{"id":401720,"date":"2026-07-17T03:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T03:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/401720\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T03:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T03:14:09","slug":"billionaire-chris-larsen-gifts-more-millions-to-sfs-growing-surveillance-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/401720\/","title":{"rendered":"Billionaire Chris Larsen gifts more millions to SF’s growing surveillance state \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, July 15 the SF Police Commission\u00a0approved<\/a>\u00a0a $3 million gift from the San Francisco Police Community Foundation (SFPCF), Silicon Valley billionaire and surveillance enthusiast Chris Larsen\u2019s nonprofit. The Board of Supervisors will vote next week on the issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

SFPCF is the same\u00a0venture<\/a>\u00a0Larsen used last year to donate nearly $10 million to support the San Francisco Police Department\u2019s Real Time Investigation Center (RTIC), a\u00a0centralized surveillance policing hub\u00a0<\/a>that tracks license plates using hundreds of street cameras and dozens of drones. Notably, the RTIC is housed in a building complex partly owned by Donald Trump; Larsen\u2019s Ripple Labs leases out the space to the city \u201crent free\u201d for the investigation center.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The gift will be dispersed into roughly $1 million allotments over three years. According to the resolution, roughly $540,000 will go to purchasing \u201ctwo drone docking stations,\u201d roughly $375,000 will be for \u201ccounter-drone technology\u201d and the remaining $2.085 million will be for RTIC tech, software and infrastructure including \u201chardware purchases, upgrades, maintenance, and replacements; software licenses, subscriptions, upgrades, and maintenance; facility-related technological enhancements.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"SFPD\u2019s Real Time Investigation Center is growing by millions of dollars. SFPD photo. <\/p>\n

Larsen\u2019s recent donation is striking, given the extensive privacy and security risks posed by San Francisco\u2019s drone program and the city\u2019s Flock cameras.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In mid-July, WIRED reported<\/a> on an extensive leak of the drone footage from the city\u2019s first responder program. That reporting detailed the pervasive powers that San Francisco police now have, and the inherent risks that come with such sweeping power.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two security researchers were able to watch the feeds of five surveillance drones in real time, from take off to landing, without bypassing any encryption. Said researchers were also able to access the police pilot\u2019s names and email addresses on the public host site.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This breach came from SFPD\u2019s misuse of the Skydio (the company that makes the city\u2019s drones for the first responder program) software. Skydio generates sharable links to its drone\u2019s feeds and one of those links was shared to the open internet last December with a 12-month expiration. Thus, five of SFPD\u2019s drones have had their feeds easily accessible on the internet for more than seven months.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s drone as first responder program is run through the RTIC. As is the data from the city\u2019s 400 Flock ALPR cameras.<\/p>\n

A police audit<\/a> recently revealed 299 illegal searches of San Francisco\u2019s license plate data over a year\u2014and this is not the first instance of legal violations. The Standard reported<\/a> out of state agencies accessed the city\u2019s Flock data 1.6 million times between 2024 and 2025. San Francisco inked its contract for 400 of Flock\u2019s ALPR cameras in March 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Larsen\u2019s penchant <\/a>for surveillance is well-documented. He is the harbinger of a new era in San Francisco, one less muddied by the oversight of earlier eras. Post 2020, San Francisco has shifted <\/a>from a city on the forefront of surveillance regulation into a laboratory for it, and Larsen has led the charge. He spent more than a quarter million dollars to propel Prop E into reality, which eliminated most of the regulations around police powers and surveillance in San Francisco.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This most recent donation is in keeping with his overall goal, namely to foster this new, reactionary era for San Francisco and continue the expansion of the surveillance state.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday, July 15 the SF Police Commission\u00a0approved\u00a0a $3 million gift from the San Francisco Police Community Foundation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-401720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}