The destruction of existing affordable housing then floods our parks and streets with 130-250 more newly homeless San Diegans for every 100 we take off of the streets
7.) The cruelty of a reprehensibly and increasingly corrupt City, County, and State government facilitating homelessness and profiting politically from it is the root cause of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In other words City Hall, the County and the State are LITERALLY driving Californian’s insane by throwing them out in the streets to die for political and personal gain.
8.) The State, the County and the City can have Americans COMMITTED to understaffed mental health facilities indefinitely now.
9.) We’ve had our 1st amendment rights taken from us by then Council President Jen Campbell when the Philly Fraudster relegated the public to just 60 seconds to address the “exalted ones” at a council meeting. Monica Montgomery Steppe when President of the Council, Sean Elo Rivera and the Plutocrats in City hall continue to perpetrate stifling free speech and eliminating participation in public discourse.
10.) The NSA has stockpiled every email you have ever written and will ever write; the US government can arbitrarily read your mail
11.) Activist and protesters are being arbitrarily charged with domestic terrorism for expressing their constitutionally protected “right to assemble”
12.) Now Todd Gloria and the 360 GIS crowd want to supply an unlimited number of third party corporations with your location data that should only be available via A SEARCH WARRANT
13.) The two largest law enforcement agencies are the San Diego Police Department and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, with the latter also providing contract policing services to smaller municipalities in unincorporated areas.
14.) Nine cities in the San Diego area have their own police department, as does the Port of San Diego and the major universities, including San Diego State University, University of California San Diego, and California State University San Marcos.
15.) San Diego County is unique in that agencies throughout the region coordinate on public safety matters and information sharing through the Automated Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS), which is overseen by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). ARJIS manages desktop and mobile apps through which law enforcement agencies access sophisticated data analysis and records retrieval software systems. This includes Coplink, which was pioneered by the Tucson Police Department and the University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab.
16.) ARJIS has also ushered in countywide face recognition and automated license plate reader programs.
Why do we have a United States constitution if local politicians
in what has become our banana republic of San Diego can just usurp them with impunity?
We will have less freedom of movement and expression now as Americans now than they did under Stalin, in the Former Soviet Union.
We still have a constitutional rights. We need to make the necessary stand to protect the right to maintain agency over our own data and movement in a free society. Make no mistake about it there is no such thing as “anonymous” data sets: https://www.eff.org/wp/behind-the-one-way-mirror
Attend the meeting in La Jolla if you are able to from 11am-1pm
La Jolla Rec Center
615 Prospect Dr.
La Jolla, CA 92037
It’s already so much worse. You have billionaire Bezo’s Amazon who own a little company called ‘Ring’ security cameras? You think you have any privacy rights? Think again. This is really chilling:
The privacy loophole in your doorbell
Police were investigating his neighbor. A judge gave officers access to all his security-camera footage, including inside his home.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/07/privacy-loophole-ring-doorbell-00084979?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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