I attended the BART board meeting in Oakland this morning, which packed the room and necessitated an overflow room set up to watch the proceedings remotely. The vast majority of attendees appeared to be there because of the proposal from transit agency management to expand camera surveillance, “harden” stations to make them more resistant to fare evasion, add more police, ban panhandling, and other changes, and in a refreshing demonstration that many on the left do still care about civil liberties, those who were not down with these authoritarian moves outnumbered opponents by probably around 10:1.
Here are a few comments from the Oakland Privacy group list: