The City of Oakland is seeking to build a massive new surveillance center, and Oakland residents are not happy. They have taken to Twitter and the Oakland City Council meetings to voice their opinions and the city has already voted to slow down and take a closer look at the project.
The DAC would centralize data gathered from traffic and surveillance cameras, police and emergency dispatch systems, crime maps, alarm systems and online data such as Twitter and Facebook feeds.
The article notes that proponents tout its ability to reduce crime. But Mayor Jean Quan, in her own op-ed from the beginning of last year, touted her city's drop in the crime rate:
Throughout 2013, Oakland's strategies to create jobs and reduce violence built momentum, and we saw our second-largest year-to-year drop in homicides in 40 years. Homicides came down 28 percent and home burglaries dropped 18 percent.
Her own op-ed shows that the city's plan, of jobs, violence prevention, more cops on the streets, and putting cops in crime hotspots is reducing crime. By her own logic, this means that this scheme is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars that could better be spent putting even more cops on the streets.
She adds:
But the most important factor has been strengthening the respect and trust between our officers and the community they serve. We made strong, swift progress in our work to comply with court-ordered reforms. We're seeing results, but we still are not satisfied. Every life lost to violence is unacceptable. But these signs of progress let us know we are on the right track.
But given the massive opposition to this spy center, should it get approved, that would permanently destroy the bond of trust between city and law enforcement that Quan so highly praises.
From the Al-Jazeera link, the East Bay Express notes that while the city is touting the spy system as a means of preventing crime, the terms "murder" and other such terms are not even mentioned. The Express also notes the real purpose of the spy system:
The records we examined show that the DAC is an open-ended project that would create a surveillance system that could watch the entire city and is designed to easily incorporate new high-tech features in the future. And one of the uses that has piqued the interest of city staffers is the deployment of the DAC to track political protesters and monitor large demonstrations.
Quan should have to answer tough questions given that she is so totally sold on this project. Why the obsession with this massive spy system and obsession with demonstrations when the real problem is crime given that Oakland has some of the highest robbery rates in the country?
And even if this project goes through, there is the serious question of whether or not it will pass the muster of the courts. From Katz vs. United States:
In Katz v. United States, Justice White sought to preserve for a future case the possibility that in ''national security cases'' electronic surveillance upon the authorization of the President or the Attorney General could be permissible without prior judicial approval. The Executive Branch then asserted the power to wiretap and to ''bug'' in two types of national security situations, against domestic subversion and against foreign intelligence operations, first basing its authority on a theory of ''inherent'' presidential power and then in the Supreme Court withdrawing to the argument that such surveillance was a ''reasonable'' search and seizure and therefore valid under the Fourth Amendment.
Unanimously, the Court held that at least in cases of domestic subversive investigations, compliance with the warrant provisions of the Fourth Amendment was required. Whether or not a search was reasonable, wrote Justice Powell for the Court, was a question which derived much of its answer from the warrant clause; except in a few narrowly circumscribed classes of situations, only those searches conducted pursuant to warrants were reasonable. The Government's duty to preserve the national security did not override the gurarantee that before government could invade the privacy of its citizens it must present to a neutral magistrate evidence sufficient to support issuance of a warrant authorizing that invasion of privacy.
This protection was even more needed in ''national security cases'' than in cases of ''ordinary'' crime, the Justice continued, inasmuch as the tendency of government so often is to regard opponents of its policies as a threat and hence to tread in areas protected by the First Amendment as well as by the Fourth. Rejected also was the argument that courts could not appreciate the intricacies of investigations in the area of national security nor preserve the secrecy which is required.
The article goes on to note that the President's powers in these cases remain unsettled. Since the President's powers in these cases are unsettled, it would be difficult for municipalities to prove that they can conduct warrantless surveillance. And the city has failed to establish the need to engage in national security surveillance anyway and has also failed to establish safeguards that would allow surveillance to be conducted legally.
More recent cases also frown on electronic surveillance. In 2012, the SCOTUS ruled that the police could not put a GPS tracking device on a suspect's car without a warrant. And conflicting court rulings regarding the NSA and their collection of data in light of the Snowden revelations virtually guarantees a lawsuit against the City of Oakland should this project go forward.
On the other hand, the challenge for opponents will be establishing standing to sue. Last year, the SCOTUS dismissed a case against the US over FISA due to lack of standing. The court ruled as follows:
Respondent attorneys, journalists, and legal, media, human rights, and labor organizations failed to establish injury-in-fact that is fairly traceable to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702, 50 U.S.C. §1881a, added by FISA Amendments Act, and thus respondents lack standing to challenge FISA amendment, which creates new procedures for authorizing electronic surveillance targeting non-U.S. persons abroad, since respondents asserted that government will target communications of non-U.S. persons with whom they communicate, but this is mere speculation, and respondents have no evidence that their communications have been monitored under Section 1881a, or specific facts to show that communications of respondents' foreign contacts will be targeted, since, even if respondents could demonstrate that targeting of their foreign contacts is imminent, they can only speculate as to whether government will seek to use Section 1881a-authorized surveillance, rather than other methods, and thus cannot satisfy standing requirement that they will suffer injury that is “fairly traceable” to challenged amendment, since, even if respondents could show that government will seek authorization from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to acquire communications of their foreign contacts under Section 1881a, respondents can only speculate as to whether FISC will authorize surveillance, such that respondents' standing theory rests on speculation about decisions of independent actors, since, even if government were to obtain FISC's approval to target respondents' foreign contacts under Section 1881a, it is not clear that government would succeed in acquiring those communications, and since even if government were to conduct surveillance of respondents' foreign contacts, respondents can only speculate as to whether respondents' own communications with those foreign contacts incidentally would be acquired.
However, under this logic, someone who was actually affected by surveillance (i.e. charged with a crime) or someone who could prove (possibly through open records requests) that the city actually targeted them with illegal surveillance as opposed to speculation could bring suit.