Deployed variety of surveillance techniques
By Katelynn Richardson
Daily Caller News Foundation
Santa Clara County deployed a variety of surveillance techniques on congregants of a local church that met during COVID-19, including tracking phone location data and parking a car in a nearby lot to observe behavior, court documents reported by independent journalist David Zweig reveal.
(Image courtesy Pexels)
Inspectors from the county’s COVID-19 Business Compliance Unit spent a total of 51 hours conducting stakeouts near Calvary Chapel San Jose between November 25, 2020 and January 3, 2021, observing everything from Sunday services to baptisms and prayer groups, Zweig reported. Enforcement officers, who were paid $219 an hour, wrote in great detail about church activities, noting each violation of the mask mandate, social distancing policy and state-wide ban on singing.
Using cellular mobility data from a company called SafeGraph, which aggregates location data from 47 million devices nationwide to show movement patterns, the county also set up a geofence around the church building to track how many people visited each day, documents obtained by Zweig show. The county paid Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho $800 an hour to analyze the data, determining there was a daily peak of 1,700 people visiting in early 2021.