Founded in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the Citizens Privacy Coalition (CPC) exists to watch the watchers and empower the Bay Area. As our name implies, we are a grassroots, volunteer-run watch dog coalition that aims to combat the lack of oversight and awareness surrounding the state of government and corporate surveillance in the heart of Silicon Valley using the methods outlined below:
We probe city, county, and federal government offices through public records requests to determine techniques and funding behind surveillance efforts anywhere in the county. We also attend public meetings in which surveillance issues are discussed to stay up-to-date with ongoing efforts. We are interested in learning about any and all surveillance efforts deployed in the county, but particularly in facial recognition, drone surveillance, and the surveillance of activists, journalists, and immigrants — including efforts from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the county.
We are currently working on several investigations and hope to publish them soon.
We assist government officials in the drafting and passing laws that promote oversight and transparency into surveillance tactics and spending. We do this by attending public meetings and expressing our opinions, as well as meeting with government officials individually.
A more detailed plan describing our efforts will become available in the near future. If you would like to volunteer to help in your city town, please contact us .
We train activists, journalists, and the public — especially members of under represented communities — in anti-surveillance techniques. There is strong evidence that both government and corporate surveillance disproportionately affects those from under represented communities. Thus, we aim to empower those by enabling them to evade surveillance while simultaneously living their lives and, if they so choose, fight for their liberation. The majority of our curriculum is derived from the Electronic Frontier Foundation ’s Surveillance Self-Defense project .