Please help local activists and former Occupiers with the expenses involved in attending this year’s Left Forum in NYC (5/20/16 – 5/22/16) where they will share their story with others in an effort to empower others to fight big surveillance in their own cities and towns across America.
The Domain Awareness Center (DAC) was a planned surveillance hub which aimed to integrate public and private cameras and sensors all over the City of Oakland into one $11,000,000 mass surveillance system. After mounting opposition to the DAC in 2013 and 2014, catalyzed by the Oakland Privacy Working Group, the Oakland City Council voted on March 4, 2014 to restrict the DAC to operate solely within the Port of Oakland. It also removed citywide ShotSpotter (a gunshot detection system theoretically capable of overhearing conversations) and city traffic cameras from the system, and required any further expansion or information-sharing decisions to come before the Council for approval.
Integrated, mass surveillance is highly controversial, and not only in Oakland: many US cities, and other cities worldwide. Now the surveillance resistance movement that stood down the DAC in Oakland has the opportunity empower others by bringing the story of the fight to the Left Forum in NYC this May.
We fought against state surveillance, and won a big victory. (And we continue to fight, now with BART!) Now the world needs to know! Our presentation was very well received at RightsCon in San Francisco, but it takes more than a bridge toll or a BART fare to get to New York City from Oakland. Left Forum is one of the premier activist conferences in the US; our panel has been approved, we just need a little help making sure we can “make it there.”
Check out the panel here: http://www.leftforum.org/content/rise-big-surveillance-how-oakland-pushed-back-and-won
You can donate here.
Thanks!
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