Government Surveillance and Oakland, CA's Domain Awareness Center

Your Playlist:

Description

The Oakland Domain Awareness Center (DAC) began as a project to surveil the city's port, but the mandate soon expanded with a $10.9 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security to expand surveillance to the entire city, with plans to run CCTV cameras, license plate scanners, and public databases into the center. The DAC represents just one of 73 DHS-funded fusion centers across the country, but it was the first with the ambition to run both port and city surveillance into a single center, leading Brian Hofer, an attorney affiliated with the Oakland Privacy Working Group, an association of Oakland residents fighting against the DAC, to dub it the first "NSA municipal outpost." In this interview, Hofer talks about the DAC and what other cities across the nation might learn from Oakland's fight for privacy.