Recent press releases issued by Media Alliance. Sometimes we’ll post newspaper, radio and broadcast interviews here as well.
Originally published in the Emeryville Eye
Emeryville city staff presented their latest Parking Management draft plan to the public at the July 24th Council meeting. The item’s presentation did not commence until after 9 p.m. and lasted nearly two hours. The final adoption of the contentious plan was ultimately delayed by Council. Continue reading City Council Delays Decision On Citywide Parking Plan
By Lisa Rein. Originally published in Mondo 2000
These simple letter templates can compel the Police and Sheriff Departments of a given city to provide you with documentation regarding every type of surveillance equipment in existence for a given City (Police) and saCounty (Sheriff).
It’s a roundabout way of determining what surveillance equipment is being used on the public in a given city, but since it’s all we have, at least the #ASDPSP project will make it so much easier for journalists and the public to get their hands on this information.
In this third installment of our series, Tracy will help us understand more about what we found in Sacramento, and how do approach local politicians to put pressure on them to do something about it, by implementing a “surveillance policy framework.”
| Here’s are the first two interviews of this series:
Interview with Oakland Privacy’s Tracy Rosenberg On The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project |
Tracy Rosenberg, co-founder of the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project, explains #whatwefound in #Sacramento using our project’s letter templates and Muckrock, an online platform for filing public records requests. Continue reading Mondo 2000: The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project #ASDPSP – Reports Back: Here’s #WhatWeFound In Sacramento
By Dell Cameron and Bryan Menegus – originally published in Gizmodo
Embroiled cloud computing company Salesforce tried to sanitize its image through a hefty donation to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services—one of the highest-profile organizations resisting our draconian immigration policy. RAICES said no thanks—and at least six other high-profile organizations are now threatening to cut ties with the company.
Salesforce’s work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection—an agency that, along with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is chiefly associated with family separations—was first announced by the company in March, but meaningfully came to light last month when the company’s own employees pressured CEO Mark Benioff to cancel the contract. “Given the inhumane separation of children from their parents currently taking place at the border,” they wrote, “Salesforce should re-examine our contractual relationship with CBP and speak out against its practices.”
By Alexis Collins. Originally posted on Dissent Wire
The 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act is a law that will require technology corporations, such as Google and Facebook, to drastically alter their business models regarding data collection and privacy regulations. The legislation was unanimously approved by the state legislature on June 28 and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) the same day. The bill’s quick turn around resulted from pressures that legislators faced from an upcoming November ballot initiative, which would have created more stringent privacy rules. It will go into effect on January 1, 2020. Continue reading California Enacts Law Protecting Consumer Privacy, But There is Still a Ways to Go
by Chris Witteman and Tracy Rosenberg. Originally published in 48 Hills.
The last couple of weeks have not been good ones for those who see communications as a social justice issue.
The 2015 Open Internet Order, which ensured Internet neutrality and fairness, was finally stripped out of the law books per order of the Trump FCC, now run by a former lawyer for Verizon. San Francisco’s plan for a publicly-owned fiber broadband network was put on hold, and all indications are that Mayor Breed will likely bow to AT&T and Comcast by keeping it from resurfacing. And California’s own net neutrality bill, designed to reverse what Trump’s FCC had done, got ambushed by an upstart young Assemblymember. Continue reading Profiles in Corruption: How Telecoms Control the State Legislature
This week on CounterSpin: “As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border,” the global tech company declared in a statement. “Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II.” The same Microsoft bragged a few months ago about ICE’s use of its Azure cloud computing services to “accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants, though the post has since been altered to omit the phrase “we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud.”
The spotlight on the White House’s inhumane agenda on immigration and immigrants is exposing more than the devastatingly cruel practices in force at the border, but also the numerous big corporate and institutional players that are—often invisibly—enabling that agenda. And just like the agenda, the impact of these collaborations extends well beyond immigrant communities. We’ll talk about all that with organizer/advocate Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance and co-coordinator of Oakland Privacy.
Here is our statement on AB 375. Teaser. We don’t think it’s quite as great a development as some would have it.
Continue reading Media Alliance Statement on the Passage of AB 375
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