The Oversight Bloc

Lilly Irani, Khalid Alexander

How community organizers and tech workers joined forces to rein in San Diego’s surveillance state.

In July 2019, one of us, Khalid Alexander, received a tip from a fellow San Diego community organizer. “You should be paying attention to the city’s new streetlights.” The message continued, “Apparently, they have cameras attached to them.” Alexander lived in one of the many predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods in San Diego that was under constant police surveillance, including by “gang suppression units” that watch, harass, and document residents. He feared that streetlights with cameras on them could supercharge these efforts.

Two weeks later, Alexander showed up at a public library for a forum about the streetlights program (which the city named the Smart Streetlights Program). The only other people at the meeting were the presenters: a police captain, a city staffer, and an executive from General Electric (GE), the company that produced the new streetlights. Their presentation began with an infomercial for the technology, a city-wide network of thousands of LED streetlights mounted with cameras that recorded video around-the-clock. The footage was uploaded to the cloud, where city agencies could use software to count cars, pedestrians, and who knows what else. According to the police captain, the smart streetlights were already being used to solve crimes.

[...]

Continua qui: https://logicmag.io/beacons/the-oversight-bloc/