Comment by seltzered_
13 hours ago
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Eventually the legislature clarified the status and tightened the request rules, so now you have to request footage for a specific incident, and you may have to pay a redaction fee. [0]
[0] https://mrsc.org/explore-topics/public-records/law-enforceme...
ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things).
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
If it's a major city, why isn't their FOIA team larger? Signed: A frequent requester.
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Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
I think the point is that if the footage is unsafe to release publicly, then it is also unsafe to give cops access without a warrant.
> Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public
If these controls don't exist inside the organization, they shouldn't exist for the public either.
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NO, the fact that you are hitting scalability problems to do a whole bunch of redacting is a solid indicator that this is going too far on surveillance data.
The only indicator that it was done right, is that the redactions are happening in real time at the camera, only the list of license plates that have full warrant cleared authority for should be leaving the camera itself. (or full car description: color, make, model, scratches, time of day) Otherwise there is a private company with a bunch of extra-legal tracking information they will monetize utterly illegally
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I think someone even tried automating the redactions then posting to YouTube.
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
As another data point/example:
Florida is a "sunshine state" [0] when it comes to public records which is why it's legal:
- to have mugshots and arrest records posted online
- which in turn leads to "attractive felon" style websites where mugshots are rated.
I'm generally for more privacy while at the same time getting why people push for transparency. Either way you get downstream and often unintended consequences.
0 - https://www.myfloridalegal.com/open-government/the-quotsunsh...
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Someone should use AI to request such a large amount of data that it DDoSes the whole system. Unfortunately I feel like that would result in traffic camera data just being removed from FOIA rather than removed from use.
If I recall, the FOIA allows government agencies to charge you for the work of processing your request if you're requesting more than N pages or it takes more than a couple hours of work to fulfill the request. I'd be careful about a maliciously compliant response to such a thing. That said, we live in a boring world where they'd probably just respond by threatening you with a felony hacking prosecution for attempting to take down their system.
Washington State Public Records Act has no fee if you simply want to "inspect" the records (bodycams are the named exception); they can charge "actual" costs for storage, but presumably Flock stores the data, so... They cannot charge for salaries, etc.
You can make your own copy of records for free; if you want them to make copies, they can charge actual costs.
I don't think that would be legal... you'd have to get a judge to reverse the previous decision that established the cameras are public record. They would probably just turn them off instead.