Comment by soupfordummies
12 hours ago
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.