The City Council will consider the plan Tuesday as part of a bid to reduce the cost of replacing existing streetlamps with more energy-efficient LED lights. But the city manager’s office is raising concerns and Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilman Donald Rocha are recommending delaying the discussion for a week.
“We strongly oppose the web of street-level surveillance that is rapidly spreading across our urban landscapes,” said Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group that fights for privacy protections, about the proposal. “It invades privacy, chills free speech and disparately burdens communities of color and poor people.”
San Jose has 64,400 streetlamps across the city. In an effort to go green, the city in 2008 began using city and federal funds to convert 24,000 lights to LEDs, but estimated it would cost $36.7 million to switch out the remaining 40,000 lights with controller units to dim the lights.
San Jose in 2015 allowed Philips Lighting to install 50 SmartPoles — which have wireless technology built into the poles for cellphone companies to lease — in exchange for converting 750 streetlights to LEDs.
But San Jose had to find a way to pay for upgrading the remaining lamps. The city put out a bid asking companies to propose ways they would “use the city’s real estate assets in exchange for installing streetlights or providing revenue that could be used to pay for the lights.”
Of the four finalists, Siemens won the bidding process, though its installation costs were $2 million more than Philips, which has since protested the decision twice.
As part of Siemens’ proposal to install LED lights, the company said it would partner with anyCOMM, a Sacramento County tech company, to install “controller units” that can accommodate up to four video cameras on each streetlamp — with 24/7 digital recording capabilities and audio sensors. The city staff report says the cameras could help combat crime, solve investigations and deter illegal dumping and graffiti.
anyCOMM chief executive Rob Praske couldn’t be reached for comment. And when asked about the cameras, Siemens’ spokeswoman, Amanda Naiman, said, “We can’t comment on another company’s technology.”
anyCOMM has deployed similar technology in cities like Martinez, Pacheco and Elk Grove. San Jose in 2015 worked with anyCOMM on a pilot program to install 166 Wi-Fi devices — without video cameras — atop streetlamps. It has only installed five so far, city officials said.
But while San Jose prides itself as a “smart city” that deploys new technology, it doesn’t have privacy policies related to the surveillance equipment. It’s unclear where the company would store the recordings, how long they’d be kept or who could access them.
That’s one of the reasons Assistant City Manager Dave Sykes recommended rejecting the proposal and rebidding the LED conversion project. Another reason is that the street poles can be used for broadband capabilities, making them a much more valuable resource, Sykes said.
“It feels like we put the cart before the horse,” Sykes said. “We realized we have more work to do to ensure our residents are ready for this technology. We want to engage the community and policy makers on how we move this technology forward before we enter into an agreement with someone to deploy this technology.”
Councilman Johnny Khamis urged his council colleagues to prioritize adopting a data use and retention policy earlier this year — but it didn’t move forward. With the growth of surveillance technology, Khamis said in his proposal, “we must also ensure that we safeguard the civil rights and civil liberties of the public.”
On Friday, he recommended disabling video capabilities from the lamps that face people’s homes.
But civil rights groups say that may not be enough, and worry the recording devices could gather and store information about how residents live their lives in public places. According to the Siemens proposal, anyCOMM would own the data collected by its controller units and store it on its servers. The company has the “ability to sell data and would share some portion of revenues with the city.”
“Individuals who are doing nothing wrong will be under surveillance in public,” said Chris Conley, a policy attorney for ACLU of Northern California. “The company would be the one who retains and holds this information — is there any limits on what they can do with it? Can they sell it to marketers and advertisers? There are lots of ways the information can be used.”
©2017 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
