Greetings, dance clubbers and event goers—welcome to San Francisco. Feel free to patronize the club or festive event of your choice; just remember that the following regulations apply for all events and entertainment establishments with capacity for over 100 people.

You must pass through a metal detector to enter the premises.

You will be ID scanned, and your ID will be maintained in a database for at least 15 days, ready to be made available to the police on request.

"High visibility" cameras watch you from the entrance and exit points of the premises. They will keep a recorded database for at least 15 days, one that's also available to the police on request.

Troubling rules

These rules don't exist—yet. But the City's Entertainment Commission held a hearing last night to consider them, and a consortium of civil liberties groups have already expressed considerable alarm.

"We are deeply disappointed in the San Francisco Entertainment Commission for considering such troubling, authoritarian, and poorly thought-out rules," warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation, PrivacyActivism, and eight other groups in a letter sent to the Commission. It continues:

Scanning the IDs of all attendees at an anti-war rally, a gay night club, or a fundraiser for a civil liberties organization would result in a deeply chilling effect on speech, since participants could not attend without their attendance being noted, stored, and made available on request to government authorities. This would transform the politically and culturally tolerant environment for which San Francisco is famous into a police state. A direct pipeline of personal information to the police also invites systemic abuses. The proposed rule would allow police to make a wholesale request for information every fifteen days, creating their own internal database of which individuals visit which particular venues and how often. The last time [San Francisco Police Department] created an intelligence unit, a court disbanded it to stop multiple documented abuses. The San Francisco Entertainment Commission should not invite history to repeat itself.

Just a request

We put a call into the Commission to find out why or if its members think this proposal is necessary, but we just got a response repeating the notice about the meeting. The SFPD requested these provisions last year, the Entertainment Commission's Executive Director Jocelyn Kane told the SF Weekly on Monday. Some of the discussions about beefing up event security follow a fatal shooting last July at Jellys, an area night club which subsequently closed.

"This is a request. This is nothing other than, 'Let's talk about this'," Kane assured the Weekly. But she admitted "the assumption that you need these things to operate isn't something that everyone agrees to."

The notice, however, suggests that the Commissioners could adopt rules that "depart from the terms of the proposals below but address the same general subjects as the proposals." They could also expand or contract the 100 person threshold to "apply to a different or broader range of venues."

Other requirements up for discussion include: