The short answer is because they can. They can have a commission about anything they want. From the point of view of an overweening government that wants to limit the ability of the Oakland Police Department, this is convenient. Oakland government is not really interested in protecting your privacy. What does “privacy” even mean anymore, in an era where everything you do on your computer is memorialized in cookies, and besides, you’re constantly telling the entire world about everything you do on social media because, well, you think the world cares about what vape flavor you smoke.
Clue: It doesn’t.
What is the Privacy Advisory Commission? What does it purport to do? From their mission statement: The PAC provides “advice to the City of Oakland on best practices to protect Oaklanders' privacy rights in connection with the City's purchase and use of surveillance equipment and other technology that collects or stores our data.” It was established, by fiat of the City Council, on Jan. 19, 2016, by a 7-1 vote of the Council. Libby Schaaf was then Mayor. There wasn’t a whole lot of debate about it; it just seemed like a nice thing to do, at a time when technology was rapidly advancing. At the time, Oakland was planning on developing a “domain awareness center” (DAC) to protect the Port of Oakland from terrorism; the DAC thus was an outgrowth of the war on terror. It would have utilized all the latest surveillance technology—facial recognition, automated license plate readers, surveillance cameras, drones, gunfire detection systems—known to be effective in fighting crime. In most other cities, DAC would have been a no-brainer. But not in Oakland, where almost immediately a bunch of lawyers and local activists, organized as Oakland Privacy, protested that this would violate everyone’s civil liberties.
Now, normally, DAC would have passed into law quietly and uncontroversially. But this being Oakland—a city of activists—Oakland Privacy, with their extensive network of nonprofits, employed all their resources to fight against it. The City Council—heavily dependent on union money to get re-elected-- hastened to do Oakland Privacy’s bidding, and the DAC was heavily watered down. But it still exists, and one of its goals is to reduce the technology that OPD depends on to help it fight crime. In this, the Privacy Advisory Commission echoes the efforts of other commissions, such as the Police Commission, to control and limit the power of the Oakland Police Department. Together with a bevy of other anti-police boards and commissions, the Privacy Advisory Commission’s volunteers see themselves as the vanguard of the citizen’s right to protect himself from police overreach. If you ever have the chance, watch a broadcast of a Privacy Advisory Commission meeting on KTOP, Oakland’s public TV station. It’s amusing to see these nonentities pretending to do vital public service when in fact they’re useless bureaucrats.
In whose interests does the Privacy Advisory Commission exist? The unions, of course. The criminals, of course; they don’t want to get caught. Yours or mine? Not so much. It seems to me to be a matter of common sense that we should have as many tools as possible to help us catch the bad guys. This is not an abstraction: it’s a very real fact that if someone is out there bipping or mugging or using a vehicle to break into an ATM, these technologies are of immense benefit to the police. Who would be against that?
But here comes the Oakland Privacy Commission. They’re against it, “defending the right to privacy,” even as they protect the right of criminals to do their thing. Let’s recognize, upfront, that there’s always been a tension between law enforcement and citizen privacy. The Founders didn’t want His Majesty’s soldiers breaking down peoples’ doors to find spies and so they adopted the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” This is a very fine thing. But the Fourth Amendment was written in a very different time from ours. These days, the primary threat to us comes, not from our own government, and certainly not from the British Empire, but from criminals in our midst, who seem to feel they’ve been granted immunity by progressive government from being prosecuted for breaking the law. I am not fearful of the police violating my privacy. I am fearful of thugs hurting me, and I depend on the police to protect me from them. Which only adds to my wonderment why so-called “privacy advocates” are so dead-set against technologies that actually work in fighting crime.
What I’d like to see in Oakland is intolerance not to the use of effective technology, but a dedicated campaign against thugs. Let’s use anything and everything in our power to stop them and throw them in jail and keep them there. They know they’ll be protected, to a certain extent, from the law, by idiots like Pamela Price and the Privacy Advisory Commission. They know they can get away with a lot of crap simply because there are ideologues running our affairs who prefer to posture as “privacy advocates” instead of actually protecting public safety. Next time you see a “privacy advocate” on TV, realize you’re looking at a loser who’s hoping to feather his nest as the City raises taxes to hire more bureaucrats.
Have a great weekend! Back on Monday.
Steve Heimoff