oakland

Oakland Neighbors Increasingly Use Surveillance Cameras For Security

Will Kane The motion-activated surveillance camera outside Jesper Jurcenoks’ home in the Oakland hills takes some 12,000 pictures a day. Every car, motorcycle, delivery truck, police car, bicyclist, pedestrian and deer that enters his isolated street off Skyline Boulevard gets photographed. Four times a second. Day and night. When they arrive and when they leave, time-stamped and stored on a server for 60 days. The two cameras, one at each entrance of Jurcenoks’ looping street, form a virtual wall around the neighborhood, he said. For years, Oakland residents have built fences or installed security cameras on their homes because they were fed up with burglaries and auto break-ins. Some neighborhoods hired private security guards to patrol their streets. Now they’re becoming more aggressive in their efforts to fight back. In growing numbers, residents are forming neighborhood groups and spending thousands of dollars on cameras that can monitor the perimeter of entire blocks. They don’t merely want to protect their homes. They want to catch anyone intent on criminal behavior. “We will not a let a criminal enter or leave our neighborhood undetected,” Jurcenoks said. “We’re not saying we can stop the crime. We want to make sure we have a photograph.” Trying to avoid  abuse Seven areas across the city have signed up for a neighborhood-wide surveillance system, and dozens more are interested, said Jurcenoks, the founder of  Neighborhood Guard , a nonprofit that helps owners set up and install such systems. He installed his neighborhood’s system in 2012, costing the neighborhood association $2,000 for each […]

Oakland Privacy Activists Threaten To Sue The City To Stop Surveillance Project

Captain Darren Allison addressed the League of Women Voters forum last week on the DAC. A coalition of activists opposed to the construction of Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center say they’re ready to take the city to court to stop the controversial surveillance project. Brian Hofer, a lawyer working with the Oakland Privacy Working Group, is delivering a letter to Mayor Jean Quan, the city council, the city administrator, and the city attorney today. The letter states that the group will "seek judicial relief" to halt the project. Hofer and his clients claim that the planned contractor to carry out work on Phase 2 of the DAC, Schneider Electric, is also a nuclear weapons contractor, and that hiring the company would violate Oakland’s Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Ordinance. The Express reported on November 19, 2013 that all of the contractors under consideration for the contract to build the DAC were linked to nuclear weapons work , but that Schneider Electric seemed to have only indirect contracts, providing security cameras to a Navy nuclear weapons facility. Since then the Oakland Privacy Working Group uncovered detailed evidence of what they say is Schneider Electric’s close work with military and US Energy Department agencies that design, build, and deploy nuclear weapons systems. The letter delivered to the city today includes a photocopy of Schneider Electric marketing materials in which the company describes itself as a "global specialist" in "weapon launching control system for nuclear submarines," and "nuclear weapons handling systems." The activists have […]