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San Francisco is considering whether to strengthen or roll back civil rights protections against government surveillance. Nearly three years ago, EFF joined a coalition of community groups to support the city’s passage of the Surveillance Technology Ordinance, which bans government use of facial recognition technology and empowers the Board of Supervisors, with public input, to decide whether or not city agencies may acquire and use other surveillance tech.
A year later, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) violated the landmark Ordinance by using a large non-city surveillance camera network to spy on racial justice protests without Board approval. Now, the SFPD and Mayor London Breed are stoking fears about crime in order to gut the Ordinance’s community control provisions with a ballot measure that would create broad exceptions for the police. Several Supervisors have put forward a competing ballot measure to strengthen that community control and the ban on government use of facial recognition technology.
EFF supports the Supervisors’ measure, and opposes the police and Mayor’s measure that would weaken transparency and oversight of police surveillance. The measures can be withdrawn until early March—otherwise, they will go to a city-wide vote in June.
This fight is not just for the civil liberties of San Franciscans, but to protect the Black-led racial justice movement across the country from police backlash. A chief lesson from the protests following the police murder of George Floyd is that communities across the country must have the right to democratically decide how to handle complicated issues of civil liberties, crime, and public safety. San Francisco’s Surveillance Technology Ordinance protects that right and allows
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Read the original article: San Francisco Should Strengthen, Not Gut, Surveillance Technology Ordinance