Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency
Oakland could become the next community in California to adopt an open and rigorous vetting process for police surveillance technology.
All too often, government executives unilaterally decide to adopt powerful new surveillance technologies that invade our privacy, chill our free speech, and unfairly burden communities of color. These intrusive and proliferating tools of street-level surveillance include drones, cell-site simulators, surveillance cameras, and automated license plate readers.
All surveillance is political.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the local level when law enforcement acquires new surveillance technology. Too often, the political process advantages police over the public interest. In California, a new bill—S.B. 21—offers the rare opportunity to shift the balance in favor of privacy.
Californians: tell your state senator to vote in favor of S.B. 21.
Today, the chairman of the FCC announced his desire to abandon the agency’s net neutrality protections – which protect online competition, free speech, and privacy from interference by Internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T – by undermining the legal authority behind those protections.
Recognizing the Year’s Worst in Government Transparency
A thick fog is rolling in over Sunshine Week (March 12-18), the annual event when government transparency advocates raise awareness about the importance of access to public records. We are entering an age when officials at the highest levels seek to discredit critical reporting with “alternative facts,” “fake news” slurs, and selective access to press conferences—while making their own claims without providing much in the way to substantiate them.
Two members of the New York City Council introduced a bill on Wednesday, March 1 to enact long overdue transparency rules for the NYPD’s procurement and deployment of electronic surveillance technology. It is the latest in a series of similar proposals around the country modeled on a Silicon Valley law adopted in 2016, which was crafted to impose municipal checks and balances to constrain on executive power and address the metastasis of surveillance.
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