South San Francisco will get 31 new surveillance cameras to be placed along Highway 101 and Interstate 280 following an unanimous vote from the City Council approving the new law enforcement measure.

The cameras, called automated license plate readers, have been increasingly installed in the Bay Area with several Peninsula cities recently approving their use. By capturing images of passing vehicles and logging plate numbers, make and color, the technology can alert nearby officers if a vehicle suspected of being involved in a crime is spotted. Officers can also access data after the fact to aid in police work.

“This is the world we are living in,” Council member Mark Addiego said. “It’s horrifying when you read reports about how many people are coming into our city and quite frankly just raising hell.”

The city first looked into adding the cameras last year, citing an uptick in crime near hotels, particularly “smash-and-grab” car break-ins. Councilmember Eddie Flores also voiced concern regarding highway shootings, citing those that have occurred recently in Oakland.

The technology can be used in instances of crimes from homicide to catalytic converter theft but, unlike red light cameras, would not be used for traffic enforcement.

Despite agreeing the cameras would be useful in fighting crime, council members expressed some hesitation surrounding privacy. The move will establish South San Francisco as the city with the most cameras in the county, which currently has a total of 119.

“I come from a time when George Orwell’s 1984 was required reading,” Addiego said. “Apparently we’re there, and there’s something a little bit disconcerting about that.”

While storage practices differ in other cities, data captured by the cameras would be deleted after 30 days unless part of an investigation, and the city would allow data to be shared with other law enforcement agencies only if requested for an investigation. Sharing data with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be strictly barred.

Per a request from Flores, the program will undergo quarterly audits from an independent party to ensure compliance with the city’s rules. A webpage will also be established allowing members of the public to view the volume of data collected and how often it is being accessed by officers.

“We want to make sure that when we do this, we do it right and don’t produce unintended consequences that we might later regret,” Flores said.

According to City Manager Mike Futrell, the city’s guidelines mirror that of soon-to-be proposed legislation from state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, which aims to curtail ALPR use. Wiener had last year introduced legislation to require data deletion after 24 hours following a report that some agencies were storing data for up to five years and others had shared data with ICE.

Police Chief Scott Campbell noted the technology carries the benefit of allowing for “completely unbiased” police work, allowing officers to react to crime that has already been committed.

The cameras would likely be procured from ALPR operator Flock Safety, at an annual cost of $2,500 per camera, or $77,500 for the whole city. A one-time installation fee of $250 per camera would also be added in the first year.

The city’s immediate neighbors all have cameras installed with the exception of Brisbane. Daly City is the only city in the county where its cameras are affixed to police vehicles rather than fixed locations.

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San Francisco lawmakers are mulling a proposed law that would allow police to use private security cameras – think: those in residential doorbells, medical clinics, and retail shops – in real time for surveillance purposes.

The US city’s Rules Committee was due to vote on the draft ordinance on Monday, and this was pushed out by at least a week by the panel; its members indicated they would vote on an amended proposal July 18 at the soonest.

Matt Cagle, an attorney for the ACLU, called the proposal for a “power grab” by the SF cops. “It is rare for a police agency to seek to tap into privately owned cameras — I haven’t seen that in California before,” he told The Register. “This is the police seeking permission to proactively and affirmatively go out to private camera owners and say hey, can we live-stream your cameras? This is unprecedented in the city’s history.”

The proposal [PDF] expands San Francisco’s 2019 surveillance ordinance, which, among other things, requires the police to seek authorization from the public and elected officials before acquiring and deploying surveillance systems. So if it weren’t for this law, the cops could monitor citizens without the public even knowing.

The 2019 law also limited the cops’ access to and usage of real-time video footage from things like Internet-of-Things cameras and security CCTV, and the police department and mayor say this hamstrings their ability to fight crime.

The new proposal – championed by Mayor London Breed after November’s wild weekend of orchestrated burglaries and theft in the San Francisco Bay Area – would authorize the police department to use non-city-owned security cameras and camera networks to monitor live “significant events with public safety concerns” and ongoing felony or misdemeanor violations.

Currently, the police can only request historical footage from private cameras related to specific times and locations, rather than blanket monitoring. Mayor Breed also complained the police can only use real-time feeds in emergencies involving “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.”

If approved, the draft ordinance would also allow SFPD to collect historical video footage to help conduct criminal investigations and those related to officer misconduct. The draft law currently stands as the following, which indicates the cops can broadly ask for and/or get access to live real-time video streams:

Obtaining video footage from private security cameras has real public-safety benefits and would help officers arrest drug dealers and looters in real time, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott told lawmakers on Monday.

“What we’d like to do is be able to, in the appropriate circumstances, live monitor this activity as it’s occurring, so we can have a better chance of apprehending those committing those acts,” he said.

What we’d like to do is be able to, in the appropriate circumstances, live monitor this activity as it’s occurring

If the proposal successfully passes out of the committee during next week’s hearing, it still requires approval by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before it becomes law. And it faces significant public opposition in the meantime.

Cagle said San Francisco Supervisors have received “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of messages in just the last few days” from residents who oppose the proposal. And he pointed to a survey [PDF] of 372 likely voters, commissioned by the ACLU, that found 60 percent of San Franciscans oppose letting the police use private cameras to monitor people.

In a joint letter [PDF]17 organizations including the ACLU of Northern California, EFF, social justice center GLIDE, and the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, urged the Board of Supervisors to oppose or “significantly amend” the policy, which they say will “allow the SFPD to engage in unprecedented live surveillance” via thousands of private cameras.

It could allow SFPD to share video footage of, say, women visiting medical clinics that provide abortions with out-of-state prosecutors, or undocumented immigrants going to work with federal immigration agents, the organizations argued. We note that San Francisco is a sanctuary city.

“We are deeply concerned that SFPD’s proposal, if approved as written, threatens the privacy and safety of people going to work and school, accessing housing and seeking social services that make our city healthy and safe,” the letter said.

Opponents argue that the proposal would be used to criminalize Black and Brown people, activists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and Muslims. And if lawmakers don’t toss the surveillance expansion outright, the groups want the supes to at least set limits on what the cops can surveil, how long they can retain the data collected from private cameras, and with whom they can share the video footage .

As it’s currently written, the proposal would allow police to spy on First Amendment activities, such as political protests or religious gatherings, and keep all footage on file for as long as officers wanted.

“This concern is far from hypothetical: EFF and the ACLU of Northern California sued the city after SFPD used a business district’s camera network to live-monitor protests for eight days following the police murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020,” EFF policy analyst Matthew Guariglia wrote in a blog post.

Over the next week, lawmakers are expected to meet police and incorporate some changes into the surveillance proposal.

“Any time a government builds a surveillance system that collects information about people, that system can be vulnerable to misuse by other agency, and this allows the SFPD to share collected footage with very few limitations,” Cagle said. “What we are saying is, if we care about reproductive justice, if we care about stopping police violence, if we care about protecting activists, than we should do everything we can to boost protection rather than increasing surveillance.” ®

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Bloomberg/Contributor via Getty

Moveable explores the future of transportation, infrastructure, energy, and cities.

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while loading with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may offer one day, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”

The document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

“​​As companies continue to make public roadways their grounds testing for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are—rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies,” said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center . “Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, ring doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance.”

Waymo and Cruise are the two AV companies mentioned in the training document, although more have permits to test driverless cars in California (the state grants permission through the DMV, not the city). A Waymo spokesperson told Motherboard the company “requires law enforcement agencies who seek information and data from Waymo to follow valid legal processes in making such requests (eg secure and present a valid warrant, etc.). Our policy is to challenge, limit or reject requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overly broad.” The company spokesperson also says they do not collect data “to identify individuals.” A Cruise spokesperson told Motherboard, “We are working closely with law enforcement on our common goal of making our roads safer. We share footage and other information when we are served with a valid warrant or subpoena, and we may voluntarily share information if public safety is at risk. Cruise has always worked closely with the communities we serve to make transportation safer, cleaner, and more accessible and will continue to do so.”

SFPD’s use of AVs as mobile surveillance cameras follows the practices of the Chandler Police Department in Arizona, where Waymo has been testing AVs since 2017. But previous reports indicated these were rare instances involving traffic crimes like hit and runs. SPFD did not respond to a Motherboard email asking for more details on when and how often it sought footage from AVs.

The use of AVs as an investigative tool echoes how Ring, a doorbell and home security company owned by Amazon, became a key partner with law enforcement around the country by turning individual consumer products into a network of cameras with comprehensive coverage of American neighborhoods easily accessible to police. Police departments around the country use automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to track the movements of vehicles. The EFF has sued the SFPD for accessing business improvement district live cameras to spy on protestors.

Privacy advocates and researchers have long warned about the implications of increasingly sophisticated cars, but many of these warnings are essentially extensions of the privacy concerns of smartphones, where consumer technology tracks your movements and behavior, anonymizes it, and sells it to third parties in a manner that can be reverse engineered to identify individuals. They rarely imagine a scenario where cars on the road are constantly recording the world around them for later use by police departments.

It is the combination of using fixed location camera networks with rolling networks of autonomous vehicle cameras and data that scares privacy advocates most. “​​The holistic outcome of these combined moving and fixed networks is a threat that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Schwartz said. “Working together, [they can] more effectively turn our lives into open books.”

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South San Francisco could be the next town in the county to install vehicle security cameras along major traffic arteries in hopes of catching criminals and deterring future crimes, with the city council expressing its approval of the law enforcement tool this week.

Eddie Flores

On Tuesday, a plan was presented to the city council to place 25 cameras, called automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, near entrances and exits along Highway 101 and Interstate 380. The cameras would be able to collect license plates and compare them with a “hot list” of vehicles involved in crime, as well as using artificial intelligence to identify and record vehicle make, model and color.

The proposal to use the technology comes after a surge in crime along the city’s hotel corridor, particularly after “smash-and-grab” car break-ins, city officials said.

“I would definitely like to support them, support the hoteliers and the companies. I think that’s important, ”said Councilor Eddie Flores.

Neighboring cities like Daly City, Redwood City, San Bruno, San Mateo, and others have or are planning to install ALPRs that mount cameras either in fixed locations or on police vehicles.

Despite widespread agreement, council members raised several privacy concerns, including how long data is retained, who can access it, how secure it is, and what is collected.

According to Police Chief Scott Campbell, ALPRs “are not designed to take photos of people,” and the information they collect can only be viewed by law enforcement agencies. The data is stored on encrypted servers for 30 days before being transferred to a Northern California database, where it is stored for a year before being deleted, unless the vehicle is suspected of being involved in a crime, said he.

The whereabouts of vehicles on the “hot list” can be quickly disclosed to nearby officials, said Campbell, who mentioned cases where the technology helped with an arrest.

“The good thing about this technology is that it is completely impartial, it only warns of vehicles that have been involved in crime, and officers have to review this information to make sure the camera isn’t inadvertently wrongly registered,” said Campbell . “It enables the officers to react to this information and to investigate crimes that have already been committed.”

Any outside agency, including Homeland Security or the CIA, would have to request data and it would be up to the city to grant access, he said. And depending on county and state regulations, immigration and customs enforcement would be strictly prohibited, he said.

The cameras would be used in crime cases from killing to catalytic converter theft, but not in “minor crimes,” and unlike red light cameras, they would not be used for monitoring traffic, Campbell said.

Although no cost estimates were provided for South San Francisco, Atherton, who was considering installing cameras in 2019, estimated the cost to be between $ 35,000 and $ 65,000 to equip an intersection with two cameras, excluding maintenance and licensing fees the required software. Foster City, where 20 cameras were recently approved, estimates the annual cost of running its program at $ 50,000.

Piedmont, where five ALPRs are installed, has created a portal for public access to the data collected by the system. It said the cameras collected data on 47,000 cars last month, 79 of which were classified as suspicious of criminals, and 26 of those cars were “searched”.

The cameras, which are increasingly used not only on the peninsula, have been carefully scrutinized by some state legislators who deal with data protection.

Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, drafted a law that year to tighten the ALPR regulations. In addition to restricting the exchange of data, the law, which has been put on hold, would also stipulate the deletion of the recorded data within 24 hours. A state audit commissioned by Wiener found that last year authorities in the country who used the cameras shared data with the police across the country and kept data for more than five years.

Police in Pasadena and Long Beach were found to have shared data collected by ALPR with ICE last year, despite the state protection law and despite the fact that police have made an express commitment not to do so, according to Wiener’s office.

Flores asked city officials to provide additional evidence that if cameras were installed, the data the city was collecting would not be unwittingly shared with anyone. Councilor Buenaflor Nicolas asked whether the companies responsible for keeping the data had ever breached the data and how the city would be liable in this case.

Campbell said he was not aware of any violations and would look into the liability issue.

Further answers to the Council’s questions and additional information will be presented in a public meeting at a later date.

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A creepy handyman admitted hiding cameras in bathrooms in homes in Paramus and Wayne, New Jersey, police said.

Romeo Sanchez, 47, of West New York, was arrested on September 17 for invasion of privacy by Paramus police after a homeowner who hired him to install a window discovered a suspicious device in her bathroom in late August reported WABC.

The device, which police said was inserted into a bathroom wall, was later classified as a micro-camera with a memory card, the station reports.

The homeowner saw the device plugged into an electrical outlet in the bathroom and knew it was “not hers,” Paramus police officer Mark Pinajian told CBS New York.

The victim then saw clips on the device showing herself and her bathroom as well as another location, Pinajian said.

Investigators set out to track down Sanchez, a married father, who admitted to having the camera installed in the Paramus house – and claimed he intended to retrieve her when he returned to finish work, police said With.

The other location pictured on camera was a bathroom in a house in Wayne where Sanchez was also being hired for a job, police said.

No children were present in either house and there is no evidence that Sanchez distributed the video, CBS New York reported.

“As far as we can see, he’s not a licensed contractor,” said Pinajian. “He’s like a handyman doing little things and he’s been referred to other people. That’s how he got into business. “

Investigators are investigating Wayne’s home there, Paramus police said. Wayne police have not returned a message asking for comment on the case, NorthJersey.com reported.

Sanchez, who served up to a year in prison, has been released pending a trial, reports NJ.com.

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