I read the Staff report and supplement concerning this matter. I was on the one hand shocked when I first read about the issue—and not from my city or its staff or council, but from the newspaper. A first mistake in this chain of belated disclosure FWIW not even acknowledged—get in front of it. You were not. Where was—and is—the communication City wide, both from the administration and our leaders? Even financial and healthcare entities—neither of them models of good communication--recognize both the need and the legal consequences of not doing so for privacy-based information.
But having learned of it, was I surprised? Frankly, no. I was among the few voices in the wind who were ignored saying to council in advance at public meetings around cameras in general that this was all a bad idea to start with. Sure enough…
Preliminarily, I also have to both laugh and cry at what I view as basically ineptitude in not aligning what the city was doing to the specific advice the State Attorney General was providing by 2023. Other than the memos to council mentioning this factually, there is also no disclosure in those memos about how and why this happened, what specifically was changed to avoid it in the future, and what the consequences were. Lip service was paid to transparency, but my own view is this approach of not providing full disclosure around why advice at the top State level was not followed is not transparent, sufficient nor acceptable. Those strike me as top management issues too—both the miss and the lack of sufficient training and understanding of realm of likely possibilities to begin with. All I can get from the memos is some vague sense that because Menlo Park was only receiving but not providing data initially, it should be okay. That is naïve just for starters. And, as a most basic comparison using law enforcement and security “1” analogies, if you do not guard a physical door initially because it does not matter or nothing inside is valuable, and you later do need to guard the door or access point, don’t you then need to ALSO check the premises after securing the door? Seems basic to me. And here, a fail. Let’s acknowledge that directly and provide more disclosure.
Having read the Staff report, what I continue to be more amazed by is the big picture blindness in Menlo Park—and government agencies in general—to what is going on at our highest level of government. You read it every day in the news and presumably are concerned about it. Yet here, all that outside data that is essentially screaming “Warning, Will Robinson!” is completely disconnected. For example, we are on the cusp of an Administration about to harvest the most private of Social Security data. We had Elon Musk and crew running rampant for months in federal data systems and downloading huge numbers of terabytes to who knows what devices that ended up who knows where. We have an almost out of control Dept of Homeland Security routinely flaunting what most think are accepted norms if not the law.
Do I have any confidence as a result “normal” rules of conduct or “normal” expectations about functioning of federal government agencies can be relied upon in using data like this? Including very specifically all matter of Federal law enforcement agencies to be clear? Of course not! So, your data sounds like it was pilfered by Houston and some other frankly hole in the wall entity. Sounds like proverbial “moles” to me. You laugh? I hope not. I cry at the naivete. And that was just the quasi “bush league hiding in plain sight” play that was missed. What about the elephant behind the curtain? Read on.
Yet bigger picture--which I have spoken to prior councils about directly and was seemingly brushed off both by council and police administration. The entire memo itself assumes there is an underlying system of laws, protections, prohibitions, and the like with respect to use and retention of data. Given the events of the 2026 in National realms, how in the world can you even make or rely on an assumption like that? I most certainly would not. That you seem to fail to recognize it in any way in the materials is yet more amazing!
Let’s go on to more specifics, which I cautioned you about in my prior public comments, and continue to fully think and believe today. Do some research if needed. These memos and related policies focus on data access and retention. As you missed in my prior comments, I’ll make the same key one again. Do NOT assume retention and access policies are even controlling here when it comes to improper actual access at inception, which results in you having NO control thereafter. Basically, the “Snowden” disclosures make clear that our telecommunications system has been fundamentally compromised. In plain English, the telecommunications companies and major suppliers have provided “back doors” on a routine basis to the backbones of communications. No doubt the same ones these ALPR, Flock or similar systems ultimately use to transmit data. And let me guess it is not end-to-end encrypted either. (And have you asked?) “Supposedly” this “back door” access is just for national security and “supposedly” is not to be captured or used involving US citizens--but allowed when one party is not. Given the newest Social Security data access as just the current example (and Census, and IRS, and …), do you honestly believe that? Do you even know if ALPR, Flock or similar data is subject to a national security order (which are of course typically secret…). Thus, BEFORE the data even hits the relevant server pre-access by ANYONE, is it intercepted and stored for independent access legitimately or otherwise by the Federal government? Or is it intercepted during any other routine access—basically any time the internet backbone is used to transmit it? Do you know? I submit you do not. Even if you diligenced it, you probably would not know with real confidence given the cloak of “national security.” What you can easily determine though is that per the Snowden disclosures, this is not just possible, but perhaps likely. Then given today’s National leadership, how can you reasonably conclude the risks here are not just theoretical, but very real?
Net, I think while the sense of security these cameras may provide is laudable, the real-world loss of our core freedoms—privacy, travel, not to be surveilled in everyday life and many others are not.
Net, you really should consider this biggest picture and what you can read at the National level virtually every single day. If you do, perhaps like me you will conclude to pull the proverbial plug on “HAL” before it is too late. Think nationally, act locally.
Regards, Elias Blawie
40-year Menlo Park resident
