SAN FRANCISCO–San Francisco police violated the city’s surveillance technology law by tapping into a private surveillance camera network to spy on demonstrators protesting the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California (ACLU) told a state appeals court in a brief filed Monday.
San Francisco’s ordinance requires police to get the Board of Supervisors’ permission before acquiring or borrowing surveillance technology. But the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) obtained no such permission before officers monitored the Union Square Business Improvement District’s network of more than 300 cameras for eight days during the protests.