Archive

Santa Cruz Mayor Cummings and Police Chief Mills are hosting an online community meeting to discuss police policies in the wake of national protests over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others at the hands of the police. Read More

Together, we are achieving important victories against secret and dangerous surveillance. We are raising awareness of how surveillance technology like drones, stingrays, and facial recognition exacerbate discriminatory policing, suppress dissent, and facilitate harm to immigrants and people of color. We are building the political coalitions and power essential to win surveillance reform and durabl... Read More

On Wednesday, the Santa Cruz Public Safety Committee voted to approve an ordinance that would bring oversight to government use of surveillance technology, prohibit government use of facial recognition, and ban government use of predictive policing technology. Read More

SACRAMENTO — A partial company list published today in an expose by Buzzfeed confirms that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and at least one California law enforcement agency have teamed up with Clearview AI to run people’s faces against the company’s shadily-assembled database of billions of photos. In fact, according to Buzzfeed, ICE agents have run more than 8,000 searches from about 60 acco... Read More

In the last few weeks, a company called Clearview has been in the news for marketing a reckless and invasive facial recognition tool to law enforcement. The company claims the tool can identify people in billions of photos nearly instantaneously. And Exhibit A in support of their claim to law enforcement that their app is accurate? An “accuracy test” that Clearview boasts was modeled on the ACLU’s... Read More

The state of California just made it clear: Face recognition surveillance isn’t inevitable. We can — and should — fight hard to protect our communities from this dystopian technology. Building on San Francisco’s first-of-its-kind ban on government face recognition, California this week enacted a landmark law that blocks police from using body cameras for spying on the public. The state-wide law... Read More

SACRAMENTO — Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed landmark legislation making California the largest state in the country to block law enforcement agencies from using facial recognition and other biometric tracking technology in connection with officer body cameras. Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) introduced AB 1215: The Body Camera Accountability Act earlier this year in l... Read More

SACRAMENTO–The California Legislature today sent State Assemblymember Phil Ting’s Body Camera Accountability Act (AB 1215) to Governor Newsom, positioning California to become the largest state in the country to block law enforcement agencies from adding facial recognition software to officer-worn body cameras. In response to the bill’s passage, Matt Cagle, Technology and Civil Liberties Attorn... Read More

SACRAMENTO — Today, the California Senate passed AB 1215: The Body Camera Accountability Act, legislation to block law enforcement agencies from using facial recognition surveillance against Californians on officer-worn body cameras. Introduced by Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), AB 1215 passed the Senate just weeks after the ACLU released test results showing that facial recognition so... Read More

SACRAMENTO — After putting facial recognition technology to the test using photos of all 120 members of the State Legislature, the American Civil Liberties Union of California released results that further support the need for AB 1215 by Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), which bans facial recognition in police body cameras. Read More