Oakland City Council unanimously passed the city’s “Rules for Surveillance”, the country’s most stringent police surveillance oversight law.
The law provides for a “Privacy Advisory Commission” and directs police to produce an annual report with fine-grained details of how surveillance technology was used. The Privacy Advisory Commission must be notified any time the city and its police seek funding or appropriations to procure any new surveillance technology. The city is also barred from entering into nondisclosure agreements with surveillance technology providers that would impair this transparency – a key provision, doubtless inspired by the Harris Corporation’s practice of binding police departments to secrecy over its Stingray cellphone spying devices, a bizarre attempt to thwart transparency that culminated with Federal agents raiding local police departments to seize evidence before it could be introduced in open court, which would have revealed the existence and characteristics of Stingray devices.
