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San Diego Citizens Wrest Control of Surveillance Tech Away From Police

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Organizers in San Diego have secured a major win after a long fight against unbridled police surveillance.
San Diego is joining a growing list of cities taking official action against the unregulated use of emergent police surveillance technologies.
Community-led efforts to address potential civil liberties violations, spurred by the deployment of more 3,000 police cameras across the city, finally paid off Friday when the San Diego City Council voted unanimously to stop police from making any future decisions about surveillance unilaterally.
Under a new ordinance, the city will assemble a privacy advisory board comprised of community leaders and technology experts over the next year. The board will review future technology proposals as well as existing products and policies to determined their impact on San Diegans’ civil liberties. Per the new measure, the city council will have final say over any technologies going forward and will re-review their use annually.
The ordinance was backed by the TRUST SD coalition, more than 30 organizations that came together to combat the secretive use of “smart streetlights” acquired by the city in 2016. San Diego had approved the lights —which incidentally came equipped with cameras and other sensors accessible by police — under an initiative established to lower the city’s energy bill.
San Diego’s then-mayor, Kevin Faulconer, ordered the cameras turned off in Sept. 2020 amid a wave of activist attention while new privacy safeguards were contemplated.
Lilly Irani, a professor at UC San Diego and member of the TRUST SD Coalition, told Gizmodo the privacy groups researched ordinances in other cities such Seattle and Oakland in an effort to devise a broader regulatory scheme that incorporated community approval.

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