City council to vote on providing more surveillance technology transparency in Portland

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - An effort to help people in Portland understand how and where the city’s surveillance technology is being used will go to the city council on Wednesday. The city council will hear public testimony and vote on the resolution.

Those in support of the resolution being proposed said this policy would create transparency and procedures for understanding surveillance across the city.

In Portland, like many other major cities, surveillance technology is a part of everyday life.

“Including things like cameras, traffic cameras, automatic license plate readers that can create database of movement of specific vehicles,” Lia Holland, spokesperson for Fight for the Future, said.

The City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability said in a two-year public engagement process, hundreds of Portlanders have participated and helped to inform a surveillance technology ordinance being proposed to the city council on Wednesday.

A coalition of dozens of organizations that support this resolution said this is a step in the right direction for transparency when it comes to surveillance around the city.

“This ordinance proposes to create an inventory of all the surveillance tech the city uses. We don’t have one right now. There’s no list of all the technologies the City of Portland is using,” Holland said.

And said it would also help the public understand where the data ends up.

“Without any sort of insight whatsoever into what’s done with that data in Portland right now, we don’t know if that data is being sold off to third-party data brokers,” Holland said.

And said it would enable Smart City PDX to help the city assess ongoing and new technologies in more responsible ways.

“Start developing frameworks for what an equitable and acquisitions process should be for new surveillance technologies,” Holland said.

ACLU of Oregon said this resolution is critical in developing trust between residents and the city.

“Nobody wants to walk around the City of Portland feeling like big brother is lurking over their shoulder at every turn,” Holland said.

The city said the public is invited to speak in person via Zoom or at City Hall on Wednesday. The meeting starts at 2 p.m.

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