Oakland Privacy: Fighting Against the Surveillance State

We fight against spy drones, facial recognition, tracking equipment and online tracking, police body camera secrecy, anti-transparency laws, and requirements for “backdoors” to cellphones; we oppose “pre-crime” and “thought-crime,” —  to list just a few invasions of our privacy by all levels of Government, and attempts to hide what government officials, employees and agencies are doing.

We draft and push for privacy legislation for City Councils, at the County level, and in Sacramento. We advocate in op-eds and in the streets. We pursue lawsuits as necessary to protect our rights. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and believe no one is illegal.

Check out some of what we worked on in 2023 (with links to 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019).

Oakland Privacy originally came together in 2013 to fight against the Domain Awareness Center, Oakland’s citywide networked mass surveillance hub. OP was instrumental in stopping the DAC from becoming a city-wide spying network.  We helped fight and in 2018 we helped win the fight against Urban Shield.

Our major projects currently include local legislation to regulate state surveillance (we got the strongest surveillance regulation ordinance in the country passed in Oakland!), supporting and opposing state legislation as appropriate, battling mass surveillance in the form of facial recognition and other analytics, mass aerial surveillance, ubiquitous license plate readers,  online tracking and ID requirements,  street surveillance, and fighting to ensure local governments adhere to State privacy and transparency regulations.

On September 12th, 2019 we were presented with a Barlow Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for our work, and on March 16th, 2021 the James Madison Freedom of Information Award by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists.

If you are interested in joining the Oakland Privacy email listserv, coming to a meeting, or have questions, send an email to:

contact@oaklandprivacy.org Check out our website: http://oaklandprivacy.org/ Follow us on twitter: @oaklandprivacy, and/or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@oaklandprivacy