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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The "Surveillance and Community Safety Ordinance" unanimously passed out of Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission on Thursday night, formally moving it to the Oakland City Council. Passage of the ordinance was roundly applauded by local civil liberties advocates and legal scholars, some of whom spoke at the meeting.

"You are ahead of most of your peers across the country, and you are paving the way for them," Nuala O'Connor, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group based in Washington, DC, told the assembled commission. (O'Connor was also the first chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security.)

The draft ordinance may still be subject to minor changes before being adopted by the city council, particularly as to how it will be enforced.

[...] For years, American cities have often accepted federal, state, or regional grant money to obtain various surveillance equipment for their local law enforcement agencies. Lawmakers often don't ask questions as to how and in what circumstances such gear will be used, neither do they typically evaluate after the fact whether those tools have been actually effective in reducing crime.

[Continues...]

As specifically defined under the proposed law, such a report must contain a slew of information, including:

a) A description of how the surveillance technology was used, including the quantity of data gathered or analyzed by the technology;

b) Whether and how often data acquired through the use of the surveillance technology was shared with outside entities, the name of any recipient entity, the type(s) of data disclosed, under what legal standard(s) the information was disclosed, and the justification for the disclosure(s);

c) Where applicable, a breakdown of what physical objects the surveillance technology software was installed upon; for surveillance technology software, a breakdown of what data sources the surveillance technology was applied to;

d) Where applicable, a breakdown of where the surveillance technology was deployed geographically, by individual census tract as defined in the relevant year by the United States Census Bureau;

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission