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Brian Hofer

Featured Work

News & Commentary
Blue lights in Oakland plaza at night spell out STOP THE SPY CENTER
  • Privacy and Technology

How the Fight to Stop Oakland's Domain Awareness Center Laid the Groundwork for the Oakland Privacy Commission

When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA in 2013, I didn’t yet know that my own city of Oakland had futuristic surveillance problems of our own. Oakland had quietly embarked on a path towards building a city-wide surveillance network called the Domain Awareness Center (DAC), comprised of over 700 cameras throughout schools and public housing, facial recognition software, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and 300 terabytes of storage for all the data they anticipated collecting on Oakland residents.