SAN DIEGO (CN) — After a second vote, the San Diego City Council on Tuesday approved sizable changes to municipal laws regulating the use of surveillance technology by law enforcement and a public advisory board's right to review them.
The amendments to the city’s TRUST — Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology — ordinance exempts the city’s volunteer surveillance technology oversight board from reviewing security cameras used to monitor public facilities and a police database with information that includes warrants and other information that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has access to. It also exempts city personnel involved in federal task forces from the review process.
Multiple amendments were submitted by City Council members at the council's first meeting to discuss Mayor Todd Gloria’s amendments on Jan. 23.
Other cities across the country have similar public advisory boards that review municipal surveillance technology, but city officials in San Diego argued the process to get technology reviewed is too cumbersome, and multiple amendments have been and will be needed in the future to streamline the process. Local community groups say the city is trampling privacy rights and transparency about how it is surveilling its residents.
“I think they have stripped significant amount of oversight from the community,” said Pegah Parsi, the vice chair of San Diego’s Privacy Advisory board. “I don’t know if we’re having a meaningful conversation anymore about privacy and civil liberties.”
In 2016, the city approved a plan to upgrade its streetlights by putting in energy-efficient lights equipped with sensors that recorded the temperature and the movement of people and cars on the street. The sensors were supposed to record information for future city planning purposes, but their video capturing capabilities ended up being used by police to investigate various crimes without the public knowing about it.
When the truth came out, a coalition of local nonprofit and community groups worked with the city to develop regulations for how the city uses surveillance technology, and how to make that process more transparent with the public.
The TRUST ordinance requires each city department to create an inventory of its surveillance technology, state how they use it, and hold community meetings to get feedback about it. It also created a privacy advisory board of community volunteers that reviews and provides feedback to the City Council about the city’s surveillance technology. The City Council then has to approve each piece of surveillance technology for use.
Parsi said since the board got up and running in March 2023, she’s spent up to 100 hours some months trying to keep up with the pace of reviewing each piece of surveillance technology.
But even with a heap of technologies to review, she and the board’s other members did not want to exempt technologies from being reviewed, she said, because it could mean that local law enforcement start using surveillance technology that the public won’t know about.
“Police have never gotten a technology and underused it,” said Askari Abdul-Muntaqim, a member of a local nonprofit community group called Pillars of the Community. Law enforcement overuse the technology they have and wait for a lawsuit to force them to reel back how they use it, he added. But by the time that court date comes “they will have already destroyed many lives,” he said.
In light of revelations that some cities including nearby El Cajon share data from license plate readers with law enforcement in Texas and other states where abortion is illegal, Abdul-Muntaqim said he worries that similar information sharing will be made exempt by these news amendments.
“This is a well-taken concern,” said Adam Schwartz, the director of privacy litigation at the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Having rules about how surveillance data is collected and determining if and where it is shared with other law enforcement agencies, like refusing to share data with federal task forces looking to arrest migrants or other states looking to prosecute people seeking reproductive health care, is an important part of having proper oversight of surveillance technology and how it’s used, he added.
“Part of being a sanctuary is being a data sanctuary,” Schwartz said.
The point of having a public oversight board to review how the city uses surveillance technology is not to stop them completely from using it, but about transparency so people are aware of how government is using their money and monitoring residents, and why they’re using certain technologies, said Seth Hall, a member of TRUST SD, a coalition of community groups that helped create the surveillance ordinance.
Hall added that since council members made amendments on the dais at the first vote on the amendments, it wasn’t possible for many community members to voice their opinions about it.
More than a dozen or so protesters did show up to voice their objections to the amendments during the first vote.
Hall called the amendments “a wrecking ball to the surveillance ordinance” that “caused a lot of destruction to transparency in San Diego.”
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
Additional Reads
-
Homes, businesses damaged as tornadoes pummel Midwest April 26, 2024 -
