Proposition E Would Make It Easier for Police To Surveil San Francisco

Published

1 year ago

February 23, 2024

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On March 5, San Franciscans will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure that would decide whether or not to make them into guinea pigs for surveillance experiments by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).

Proposition E purports to streamline the SFPD, with sections on community engagement, recordkeeping, and the department’s vehicle pursuit and use of force policies. But its portion on department use of surveillance technology is troubling.

Under an existing ordinance passed in 2019, the SFPD may only use “surveillance technologies”like surveillance cameras, automatic license plate readers, or cell site simulatorsthat have been approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city and county legislative body. The process requires that the SFPD, like any other city or county agency, submit a policy to the board for approval before using any new technology. The 2019 ordinance also banned the use of facial recognition technology.

But Prop E adds a clause stipulating that the SFPD “may acquire and/or use a Surveillance Technology so long as it submits a Surveillance Technology Policy to the Board of Supervisors for approval by ordinance within one year of the use or acquisition, and may continue to use that Surveillance Technology after the end of that year unless the Board adopts an ordinance that disapproves the Policy.”

In other words, the SFPD could roll out an unapproved method of surveillance, and it would have free rein to operate within the city for up to a year before ever having to ask city officials for permission. And until the city passes a statute that specifically forbids itthat is, forbidding a technology that is by that point already in usethen the SFPD can keep using it indefinitely.

“Let’s say the SFPD decides they want to buy a bunch of data on people’s geolocation from data brokersthey could do that,” says Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “They could use drones that are flying at all times above the city. They could use the robot dogs that were piloted at the border. These are all surveillance technologies that the police doesn’t necessarily have right now, and they could acquire it and use it, effectively without any sort of accountability, under this proposition.”

If those scenarios sound implausible, it’s worth noting that they’ve already happened: As Hussain notes, the Department of Homeland Security recently tested robot dogs to help patrol the U.S./Mexico border. And in 2012, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department enlisted civilian aircraft to fly over Compton and surveil the entire area.

Not to mention, federal agencies already routinely purchase people’s cell phone geolocation information and internet metadata without a warrant.

In a sense, Prop E would make San Franciscans into guinea pigs, on whom the SFPD can experiment with all manner of surveillance technology. If that sounds hyperbolic, a member of Mayor London Breed’s staff told the board of supervisors in November 2023 that Prop E “authorizes the department to have a one-year pilot period to experiment, to work through new technology to see how they work.”

The San Francisco Ballot Simplification Committee’s description of the proposition notes that it would “authorize the SFPD to use drones and install surveillance cameras without Commission or Board approval, including those with facial recognition technology.”

The ACLU of Northern California calls Prop E “a dangerous and misleading proposal that knocks down three pillars of police reform: oversight, accountability, and transparency.” Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the EFF, wrote that under Prop E, police could “expose already marginalized and over-surveilled communities to a new and less accountable generation of surveillance technologies.”

Despite these concerns, Prop E has its share of support. Breed defended the proposal, saying “it’s about making sure that our police department, like any other police department around the country, can use 21st century technology.” By January, groups supporting Prop E had raised more than $1 millionten times the amount raised by opponents and considerably more than has been raised for any other proposal on the March ballot.

It also seems to be popular among the public: A January survey released by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce found that 61 percent of San Franciscans favored Prop E, with only 37 percent opposed. (One possible explanation: The same survey found that 69 percent of those polled feel that crime has gotten worse. Recent data indicates that violent crime rose during 2023 even as it declined nationally, and while the rate of property crime fell, state and national rates fell faster.)

San Francisco is no stranger to potentially abusive surveillance practices. In 2022, the board of supervisors passed an ordinance that would allow the SFPD to request and receive real-time access to citizens’ private security camera feeds. While city officials like Breed and newly-appointed District Attorney Brooke Jenkins touted that the ordinance would help crack down on smash-and-grab shoplifting rings, a recent city report detailed that in the third quarter of 2023, the vast majority of requests were for narcotics investigations.

UK

‘It shouldn’t be like this’: Full-time workers turning to food banks

Published

16 mins ago

August 11, 2025

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'It shouldn't be like this': Full-time workers turning to food banks

At a community food table in Staffordshire, produce is being handed out for free.

“I need to come here otherwise we’d be living on bread,” Rebecca Flynn told Sky News.

The 51-year-old said: “I’m earning pretty decent money, but it’s not enough.”

It gives you an insight into just how deeply the cost of living crisis is biting – because Rebecca is working full-time as an office manager for a day service for people with learning difficulties.

On top of that, she has a second job going door-to-door on evenings and weekends, selling cosmetics and homeware.

“There’s nothing more I can do. Unless I win the lottery or get another job. It should be noticed that people are in this state,” she says.

“Local councils, local governments, they need to see what’s going on, come to ground level. It’s 2025. It shouldn’t be like this.”

But it’s not just Rebecca working all hours and needing food handouts to survive.

Alex Chapman is the co-founder of the Norton Canes Community Food Table, and says a third of the people who use it are working full-time.

“It’s mad that you’re working a good job and you think you’d be able to afford everything and go on holiday and everything like that, but in reality they’re struggling to put food on the table,” he says.

“We’re seeing a massive increase in the people that are using the food table. We see them in their work outfits. Professionals, nurses – you don’t expect them to be struggling because they’re working full-time. People who aren’t working – you expect them to be struggling. But it’s across the board.”

The food table is in Cannock Chase.

Sky News analysis of local authorities gives an insight into why people are feeling dissatisfied their salaries are no longer delivering the comfortable lifestyles they thought hard work and a good job would deliver.

Over the past few years, Cannock Chase has gone from being a middle-class part of Britain to one of the lowest-earning areas in the UK.

In 2021, UK average annual salaries were just short of £26,000 – Cannock Chase was almost identical, according to Sky News analysis of Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Since then, the UK average wage has increased by 21.6% – or more than £5,000 a year – keeping pace with high inflation.

But in Cannock Chase, salaries have only risen by 8.4% – meaning on average people are now £300 worse off per month than the average worker across the UK.

SEE HOW YOUR AREA HAS COPED WITH THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS

It won’t have escaped your attention that prices have gone up, by a lot – by a fifth since 2021, the highest sustained rate since the 1990s – with some of the biggest rises among essentials like energy and food.

But, across the whole country, wages have actually done a pretty good job at keeping up with inflation. The problem is that the wage increase is an average, made up of highs and lows, while the price rises affect us more uniformly.

That means if you haven’t had a pay-rise, you will quite quickly find that you can’t afford as many of the things you used to.

People in places like Brentwood in Essex, the Cotswolds in rural Gloucestershire, and Melton in Leicestershire, have seen their wages increase at twice the rate of prices in the last few years, on average.

But on the other end of the scale are places like Cannock Chase, where inflation has been more than double the rate of wage increases.

It used to be a place where average earnings pretty much exactly reflected the UK midpoint. Now, people in Cannock are about £300 worse-off every month than the average person.

See how your area compares with our look-up.

Louise Schwartz, who has two children, describes herself as middle-class. After 20 years in the classroom she now has three jobs, working 50 hours a week as a teaching coach, at a software firm and giving private music lessons.

Her husband is an estate agent. They have a mortgage and three cars and together earn around £80,000 a year.

She says the family loves travelling together but can’t afford to go on holiday this year: “It makes me feel sad for my kids, more than anything, that we can’t give them a week away.

“We have food on the table, we’ve got heating, we’ve got cars to drive. But there are definitely some luxuries that we’ve cut back on recently.

“We don’t do expensive supermarkets. We don’t do expensive brands. We do whatever’s on offer for that particular week. My eldest son has started driving, which has then had an impact on my daughter’s horse-riding lessons.”

Louise adds that the family have a hot tub in the garden that they bought years ago, but because of the cost of electricity, they don’t use it.

I ask her: “What does it say that a teacher and an estate agent both working full time can’t afford to go on holiday this year?”

She replies: “I think a lot of people might not be surprised by that because I think people are probably in a similar position but maybe we just don’t talk about it.”

Full-time workers tell us again and again they thought their lifestyles would be more comfortable – that the work ethic would be delivering more than it is.

It seems the dissatisfaction is not only what one person described as “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, but also the lack of what people refer to as “pleasure money”.

Heidi Boot is what you might call the backbone of the middle classes – running a small business full-time called HB Aesthetics, a salon that does eyebrows, eyelashes and nails.

“I feel like everybody is stretching their appointments. People are working so hard for their money and they’ve got nothing to show for it. They’ve paid all their bills and now they’ve got nothing left to spend on themselves,” she says.

“It shouldn’t be that way. But because I see it all the time I feel like it’s just the normal now.”

The constituency of Cannock Chase has always voted the way of the country – and at the last election showed significant support for Reform.

The financial woes will worry the government, which insists it’s taking action to give workers more money in their pockets.

But there’s no denying the despairing mood of middle England in the political battlegrounds that brought Labour to power.

UK

‘Shocking and brutal’ on priest may be linked to man’s murder

Published

40 mins ago

August 11, 2025

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'Shocking and brutal' on priest may be linked to man's murder

A man’s death may be linked to a “brutal” attack on a priest in a church, police have said.

Officers have begun a murder investigation after receiving a report that a man was found dead in Co Down.

The discovery was made at an address in the Marian Park area of Downpatrick at about 12pm on Sunday.

Police have arrested a 30-year-old man on suspicion of murder and he is in custody.

This comes after a priest was left in a serious condition in hospital following a “brutal attack” in a church in Downpatrick on Sunday morning.

It was reported to police that at about 10.10am, a man walked into St Patrick’s Church and hit Fr John Murray on the head with a bottle.

Superintendent Norman Haslett, district commander for Newry, Mourne and Down, said officers suspect the murder may be linked to the attack on the priest.

“Inquiries are at an early stage and, at this time, we suspect this may be connected to a serious assault in the St Patrick’s Avenue area of Downpatrick on Sunday,” he said.

Detective Chief Inspector David McBurney said it was a “brutal attack” on the priest and appealed for people with information to come forward.

Sinn Fein MP for South Down, Chris Hazzard, said the attack on the priest and the death of the man in Downpatrick were “deeply shocking”.

“The death of a man, along with the vicious attack on Fr Murray in St Patrick’s Church, has deeply saddened and horrified the local community,” he said.

DUP MLA for South Down, Diane Forsythe, condemned the “disgraceful attack on a religious leader in a place of worship”.

Of the two incidents, she said: “There is no place for violent attacks in our society.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the entire community as they process this devastating murder as well as the serious assault earlier today.”

Alliance South Down MLA Andrew McMurray said the incidents had left many in the local community “in shock on what should be a day of peace and rest”.

Anyone with information about the man’s death or the assault on the priest is urged to contact the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Technology

SoftBank founder Son makes his biggest bet by staking the Japanese giant’s future on AI

Published

2 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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SoftBank founder Son makes his biggest bet by staking the Japanese giant's future on AI

Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks at the SoftBank World event in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.

Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Masayoshi Son is making his biggest bet yet: that his brainchild SoftBank will be the center of a revolution driven by artificial intelligence.

Son says artificial superintelligence (ASI) — AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans — will be here in 10 years. It’s a bold call — but perhaps not surprising. He’s made a career out of big plays; notably, one was a $20 million investment into Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba in 2000 that has made billions for SoftBank.

Now, the billionaire is hoping to replicate that success with a series of investments and acquisitions in AI firms that will put SoftBank at the center of a fundamental technological shift.

While Son has been outspoken about his vision over the last year, his thinking precedes much of his recent bullishness, according to two former executives at SoftBank.

“I vividly remember the first time he invited me to his home for dinner and sitting on his porch over a glass of wine, he started talking to me about singularity – the point at which machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence,” Alok Sama, a former finance chief at SoftBank until 2016 and and president until 2019, told CNBC.

SoftBank’s big AI plays

For Son, AI seems personal.

“SoftBank was founded for what purpose? For what purpose was Masa Son born? It may sound strange, but I think I was born to realize ASI,” Son said last year.

That may go some way to explain what has been an aggressive drive over the past few years — but especially the last two — to put SoftBank at the center of the AI story.

In 2016, SoftBank acquired chip designer Arm in a deal worth about $32 billion at the time. Today, Arm is valued at more than $145 billion. While Arm blueprints form the basis of the designs for nearly all the world’s smartphones, these days, the company is looking to position itself as a key player in AI infrastructure. Arm-based chips are part of Nvidia’s systems that go into data centers.

In March, SoftBank also announced plans to acquire another chip designer, Ampere Computing, for $6.5 billion.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI is another marquee investment for SoftBank, with the Japanese giant saying recently that planned investments in the company will reach about 4.8 trillion Japanese yen ($32.7 billion).

SoftBank has also invested in a number of other companies related to AI across its portfolio.

“SoftBank’s AI strategy is comprehensive, spanning the entire AI stack from foundational semiconductors, software, infrastructure, and robotics to cutting-edge cloud services and end applications across critical verticals such as enterprise, education, health, and autonomous systems,” Neil Shah, co-founder at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

“Mr. Son’s vision is to cohesively connect and deeply integrate these components, thereby establishing a powerful AI ecosystem designed to maximize long-term value for our shareholders.”

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon

SoftBank’s stock performance since 2017, the year that its first Vision Fund was founded.

There is a common theme behind SoftBank’s investments in AI companies that comes directly from Son — namely, that these firms should be using advanced intelligence to be more competitive, successful, to make their product better and their customers happy, a person familiar with the company told CNBC. They could only comment anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.

It started with and brain computers and robots

As SoftBank launched “SoftBank’s Next 30-Year Vision” in 2010, Son spoke about “brain computers” during a presentation. He described these computers as systems that could learn and program themselves eventually.

And then came robots. Major tech figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla boss Elon Musk are now talking about robotics as a key application of AI — but Son was thinking about this more than a decade ago.

In 2012, SoftBank took a majority stake in a French company called Aldebaran. Two years later, the two companies launched a humanoid robot called Pepper, which they billed as “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.”

Later, Son said: “In 30 years, I hope robots will become one of the core businesses in generating profits for the SoftBank group.”

SoftBank’s bet on Pepper ultimately flopped for the company. SoftBank slashed jobs at its robotics unit and stopped producing Pepper in 2020. In 2022, German firm United Robotics Group agreed to acquire Aldebaran from SoftBank.

But Son’s very early interest in robots underscored his curiosity for AI applications of the future.

“He was in very early and he has been thinking about this obsessively for a long time,” Sama, who is author of “The Money Trap,” said.

In the background, Son was cooking up something bigger: a tech fund that would make waves in the investing world. He founded the Vision Fund in 2017 with a massive $100 billion in deployable capital.

SoftBank aggressively invested in companies across the world with some of the biggest bets on ride hailing players like Uber and Chinese firm Didi.

But investments in Chinese technology companies and some bad bets on firms like WeWork soured sentiment for the Vision Fund as it racked up billions of dollars of losses by 2023.

Vision but bad timing

The market questioned some of Son’s investments in companies like Uber and Didi, which were burning through cash at the time and had unclear unit economics.

But even those investments spoke to Son’s AI view, according to the former partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund.

“His thought back then was the first advent of AI would be self-driving cars,” the source told CNBC.

Again this could be seen as a case of being too early. Uber created a driverless car unit only to sell it off. Instead, the company has focused on other self-driving car companies to bring them onto the Uber platform. Even now, driverless cars are not widespread on roads, though commercial services like those of Waymo are available.

SoftBank still has investments in driverless car companies, such as British startup Wayve.

Timing clearly wasn’t on Son’s side. After record losses at the Vision Fund in 2022, Son declared SoftBank would go into “defense” mode, significantly reducing investments and being more prudent. It was at this time that companies like OpenAI were beginning to gain steam, but still before the launch of ChatGPT that would put the company on the map.

“When those companies came to head in 2021, 2022, Masa would have been in a perfect place but he had used all his ammunition on other companies,” the former Vision Fund exec said.

“When they came to age in 21, 22, the Vision Fund had invested in five or six hundred different companies and he was not in a position to invest in AI and he missed that.”

Son himself said this year that SoftBank wanted to invest in OpenAI as early as 2019, but it was Microsoft that ended up becoming the key investor. Fast forward to 2025, the Vision Fund — of which there are now two — has a portfolio stacked full of AI focused companies.

But that period was tough for investors across the board. The Covid-19 pandemic, booming inflation and rising rates hit public and private markets across the board after years of loose monetary policy and a tech bull run.

SoftBank didn’t see that time as a missed opportunity to invest in AI, a person familiar with the company said.

Instead, the the company is of the view that it is still very early in the AI investing cycle, the source added.

Risk and reward

AI technology is fast-moving, from the chips that run the software to the models that underpin popular applications.

Tech giants in the U.S. and China are battling it out to produce ever-advancing AI models with the aim of reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a term with different definitions depending on who you speak to, but one that broadly refers to AI that is smarter than humans. With billions of dollars of investment going into the technology, the risk is high, and the rewards could be even higher.

But disruption can come out of no where.

This year, Chinese firm DeepSeek made waves after releasing a so-called reasoning model that appeared to be developed more cheaply than its U.S. rivals. The fact that a Chinese company managed the feat, despite all the export restrictions for advanced tech in place, rocked global financial markets that were betting the U.S. had an unassailable AI lead.

While markets have since recovered, the potential of surprise advances in technology at such an early stage in AI remains a big risk for the likes of SoftBank.

“As with most technology investments the key challenge is to invest in the winning technologies. Many of the investments SoftBank has made are in the current leaders but AI is still in its relative infancy so other challengers could still rear up from nowhere,” Dan Baker, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC.

Still, Son has made it clear he wants to set SoftBank up with DNA that will see it survive and thrive for 300 years, according to the company’s website.

That may go some way to explain the big risks that Son takes, and his conviction when it comes to particular themes and companies — and the valuations he’s willing to pay.

“He (Son) made some mistakes, but directionally he is going in the same driection, which is — he wants to be sure that he is a real player in AI and he is making it happen,” the former Vision Fund exec said.