The Times reports on the appeal of the system to law enforcement:
For law enforcement, data mining is a big step toward more complete intelligence gathering. The police have traditionally made arrests based on small bits of data — witness testimony, logs of license plate readers, footage from a surveillance camera perched above a bank machine. The new capacity to collect and sift through all that information gives the authorities a much broader view of the people they are investigating.
Privacy advocates are not enthusiastic about this development:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California described the program as “warrantless surveillance” and said “the city would be able to collect and stockpile comprehensive information about Oakland residents who have engaged in no wrongdoing.”
And then there are those who see this development as simply another part of life in a world of expanding technological capabilities:
Steve Spiker, research and technology director at the Urban Strategies Council, an Oakland nonprofit organization that has examined the effectiveness of police technology tools, said he was uncomfortable with city officials knowing so much about his movements. But, he said, there is already so much public data that it makes sense to enable government officials to collect and analyze it for the public good.
I think that more surveillance technology is not necessarily a bad thing (but see: Neil M. Richards, The Dangers of Surveillance, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 1934 (2013) for an interesting and extremely readable account of the inherent harms of increased surveillance). I do think that implementing expanded surveillance programs can be done in a manner that causes a great deal of harm.
Take, for example, the early statement in the article about the scope of Oakland's planned surveillance program, that it "will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town — from gunshot-detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city’s upscale hills."
I am less than optimistic about the program being spread across the city in such a broad, egalitarian manner. I think it is far more likely that surveillance programs will be ramped up in neighborhoods that have the highest crime rates. While license plate readers on police cars that augment already-used speed radars will be used in the affluent parts of town, I would expect that most of the cameras and permanent scanning equipment will be placed in "high-crime" areas -- areas that tend to be the homes of racial minorities and lower-income people. Authorities will indeed have more information about people's lives, but this information will likely consist of a disproportionate amount of people living in these high-crime areas.
I could be wrong about this, since I have not seen the precise details of the proposed surveillance program (although a 2008 report (available for download here) from "Phase 1" of the project mentions a focus on schools and "hot spots,"). It is possible that the city will implement its security program in a broad manner that subjects areas of the city to equal scrutiny. But I have my doubts, since law enforcement officials and the administration will likely want to focus surveillance efforts on areas with the highest crime rates in an attempt to decrease the city's crime statistics.
Whatever the effectiveness of this technique may be, it will come with the side effect of centralizing enforcement efforts in these areas, and will place a disproportionate amount of any resulting privacy invasions on those who live in these areas. I am not saying that the city should abandon the surveillance program altogether, but I would certainly argue that this is a cost that needs to be minimized, or at least taken into account.
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