This is what San Francisco has become in 2025. A surveillance State.
Unbeknownst to the hundreds of people who gathered in San Francisco Civic Center on a beautiful March afternoon to protest Donald Trump’s evisceration of the federal work force their every move was being filmed from above.
Perched on the fourth floor of the Superior Court building the blogger had the same view as the omnipresent surveillance cameras positioned atop the Asian Art Museum and the San Francisco Library.
Hundreds of people gathered at a Stand Up for Science rally outside City Hall on Friday, protesting in the face of widespread cuts and layoffs from the Trump administration. Attendees held up signs like “Public Health Over Private Wealth” and “Science for All. Justice for All.” They chanted, “This is what democracy looks like” and cheered.SF Chronicle 3.7.2025
Surveillance camera atop the Asian Art Museum films everyone and everything. “What we’ve seen so far are cuts on the order of 10% to NOAA and the weather service,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, during a briefing Friday. “There are highly credible rumors that the plan is for a further 30% to 50% cut.”SF Chronicle 3.7.2025 –
Surveillance has been a decades long fixture in San Francisco. Its early history is best memorialized in the classic opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film “The Conversation.”
The opening scene of “The Conversation” establishes Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a surveillance expert, eavesdropping on a couple walking through Union Square in San Francisco, using a team and equipment to record their conversation, which is often muffled by ambient noise.
Top photo: Surveillance camera perched atop the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library sees all in the Civic Center.
I am a Green Party member, legal worker, walker, cyclist who follows politics, world events, 🌎 the literary world and 🎥 film
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