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[The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) board voted to approve

May 9, 2018 by Katherine Berry

[The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) board voted to approve new policy that requires it be notified if the local police department wishes to acquire new surveillance equipment.]

According to a report released by the State Department of Transportation, BART and its partners have already acquired at least 3,000 sensors in the Bay Area since 2010, with the first of these being deployed in the San Francisco/Oakland area in January, with the last being deployed in the Oakland area in June 2011.

BART and its partners are already in the process of building a new surveillance system at its Fremont facility. A separate, much larger surveillance system at a nearby transit center, which also has been completed, is expected to begin service in the coming months.

"We expect to have these new surveillance systems in place soon," said Brian Shinn, a BART spokesperson. "We plan to have these in place by August."

[The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) board voted to approve new policy that requires it be notified if the local police department wishes to acquire new surveillance equipment.]

BART and its partners are already in the process of building a new surveillance system at its Fremont facility. A separate, much larger surveillance system at a nearby transit center, which also has been completed, is expected to begin service in the coming months.

The new surveillance system is also part of a new program that uses technology such as a "high-tech surveillance system" to monitor and identify individuals at public locations.

BART has been using the system for over twenty years, but that process was not entirely successful, Shinn noted.

"The system has been used for over 30 years, but there are a lot of privacy concerns about it now," he said. "We want to get to a point where people are less likely to share information with the police."

The new surveillance system also incorporates equipment from several national and international organizations that have been at the forefront of the community's surveillance efforts.

According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C., the Bay Area Rapid Transit's recent budget has led many in the community to believe that local government oversight is not enough.

BART, in turn, has been critical of the federal government's oversight of the federal government's surveillance programs, arguing that the current system is "underhanded" and that existing federal surveillance programs have been used to "enabler [the] development of criminal and other surveillance technologies."