Who's Watching? Safeguarding Our Privacy (Democracy Forum 6/28/26)

Welcome everyone. My name is David Waxburg. I'm among the many leaders of Indivisible Palo Alto Plus. On behalf of IPA Plus, welcome to the third Democracy Forum: Who's Watching? Safeguarding Our Privacy. The Democracy Forum aims to provide a deep-dive educational experience that will equip all of us with the knowledge, skills, and tools we need to preserve and strengthen the American democratic experiment, and it is in dire need of strengthening.

These forums are applied education because Indivisible is an action-oriented group. We seek to learn about issues related to democracy and learn what we can do about them. Hence, our title includes a verb. We will cover not only who's watching us and the implications of surveillance, but also how we can safeguard our privacy and our democracy. So, strap in because it might get bumpy. We have a few elected officials with us. I'm not going to be able to name them all, but I want to at least acknowledge we've got folks from Palo Alto City Council, East Palo Alto City Council, Foster City, and Cupertino City Councils, and candidates for the city council for Palo Alto and Mountain View. Thank you all for being with us.

Our panel will be moderated by Suse Faravar. Suse is an award-winning technology journalist, author, and communication strategist based in Oakland. He currently runs Far Media, teaches journalism at UC Berkeley, and served as senior writer at Forbes. He's authored two books, The Internet of Elsewhere and Harus Data. And Suse, the floor is yours.

Thank you to David and the team that put on this event. My name is Suse Faravar. It's a delight to be here with you, to spend a Sunday afternoon with all of you. It's not every day, as I know many of our guests here can attest, that you have so many beautiful people such as yourself here to talk about one of the most important issues facing all of our communities. So thank you for taking time out of your day to be with us. I wanted to very, very briefly introduce our panel. I have known these incredibly smart, incredibly hardworking people for some years now. To my immediate left is Ree Sullean, the senior campaigns director for Fight for the Future. Ree formerly served on the Oakland Privacy Commission, which I hope we'll get into a little bit later in the discussion. To Ree's left is Brian Hoer, the executive director of Secure Justice, who also chaired the Oakland Privacy Commission for, I don't know, 10 years, and was its founding chair. Left, I believe, last year, if I'm not mistaken. To his left is Cindy Cohn, the recently retired, but yet still wants to talk about privacy, former executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a members-based organization just up the road in San Francisco. I am a longtime proud member of the EFF. I would encourage other people to join as well. Thank you all for being here with me. I would love to start out by talking a little bit about some of the surveillance that's happening currently in our communities, and specifically here in Palo Alto. Brian, I believe you shared with folks there's a stack of flyers up at the front, a chart that I think you made showing a chart that's going up. If you haven't seen it, it's up at the front. It's charting communities that have decided to no longer do business with the Flock Corporation. And it's a chart that's going like this. And so I'd love to hear from Brian about what does that say to you when you make this chart and you add data points, when you see communities even right here in the Bay Area that are deciding to no longer do business with Flock.

I like how you start off with the most frustrating question of my life. We're in the upside-down world where the Bay Area is the strongest defender of one of the largest, most fast-expanding surveillance technology vendors in the country, Flock Safety. And you can sort of see in the very, very back, the gentleman is sort of holding up that foam board. And if you saw a stock chart like that, I'm pretty sure you'd want to invest. About a year ago, Flock expanded rather rapidly. They are certainly everywhere. There's no dispute about that. And all over the Bay Area, every single day, if you drive, you are being tracked by one of their license plate readers, and your data is being retained in their databases, which are getting co-mingled with even more data sets these days. And if you look at that later, you'll notice that the dramatic increase has all been within the last calendar year, as the rest of the country, not the Bay Area, but the rest of the country, is finally figuring out how dangerous and invasive these technologies are. I think this year alone, it's something like 56 contracts have been terminated or not awarded in the first place. And so we've been trying to spend a lot of time and resources in the next coming months trying to stop this here in the Bay Area. San Jose has 500 cameras. Oakland has 294. San Francisco has 400. I mean, it's everywhere, and you are being tracked with these things.

Ree, I'd love to hear from you about Flock specifically, and how Flock and other technologies fit into some of the communities who you are constantly advocating for.

The Oakland Flock fight, as many others were. And it was incredible to see actually how many people turned up. There were people in the hundreds that came to the contract, and it was such a huge blow to all of our democracy to see the city council there shut it down. And I just want to comment, I will answer the second part of your question about how powerful fear has been in terms of the media narrative to local lawmakers. And I think it hit me when I was being interviewed about the Flock vote in Oakland. There's no members of the press here besides you. Anyway, I don't care. I'll say it. I was being interviewed by the CBS reporter, and I was talking about how Flock has ties to ICE immigration raids. It's been used to prosecute and investigate out-of-state abortions. And while I was speaking on this interview, the B-roll was like machine guns firing in Oakland. And it was a very intentional choice. And it really reminded me so much about the childhood that I had growing up as a Muslim in a post-9/11 environment where the war on terror was meant to conjure up fear. And I think back then, the response from the community, and it's understandable when you're seeing people in the community being sent to Guantanamo or having their charitable contributions looked at with a microscope. I hope you know that the instinct is to shrink yourself and to be defensive and not respond with the full force that we're seeing now. And I think there is so much to say about how Indivisible has shown up in this moment with courage, which is the antidote. It's absolutely the antidote. And I think when it comes to surveillance, we need to show that courage in the face of the fear that we hear in the media, and when we see things like that, we need to call it out. We need that counter-narrative to be front and center. But the question was about just all of the other surveillance fights that we have, because after Oakland for me, I was like, okay, I need to pivot strategically, and what else can we win? And that's part of the reason why we decided at Fight for the Future to focus on the corporate sector, because think of how many Lowe's or Home Depots exist across the country. If we can put enough pressure to have one of them fold, that's thousands of parking lots that will have their cameras stripped. And so I think that's something that we've thought is a good opportunity. And just speaking locally, one thing that we've been focusing on is facial recognition. There was a report of several gay bars in the Castro that are using TSA-style facial recognition for entry to get in. And Pride Weekend is now, and Brian was just telling me about a huge police response from SFPD following the Trans Visibility March. And so these are really, really dangerous things where I think there's lots of places where we can turn our attention, but if I can underline anything, it's that the surveillance fight does not begin and end with your city Flock contract. There's so many targets, there's so many opportunities to try and keep us as a community safer.

And Cindy, I wanted to ask you, as somebody who's been involved in this advocacy, legal, I've seen you in courtrooms many times. You have been in this fight maybe longer than anyone in this room. I'm not sure, but certainly on this stage, I'll say that with certainty. I'd love for you to set, right, we've been talking a little bit about, we've been picking on Flock Safety specifically. I'd love for you to give us a broader perspective as to how Flock is or is not different than what came before. Is it more pernicious? Is it more pervasive? Is it worse? How do you see it as fitting into the longer arc of the surveillance struggle that you've been part of?

I want to piggyback a little bit on, and I love that you use the word pernicious. It is far more invasive today than it was in the old days. And there's multiple reasons for that. Cindy said AI. We don't really do antitrust litigation in this country anymore. There's really only four companies, what I call verticals, that municipal governments can go to to get all the different technologies that they're using right now. And every single one of those four vendors wants to be the one-stop shop. We'll build your real-time crime center. We'll have the license plate readers, the CCTV, the facial recognition, the software that's going to connect it all. The open-source intelligence, Flock Nova, this is another piece that they're bringing out where they got caught ingesting stolen data. A whistleblower leaked that. And so the amount of power, the amount of co-mingled data sets allows greater inferences, greater confidence scores in identifying people. So it is far more powerful than it used to be in the old days. And what I like to do is I openly admit I'm trying to create friction points. I'm trying to slow it down and go back to that pre-9/11 where data is siloed. And I realize that's an aggressive position. You know, honestly, if I was law enforcement, I would want all the data as well. I really would. But whenever we have that balancing question, it's always, Brian, you need to tone down your pro-privacy argument. It's never, maybe we've gone too far. And that's where I think the Bay Area is right now, is that we've crossed beyond the reasonable minds may disagree on where to draw that line. We're not having an honest conversation. No municipal government in the Bay Area honestly evaluates these technologies. They love the favorable fact pattern, but they never ever want to talk about the negatives that come with this.

You know, we talk about Flock. We've mentioned a few other facial technologies, facial recognition. Flock is of course one company that makes automated license plate readers, a technology that I think most of us are familiar with. There's all kinds of other technologies that are out there. And all of this is being done, as you alluded to a moment ago, Brian, this is being done in the name of public safety. This is being done in the name of we need, we law enforcement, we policymakers and community leaders need this to make our communities safer. What actually happens? Like, what, okay, so there's a, let's say there's a Flock camera outside. What's the real world? How does that actually unfold? Like, what, like, you know, if I'm driving a stolen car down in front of the camera, what's actually happening?

I mean, it depends on who's getting access. And I think one of the reasons why Flock has been actually such an effective target is there's so many incredible researchers that have demonstrated how easy it is, you know, for people to hack into it. How lax the company has been. I mean, we hosted an action at Flock headquarters in Atlanta recently, and around the same time, Atlanta was, there was a city near outside of Atlanta that was considering renewing a Flock contract, and at that same time, there's a story that broke out that the Flock executives were live streaming the footage of inside a community center at a pool where, you know, there were, for hours on end. And like it was, it just demonstrated, you know, most people, right, won't encounter one of these harms, but when you do, it's severe, right? And it's like when there's an ICE immigration raid, like how we don't really even get to see all of the tech that's behind the scenes. Surveillance is, you know, very much intentionally hidden. And so it's very hard oftentimes as like advocates to be like, this was the problem or that. But they are, like Suse was saying, they're in communication with each other. They're becoming more and more efficient at, you know, synthesizing all of the different data points that come from multiple sources in order to be able to track people in real time. And part of that is like, you know, the data broker industry is a part of that, that the technical capabilities have expanded. You know, and this stuff is pervasive, even, you know, the Ring cameras, I just want to highlight that because it's on nearly every doorstep. And so this is one thing that we developed actually, these little door hangers that you can download if you'd like on flockout.org, or where you can essentially start a conversation with your neighbors in a very gentle way to educate them about how Ring, even though Ring has announced that they've dropped their Flock contract, they still have a contract with Axon, and Axon also has ties to Customs and Border Patrol. And in general, you know, the more surveillance that's around, I've heard it compared to recycling in a way, like you just don't want to keep that stuff, and the cumulative effect is more and more dangerous with the time, you know, the more you have it on hand. And so I think in terms of risk, we're seeing like with facial recognition technology, we're live streaming ICE agents in Minnesota being able to snap a photo of somebody, a protester, and be able to run it through their mobile facial recognition app and be able to call that protester by name and, you know, track them and know where they live and all of these things. And so I think it's become really clear to people the harm, which is why that Super Bowl moment was so amazing to me. I'm like admittedly the person who's only there for the halftime show, but I heard that there was a commercial about the, what was the pet thing?

The lost puppy.

The lost puppy feature. Yeah. It was essentially facial recognition to help identify and locate lost puppies. And the internet blew up. I mean, this is such a, it's a huge pop culture moment where there are millions of people watching this, and the outrage was so big, and people were immediately able to recognize how, you know, creepy and invasive this was, that almost immediately Ring had announced that they dropped Flock. Like I think that's actually to me such a strong indication of how much collective power we have and how much people are starting to understand the connections between these things.

Do we, and I'll ask this to Cindy as well, do you feel like you, as somebody, as an advocate, as a professional, somebody who knows people, you've been in forums like this, I'm sure, a gazillion times previously. Do you feel like regular people have a good sense of what is, how their, how these technologies are being used in their names for their own benefit, ostensibly?

Brian, you've been as the longtime chair of the Oakland Privacy Commission. And for those who don't know, the Oakland Privacy Commission is an entity that I really admire, both just as an Oakland resident, but just as a regular, you know, citizen. The Oakland Privacy Commission is fairly unique, I think, still in the Bay Area and in California and the nation as being a city-level institution that Ree also served on for a long time, where city entities, and you can correct me if I'm getting this wrong, city entities have to go proactively before the commission and present an affirmative case as to why they need to acquire a given technology for whatever reason. Often, very often, it's law enforcement, but sometimes it's like sanitation or something like that. And they have to, they're also required to come back before the commission after a year and say, hey, we bought a bunch of drones or we bought some Flock cameras or we did X or Y, and here was the result, and we can evaluate whether it was effective or not effective and has to be accountable to the commissioners. I'm curious, Brian, when you've been in conversations and meetings with law enforcement in Oakland, you know, I've lived in Oakland a long time. I think both of you live in Oakland. Oakland, you know, there is actual crime that actually happens in Oakland. What are the arguments that you hear from the police chief, from the brass that say, you know, we need, whether it's Flock or anything else, right? We need that to bring crime down in Oakland. What do they tell you?

Great, great question. And just to give some background information, yeah, I helped lead the effort to create the first municipal privacy commission in the world, to my knowledge, certainly in the country. And that was March of 2016 was our first meeting. I later, a few years later, helped San Diego stand up the second. That's all we've really got is two. Both of those commissions are nested within a surveillance technology vetting framework that the ACLU created a model for. If you've heard the acronym COPS, Community Control Over Policing Surveillance, there's little different flavors of it around the country now, but there's approximately 30 entities in the country that said, you know what, instead of putting technology out into the wild and then worrying about the problems later, let's turn that on its head, do an analysis up front like you would do in your own personal life before even making just a regular investment or certainly before you do something potentially controversial or dangerous. You'd want to evaluate the pros and the cons, and that is the standard in the surveillance ordinance, both up front and later when the annual report comes back with the data, that the benefits of using that technology have to outweigh the cost. The cost is, you know, the focus is certainly to protecting our civil liberties, but there is a taxpayer component. Some of this technology from a privacy perspective is benign. It also doesn't work, and we're spending millions of taxpayer dollars on it on strategies that are just demonstrably ineffective. I'm going, before I answer the meat of your question, as a longtime Oaklander, I'm going to ask you, does your police department respond to stolen vehicle alerts that they get from Flock in Oakland?

Yeah.

I'm going to guess no.

No.

The number one selling point for license plate readers in the old days, which they've been around since the late '70s, was to overcome the hiding in plain sight phenomenon to locate stolen vehicles. And in Oakland, we don't even bother to respond to those. So the messaging is always, you know, suspicious, you know, when they're coming to the commission. I always ask and get deep in. In Oakland, you know, we're obviously very sensitive to gun violence. I am not the type of activist to pretend there was not a crime spike during the pandemic. There was. But if you were paying attention in 2018 and 2019, you know, nationwide and certainly here in the Bay Area, we were at generational lows. And if you're paying attention today, you'll notice that we're going back to that generational low baseline. Now, the pro-mass-surveillance folks are going to say, yeah, Brian, it's because you put Flock everywhere. Well, here's what you might not know in Oakland after that big December 16 vote that we're presently litigating for the second time, I'm suing my city. Oakland never actually acquired the Flock technology they said they were going to go get. They never got the CCTV. They never got the extra software. They never got the extra drones. They're still using the license plate readers, but causation is always, you know, flimsy when we get here. Do I think license plate readers have ever had legitimate successes? Yes. Has CCTV footage ever been used to successfully prosecute violent criminals at trial? Yes. But as I mentioned earlier, that balancing question, when we really get into the data, anybody know, just shout it out. What is the historical hit rate for license plate readers?

Amen.

1%. That's just an alert. That isn't successful resolution. That just means I got some alert that tells me I need to go pay attention to something. One-tenth of 1%. Do you know how many plate scans your police department collected this last year?

This last year? I'm going to guess hundreds of thousands. Millions.