Post Agenda - Regular Meeting

Good morning and welcome to Pittsburgh City Council's virtual cablecast post-agenda on surveillance technologies. My name is Councilman Deborah Gross and I will be chairing this post-agenda discussion today. For the record, today we are currently joined by Councilman Kahari Mosley, Councilwoman Erica Strasburger, and we may have other council members who are watching or will be joining us later. And I would also welcome our guests and appreciate you for making time today. We are virtual only because we have some national experts joining us from around the country. And it was easier certainly t

Thank you, Professor. Appreciate that. I was trying to take notes really quickly. I think next, Councilman, we were saving you for the end. Mr. Oko, and if you have a presentation to share, you should have share screen ability.

Thank you, Mr. Oko. I appreciate that. And Councilman Siegel, thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Mr. Siegel. For all my speakers, I have. I think it's five pages of notes that I'm trying to scribble while I'm also listening at the same time. That was a lot of incredibly helpful information. I'm looking now because what we do if we were in person was we'd all be sitting at the same table and council members would be in the room with us. And usually we can just take them in order as they've entered and give some time for questions and answers. um so we have um three council members with us i think i acknowledged the beginning i'm not sure one of them has joined new i think mr cha

Well, let our speakers decide who might want to respond first.

Councilman, do you have any more questions?

Thank you, Councilman. I'll just chime in as chair here before I turn it to Councilwoman, I think, Strasburg is who I saw next in the room. Is that... We're really at the beginning of our public debate conversation at council in our learning. And so that's why it's so timely and it's so helpful to have you all here to give us both context and some example of paths forward. I think the speakers present our initial report that was submitted on September 2nd in response to legislation. and teach my colleagues back in march of 2026 it was based on the acw version of surveillance technologies of cc

And I'm just going to also frame for a second, and then I will hand it back, that we're getting emails from our constituents asking about flood control. also getting a lot of inquiries about artificial intelligence, especially being in Pittsburgh. There was a large pro-industry And then thirdly, data centers are a very hot topic. And we have data centers in the city of Pittsburgh that are not hyperscale that we've had for a long time. And then we have hyperscale projects outside our very small municipal borders. As the Pittsburgh City Council, we really only have our news controller in the cit

53:25 – 59:51•ESErika Strassburger

Thank you. I I really want to thank you Councilwoman for holding this incredibly timely and important hearing and and thank you to all our speakers and guests today. And I wanted to first state again that yes, Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh City Council is on the earlier end of this, so I'm grateful for this opportunity. I'm grateful for the. the reports that we do currently get. And it strikes me that you know, if we were to take a next approach, Councilman Siegel, your idea of this intermediary approach of at the very least understanding, right, like understanding what we're dealing with would be

Thank you, Councilman. It was wonderful to see you again. So, yeah, I don't need to mediate every – this is Q&A between the council member and the speaker, so speakers feel comfortable chiming in as well.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Cranmer. Sorry, Councilwoman, I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just saying thank you.

1:03:17 – 1:03:34•ESErika Strassburger

No, not at all. Not at all. I was only going to say that I, too, had a pre-existing meeting at 11, so I'm unfortunately going to have to jump off, but I look forward to catching the remainder of the conversation afterwards by watching it on video, and thank you again for hosting this hearing. Thank you all for being here.

Councilman Sherland, I see that you're still in the room, and I apologize that we've lost several of our speakers, but we will be continuing this policy conversation, of course, in other rooms and other formats. But do you have any questions for Mr. Oko? Councilman Sherland, I can't tell if you're with us. I see that you're in the Zoom room. I'll give him a minute. I'm glad she left, so I'll have, I have some of my own kind of thoughts and questions that we can share together. Again, this is, I think as some of the other council members said, and as I said earlier, our beginning here in Pittsb

And this is how you were saying, and I think Councilman Siegel as well, that it crosses over the border of privacy.

Rights that you have a right to. We're all supposed to have a right to, right? And so that you could be... charged differently for everything from a loaf of bread to a flight to, like, your Instacart prices are different from the next person's Instacart or DoorDash prices than, you know, the person sitting in the room with you. Or that when you walk into a rental agency, you're told a different rate for an apartment than the next person. They've made movies about this kind of stuff, right? And now we're there technologically. And so I think part of this discussion is what, as a local governmen