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Judge rules Seattle media companies must hand over protest images to police

82 points by danso 6y ago

jojobas 6y ago
Who would have thought withholding evidence to crime was not a good idea?
- chowyuncat 6y ago
  Because the police have committed crime on video and not been prosecuted.
- rbecker 6y ago
  Probably people worried about the chilling effects on journalism, where every fact you record can be pressed into service of the surveillance state. Try to imagine they were reporting on the Hong Kong protests instead.
  - Covzire 6y ago
    No need to imagine, after at least 28 murders, some black children, and countless millions in damage and theft that has resulted in various cities, it's clear that Hong Kong protestors and the American variety of 'protestors' are not the same thing.
- gpm 6y ago
  Journalists withhold evidence all the time, often that's the only reason they can get evidence in the first place. For instance when they interview various forms of criminals. Setting this precedent will mean that when covering riots in the future they will have to worry about whether or not the rioters will attempt to prevent them from acquiring footage, or even attempting to destroy footage that they have acquired. That's a chilling effect on the freedom of the press that will last decades. There is also a potential chilling effect on peaceful protestors here, who now know that the police have yet another way of identifying them to retaliate. That's more of a problem in a place like Hong Kong than the US, but the constitution is there to prevent the US from being able to become like Hong Kong.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Interviewing a criminal without outside a particular crime is hard to construe as being complicit. Recording who set a police car on fire and refusing to hand over the recording is a different matter.
    - bsder 6y ago
      > Recording who set a police car on fire and refusing to hand over the recording is a different matter. That might be true if you know that Journalist X has an actual picture of the person lighting the car on fire and your are asking for that specific picture. However, that is NOT the case here. The police are on a fishing expedition and are asking for pictures that "might" include the perpetrators. Those pictures also might include a picture of someone the police might like to identify in order to exert some intimidation. The fact that the judge limited the scope is not terribly useful. Parallel construction is a thing. Journalists aren't evil. They don't necessarily want criminals to get away with their crimes. Normally you would just politely ask the journalists to go over their pictures and turn over any that they think would be helpful. However, after the police attacked journalists on camera, you can imagine that most journalists are more inclined to give the police the middle finger rather than cooperate.
      - jojobas 6y ago
        The judgement only allows the cops to prosecute arson and gun theft based on the evidence, which doesn't add up with dragnet fishing. The rest is non sequitur.
        jacobush 6y ago
        Except in the US, there is parallel construction. So it could help with the dragnet for sure. Given that we at this point don't entirely trust the Police either, they could also just find people in the videos and harass them, right?
    - kstenerud 6y ago
      It's a different matter, yes, but as the parent poster noted, there's a compelling public interest argument in favor of withholding said evidence in order to preserve the ability of the press to do their job. You can't have everything, so we must compromise. Unfortunately, in this case the judge ruled incorrectly, and freedom of the press will suffer as a result. If this ruling is allowed to stand, any future event a journalist covers where someone happens to commit a crime of opportunity will result in that journalist being at risk of harm should the perpetrators notice that they've been filmed. And that will make journalists think twice about covering such events. The alternative is allowing criminals to get away with what they were filmed doing, which of course leaves a bad taste in ones mouth. But given the stakes, it's a sacrifice we must make. I'm of course talking about crimes-of-opportunity here (in this case, arson), not planned terrorist attacks or murder, where journalists would be at risk regardless.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Journalists are allowed to keep their sources secret even if the government alleges that a crime has taken place. These rules are not as clear cut as you’re implying.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    They're not after a source. Reporters witnessed and recorded crime in progress.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    Sources of what? Did they interview the thieves for a story?
  - kevindong 6y ago
    No such constitutional right exists at the federal level. > The Supreme Court decided in a five to four decision that the press did not have a Constitutional right of protection from revealing confidential information in court. The court acknowledged, however, that the government must "convincingly show a substantial relation between the information sought and a subject of overriding and compelling state interest." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_Stat...
    - danso 6y ago
      Yep, and while Washington does have a shield law, the judge in this case has decided that it does not fully apply against this kind of subpoena: > Lee said the news organizations were not protected by a Washington state shield law that under many circumstances prevents authorities from obtaining reporters’ unpublished materials.
- danso 6y ago
  Lawyers have attorney-client privilege because courts have construed it essential for upholding the 6th Amendment's decree of right to counsel. If the press is seen as a surveillance apparatus for the police, you believe that has no implications on the First Amendment's freedom of press?
  - jojobas 6y ago
    If you write a report about a child molester orgy you can be sure to expect being questioned about it and no 1st Amendment defense will stand.
    - danso 6y ago
      Who wrote a witness report of a child molester orgy? I didn’t see it mentioned in the story
    - bobbean 6y ago
      "Think of the children"
rcw4256 6y ago
If the data exists within US jurisdiction, the US government feels (and, in practice, is) entitled to it. Plan accordingly.
- vinay427 6y ago
  This is true in virtually every country with a system of warrants for evidence collection when investigating a crime. The problem here for many people is the underlying police violence that in part instigated these crimes against the police.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Unfortunately, this order will prevent the police from using any video evidence of crimes perpetrated by a police officer found in the evidence siezed.
    - defnotashton2 6y ago
      It wouldn't happen either way as that requires somebody to prosecute the police.
kevindong 6y ago
> The SPD subpoena seeks media images taken during a 90-minute span in a four-block area between Fourth and Sixth Avenue and Olive Way to Pike Street that day. For reference, that's a 2 by 2 block centered around Westlake Station. https://goo.gl/maps/kcJnTW9yw82VE1PLA https://goo.gl/maps/kcJnTW9yw82VE1PLA
dmix 6y ago
I've been very vocal against mass surveillance, mostly with the argument that the court warrant system is entirely sufficient for police to do their jobs. One important thing about warrants and subpoenas is that they are often limited to strictly collecting data related to a specific investigation - not a fishing expedition. > The judge placed some limits on the subpoena. He said police could use the images to identify suspects only in the arson and gun theft investigations. Detectives could not use the photos or video to pursue suspects in vandalism or other lesser crimes — even if police found such evidence. > The subpoena would also be limited to professional camera equipment and would exclude reporters’ cell phone photos and videos. This seems to fit the criteria - especially since police firearms were stolen. The only red flag is that they are asking 5x different news organization to hand over journalist's raw recordings. I'd be highly skeptical of this subpoena if I was a judge - unless they could prove the journalists were likely the only ones at the time recording the incident, that they know were present, and it didn't apply to material involved in any specific reporting. Broad footage taken at a public event is always less concerning and less protected. But at the same time tons of people are recording protests besides journalists and it might just be laziness on the police's part. Although that said, sometimes rioters intimidate people trying to film crimes being committed (as seen here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/hu9lz0/protesters_in_seattle_peacefully_looting_an/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/hu9l...). And the police claim "the department was at a dead end in its investigations." So I'm not sure much outrage is warranted here, but I'd still probably lean on the safe side.
- defnotashton2 6y ago
  Well that and what kind of visibility and process and oversight do we have into this process that the police will truly stay within the judges confinements. I mean let's be honest. They are going to feed it into facial recognition, identify their targets and then gather whatever additional evidence. They could then potentially present a new case with evidence external to the data collection and construct a narrative around that. I think it's slippery.
  - 1996 6y ago
    You are downvoted, but unfortunately I think you are right. Parallel reconstruction has been documented. There is a risk what you say will happen.
beervirus 6y ago
Why are we still calling riots “protests?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8
- fareesh 6y ago
  Same reason illegal aliens were called asylum seekers and immigrants - propaganda and politics. It becomes easier to influence the public towards supporting something when you can reframe it as a moral problem. We saw this in the 1990s under Bush I when they did the whole "babies thrown out from incubators" lie that garnered support for the first Gulf war. We saw it again with the "tubes for WMDs" in the second Iraq war.
  - sacred_numbers 6y ago
    You could also say it's the same reason asylum seekers and immigrants are called illegal aliens. It's still politics, just in a different direction. Framing something as a moral problem is not necessarily bad; it just has to be a real moral problem that justifies the proposed solution. The problem with the Iraq war was that the government lied about the problem so that they could justify a bad solution.
    - fareesh 6y ago
      There is an objective difference between the terms. By mislabelling something, it is an outright falsehood, just like the lies about the Iraq war.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Because there’s riots and protests. They’re not one and the same.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    The cops are after evidence on arson and gun theft, not protests, as the headline says.
salawat 6y ago
This is why everyone should be raising hell over things like RealID and the requirement for you to allow the Federal government to get a hold of biometrics for you in order to fly. This is also why Third Party Doctrine is screaming for reassessment in the wake of expanded capabilities for meta information collection, storage and reproduction. In the past, your recordings/pictures/artifacts of reporting were physical things that cost time, money, and effort to reproduce. No one would want to ask for anymore than is absolutely necessary due to the inconvenience. Nowadays, with terabytes of data being able to be stored in the palm of one's hand, and copied, moved in minutes, there is a much greater risk for old precedents to turn into dangerous overreach based upon the sheer exaggeration of the capability to get blood from the stone of a photograph. Get a picture with a partial match in a database of a subject? Spin by their residence with a a Stingray and sniff some IMEI's. Take that to a telco, Google, or a data broker, and geofence. Or look at the latest data dump acquired and see if you can match them with some data point in the area. In this age, the things we can do with data scare the ever loving bajeezus out of me, and it's not that I don't want LE to be unable to do their jobs, but we really need to get a societal handle on how we treat digital footprint. Otherwise, it's not that far to a world nobody wants to see or live.
barnaclejive 6y ago
SPD wants video?, shoulda thought of taking it themselves then. Don't slicken a slippery slope.
aaronbrethorst 6y ago
He found that the photos and video were critical for an investigation into the alleged arson of SPD vehicles and theft of police guns Given the wildly lax gun laws in the United States, I imagine that the folks who took these guns could've just as easily driven over to Wade's in Bellevue and bought themselves something equally lethal. No reason why we should uniquely be having such a freakout over guns disappearing from a Seattle PD car. (setting aside a general freakout over US gun laws. Also, hi downvoters.)
- clarkmoody 6y ago
  Replace the word "guns" with any other type of property, and read your comment again.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    OK "Given the wildly lax sandwich laws in the United States, I imagine that the folks who took these sandwiches could've just as easily driven over to Wade's in Bellevue and bought themselves something equally lethal. No reason why we should uniquely be having such a freakout over sandwiches disappearing from a Seattle PD car" I'm a brit so I don't know anything about guns but I'm assuming they're more dangerous than a bread-based food, which may be be the point.
  - yeetawayhn 6y ago
    Yeah, there's a lot of lack of self-awareness going on in that statement. "Excuse me while I ride my death machine over to a store."
- onion2k 6y ago
  Presumably if you go to Wade's in Bellevue and buy a gun there's some sort of paper trail that can be useful in investigations should the gun be used in a crime. In general, people who steal guns don't leave their name and address.
- Bx6667 6y ago
  This comment blatantly breaks the guidelines and yet nobody flags it. But when I make a benign comment that has a pro-conservative sentiment, it’s instantly flagged and responded to by Dan.
blue52 6y ago
This is a great example of why a "warrant" is nothing other than an abusive fishing expedition. A "warrant" can be rubber stamped to exfil all of your internet data, phone records, credit card statements, to raid your home or business... All gestapo techniques. I'm very glad we have encryption and other related technologies that can prevent this type of tyranny. With all of the tech I design, privacy is the number one priority. That includes being warrant-proof.
- dencodev 6y ago
  Warrants aren't even needed these days with the Patriot Act
  - blue52 6y ago
    You are right, thanks. I don't live there anymore so that atrocity slipped my mind.
Y-Bopinator 6y ago
People opposed to the Judge’s order want the police weapons to remain on the streets in the hands of criminals. They also want to ensure the arson goes unpunished. How despicable.

82 points by danso 6y ago

jojobas 6y ago

Who would have thought withholding evidence to crime was not a good idea?

chowyuncat 6y ago
Because the police have committed crime on video and not been prosecuted.
rbecker 6y ago
Probably people worried about the chilling effects on journalism, where every fact you record can be pressed into service of the surveillance state. Try to imagine they were reporting on the Hong Kong protests instead.
- Covzire 6y ago
  No need to imagine, after at least 28 murders, some black children, and countless millions in damage and theft that has resulted in various cities, it's clear that Hong Kong protestors and the American variety of 'protestors' are not the same thing.
gpm 6y ago
Journalists withhold evidence all the time, often that's the only reason they can get evidence in the first place. For instance when they interview various forms of criminals. Setting this precedent will mean that when covering riots in the future they will have to worry about whether or not the rioters will attempt to prevent them from acquiring footage, or even attempting to destroy footage that they have acquired. That's a chilling effect on the freedom of the press that will last decades. There is also a potential chilling effect on peaceful protestors here, who now know that the police have yet another way of identifying them to retaliate. That's more of a problem in a place like Hong Kong than the US, but the constitution is there to prevent the US from being able to become like Hong Kong.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Interviewing a criminal without outside a particular crime is hard to construe as being complicit. Recording who set a police car on fire and refusing to hand over the recording is a different matter.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > Recording who set a police car on fire and refusing to hand over the recording is a different matter. That might be true if you know that Journalist X has an actual picture of the person lighting the car on fire and your are asking for that specific picture. However, that is NOT the case here. The police are on a fishing expedition and are asking for pictures that "might" include the perpetrators. Those pictures also might include a picture of someone the police might like to identify in order to exert some intimidation. The fact that the judge limited the scope is not terribly useful. Parallel construction is a thing. Journalists aren't evil. They don't necessarily want criminals to get away with their crimes. Normally you would just politely ask the journalists to go over their pictures and turn over any that they think would be helpful. However, after the police attacked journalists on camera, you can imagine that most journalists are more inclined to give the police the middle finger rather than cooperate.
    - jojobas 6y ago
      The judgement only allows the cops to prosecute arson and gun theft based on the evidence, which doesn't add up with dragnet fishing. The rest is non sequitur.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        Except in the US, there is parallel construction. So it could help with the dragnet for sure. Given that we at this point don't entirely trust the Police either, they could also just find people in the videos and harass them, right?
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    It's a different matter, yes, but as the parent poster noted, there's a compelling public interest argument in favor of withholding said evidence in order to preserve the ability of the press to do their job. You can't have everything, so we must compromise. Unfortunately, in this case the judge ruled incorrectly, and freedom of the press will suffer as a result. If this ruling is allowed to stand, any future event a journalist covers where someone happens to commit a crime of opportunity will result in that journalist being at risk of harm should the perpetrators notice that they've been filmed. And that will make journalists think twice about covering such events. The alternative is allowing criminals to get away with what they were filmed doing, which of course leaves a bad taste in ones mouth. But given the stakes, it's a sacrifice we must make. I'm of course talking about crimes-of-opportunity here (in this case, arson), not planned terrorist attacks or murder, where journalists would be at risk regardless.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Journalists are allowed to keep their sources secret even if the government alleges that a crime has taken place. These rules are not as clear cut as you’re implying.
- jojobas 6y ago
  They're not after a source. Reporters witnessed and recorded crime in progress.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Sources of what? Did they interview the thieves for a story?
- kevindong 6y ago
  No such constitutional right exists at the federal level. > The Supreme Court decided in a five to four decision that the press did not have a Constitutional right of protection from revealing confidential information in court. The court acknowledged, however, that the government must "convincingly show a substantial relation between the information sought and a subject of overriding and compelling state interest." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_Stat...
  - danso 6y ago
    Yep, and while Washington does have a shield law, the judge in this case has decided that it does not fully apply against this kind of subpoena: > Lee said the news organizations were not protected by a Washington state shield law that under many circumstances prevents authorities from obtaining reporters’ unpublished materials.
danso 6y ago
Lawyers have attorney-client privilege because courts have construed it essential for upholding the 6th Amendment's decree of right to counsel. If the press is seen as a surveillance apparatus for the police, you believe that has no implications on the First Amendment's freedom of press?
- jojobas 6y ago
  If you write a report about a child molester orgy you can be sure to expect being questioned about it and no 1st Amendment defense will stand.
  - danso 6y ago
    Who wrote a witness report of a child molester orgy? I didn’t see it mentioned in the story
  - bobbean 6y ago
    "Think of the children"

rcw4256 6y ago

If the data exists within US jurisdiction, the US government feels (and, in practice, is) entitled to it. Plan accordingly.

vinay427 6y ago
This is true in virtually every country with a system of warrants for evidence collection when investigating a crime. The problem here for many people is the underlying police violence that in part instigated these crimes against the police.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  Unfortunately, this order will prevent the police from using any video evidence of crimes perpetrated by a police officer found in the evidence siezed.
  - defnotashton2 6y ago
    It wouldn't happen either way as that requires somebody to prosecute the police.

kevindong 6y ago

> The SPD subpoena seeks media images taken during a 90-minute span in a four-block area between Fourth and Sixth Avenue and Olive Way to Pike Street that day. For reference, that's a 2 by 2 block centered around Westlake Station. https://goo.gl/maps/kcJnTW9yw82VE1PLA https://goo.gl/maps/kcJnTW9yw82VE1PLA

dmix 6y ago

I've been very vocal against mass surveillance, mostly with the argument that the court warrant system is entirely sufficient for police to do their jobs. One important thing about warrants and subpoenas is that they are often limited to strictly collecting data related to a specific investigation - not a fishing expedition. > The judge placed some limits on the subpoena. He said police could use the images to identify suspects only in the arson and gun theft investigations. Detectives could not use the photos or video to pursue suspects in vandalism or other lesser crimes — even if police found such evidence. > The subpoena would also be limited to professional camera equipment and would exclude reporters’ cell phone photos and videos. This seems to fit the criteria - especially since police firearms were stolen. The only red flag is that they are asking 5x different news organization to hand over journalist's raw recordings. I'd be highly skeptical of this subpoena if I was a judge - unless they could prove the journalists were likely the only ones at the time recording the incident, that they know were present, and it didn't apply to material involved in any specific reporting. Broad footage taken at a public event is always less concerning and less protected. But at the same time tons of people are recording protests besides journalists and it might just be laziness on the police's part. Although that said, sometimes rioters intimidate people trying to film crimes being committed (as seen here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/hu9lz0/protesters_in_seattle_peacefully_looting_an/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/hu9l...). And the police claim "the department was at a dead end in its investigations." So I'm not sure much outrage is warranted here, but I'd still probably lean on the safe side.

defnotashton2 6y ago
Well that and what kind of visibility and process and oversight do we have into this process that the police will truly stay within the judges confinements. I mean let's be honest. They are going to feed it into facial recognition, identify their targets and then gather whatever additional evidence. They could then potentially present a new case with evidence external to the data collection and construct a narrative around that. I think it's slippery.
- 1996 6y ago
  You are downvoted, but unfortunately I think you are right. Parallel reconstruction has been documented. There is a risk what you say will happen.

beervirus 6y ago

Why are we still calling riots “protests?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8

fareesh 6y ago
Same reason illegal aliens were called asylum seekers and immigrants - propaganda and politics. It becomes easier to influence the public towards supporting something when you can reframe it as a moral problem. We saw this in the 1990s under Bush I when they did the whole "babies thrown out from incubators" lie that garnered support for the first Gulf war. We saw it again with the "tubes for WMDs" in the second Iraq war.
- sacred_numbers 6y ago
  You could also say it's the same reason asylum seekers and immigrants are called illegal aliens. It's still politics, just in a different direction. Framing something as a moral problem is not necessarily bad; it just has to be a real moral problem that justifies the proposed solution. The problem with the Iraq war was that the government lied about the problem so that they could justify a bad solution.
  - fareesh 6y ago
    There is an objective difference between the terms. By mislabelling something, it is an outright falsehood, just like the lies about the Iraq war.
colejohnson66 6y ago
Because there’s riots and protests. They’re not one and the same.
- jojobas 6y ago
  The cops are after evidence on arson and gun theft, not protests, as the headline says.

salawat 6y ago

This is why everyone should be raising hell over things like RealID and the requirement for you to allow the Federal government to get a hold of biometrics for you in order to fly. This is also why Third Party Doctrine is screaming for reassessment in the wake of expanded capabilities for meta information collection, storage and reproduction. In the past, your recordings/pictures/artifacts of reporting were physical things that cost time, money, and effort to reproduce. No one would want to ask for anymore than is absolutely necessary due to the inconvenience. Nowadays, with terabytes of data being able to be stored in the palm of one's hand, and copied, moved in minutes, there is a much greater risk for old precedents to turn into dangerous overreach based upon the sheer exaggeration of the capability to get blood from the stone of a photograph. Get a picture with a partial match in a database of a subject? Spin by their residence with a a Stingray and sniff some IMEI's. Take that to a telco, Google, or a data broker, and geofence. Or look at the latest data dump acquired and see if you can match them with some data point in the area. In this age, the things we can do with data scare the ever loving bajeezus out of me, and it's not that I don't want LE to be unable to do their jobs, but we really need to get a societal handle on how we treat digital footprint. Otherwise, it's not that far to a world nobody wants to see or live.

barnaclejive 6y ago

SPD wants video?, shoulda thought of taking it themselves then. Don't slicken a slippery slope.

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

He found that the photos and video were critical for an investigation into the alleged arson of SPD vehicles and theft of police guns Given the wildly lax gun laws in the United States, I imagine that the folks who took these guns could've just as easily driven over to Wade's in Bellevue and bought themselves something equally lethal. No reason why we should uniquely be having such a freakout over guns disappearing from a Seattle PD car. (setting aside a general freakout over US gun laws. Also, hi downvoters.)

clarkmoody 6y ago
Replace the word "guns" with any other type of property, and read your comment again.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  OK "Given the wildly lax sandwich laws in the United States, I imagine that the folks who took these sandwiches could've just as easily driven over to Wade's in Bellevue and bought themselves something equally lethal. No reason why we should uniquely be having such a freakout over sandwiches disappearing from a Seattle PD car" I'm a brit so I don't know anything about guns but I'm assuming they're more dangerous than a bread-based food, which may be be the point.
- yeetawayhn 6y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of lack of self-awareness going on in that statement. "Excuse me while I ride my death machine over to a store."
onion2k 6y ago
Presumably if you go to Wade's in Bellevue and buy a gun there's some sort of paper trail that can be useful in investigations should the gun be used in a crime. In general, people who steal guns don't leave their name and address.
Bx6667 6y ago
This comment blatantly breaks the guidelines and yet nobody flags it. But when I make a benign comment that has a pro-conservative sentiment, it’s instantly flagged and responded to by Dan.

blue52 6y ago

This is a great example of why a "warrant" is nothing other than an abusive fishing expedition. A "warrant" can be rubber stamped to exfil all of your internet data, phone records, credit card statements, to raid your home or business... All gestapo techniques. I'm very glad we have encryption and other related technologies that can prevent this type of tyranny. With all of the tech I design, privacy is the number one priority. That includes being warrant-proof.

dencodev 6y ago
Warrants aren't even needed these days with the Patriot Act
- blue52 6y ago
  You are right, thanks. I don't live there anymore so that atrocity slipped my mind.

Y-Bopinator 6y ago

People opposed to the Judge’s order want the police weapons to remain on the streets in the hands of criminals. They also want to ensure the arson goes unpunished. How despicable.