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Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
- tptacek 1y agoThey're not panicking about this in Illinois, because Illinois exempts raw ALPR footage from FOIA. This page is blogspam, though.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoBoth good points; I should have linked the original post at https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to-release https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
- dang 1y agoChanged above from https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/11/cities-panic-over-having-to-release-mass-surveillance-recordings.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/11/cities-panic-over-ha.... Thanks!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xnx 1y ago[flagged]
- dedup-com 1y agoIt must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
- mixmastamyk 1y agoAre they not allowed to charge a service fee?
- tptacek 1y agoI don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.
- barbazoo 1y agoIf they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.
- stemlord 1y agothey can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with
- butvacuum 1y agoFOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20. There's a real problem though- anybody (might need to be a US citizen) can FOIA any document anywhere in the US that's not excluded. When they can punt you to the paywall and then reply with a generic reply to a birth cert it's one thing. When you have to actually find people to do the work of reviewing ALL video footage as $small_fraction of 200million people request every second of recorded footage from every camera... You're(as a city) kinda screwed. If they claim privacy they have to be able to prove it but can charge slightly more. But, if they don't then they have to provide the specific request (possibly a little more- say 1hr segments) at a cost representative of the labor involved... Which doesn't include the cost of trying to staff a FOIA center larger than your city.
- floatrock 1y agoService fees is the counter-tactic here. If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and distribute the video clips and time gets billed to $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient, asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of urgency behind them? I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation paths here.
- qchris 1y agoYou know, in hockey there's sometimes a saying that "if you're too small to carry your gear bag, you're too small to play hockey." Feels like there might be some kind of moral lesson there for this situation.
- some_random 1y agoHockey is a game, governing is not.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoNot sure I can agree anymore in 2025. Maybe in 2027, hopefully.
- hrimfaxi 1y agoIf the local governing body is too small to handle the requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken just because there are too few clerks?
- lazide 1y agoEven big cities (and companies!) do this all the time. “Oh, sorry, we are dealing with unusually high wait times. The current wait time is 8 hours” type stuff. Malicious compliance isn’t just for individuals!
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoMy city of 200K provided me with redacted bodycam video a month after the defendant's sham trial. The police are just too busy you see.
- some_random 1y agoI really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests". For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.
- th0ma5 1y agoFOA requests are a part of the total cost of ownership of these products. At some point a vendor, the state, a consultancy was negligent in this fact, and we should not entertain ideas of minimizing the issues I agree. Cities is the correct term, below that size are villages and hamlets and if they are incorporated they are a city.
- AdamJacobMuller 1y agoI don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems? It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it seems like something which most police departments and municipalities are already doing with footage from other scenarios like body cameras?
- jolmg 1y agoMy 2 cents: Police body cameras capture events at random locations. These other cameras are fixed in place and can more reliably be used to stalk people.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoThere's also tons of these. I feel like I don't see a police cruiser every time I drive somewhere, but I do pass by a couple surveillance cameras. If I assume that 1/3rd of my city's sworn officers are on duty at any time, there's literally more cameras than officers around town.
- mc32 1y agoOr as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach. ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.) It’d be a bad precedent to follow, but they could. I wonder what Tiburon will be doing. They’ve had ALPRs since forever as they only have one road in and one road out, so it’s easy for them to do.
- tptacek 1y agoJust raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the PD keeps on hand from Flock searches. There is an interesting thing happening in FOIA law here in WA (you'd never notice it from this spammy article, though). A pretty common FOIA exemption is for data not managed by a public body, but via some commercial vendor. FOIA generally only allows you to demand production of (1) actual documents that (2) the public body has (3) on hand (or are generally deemed to have on hand, such as email records). So it's pretty legally dubious that you can use FOIA to compel production from Flock (you can probably compel, from the public body, any number of reports Flock can generate --- we've done that here for our Flock network and sharing configurations, for instance). Here it sounds like a WA judge might be saying that some corpus of data Flock maintains is effectively public data. If that's the case, that's a novel interpretation.
- belorn 1y agoHere in Sweden, the use of license plate scanners has become the norm for basically all parking houses, bridge tolls and road tolls. Even if you don't install the app or become a "member" of whatever system they are using, the license plate scanners is still used to detect when you enter or leave, and in some cases they automatically look up your home address to send you the bill with zero interaction with the driver. Even if they offer alternative ways to pay, by for example sms, it still uses the license plate scanner when you leave. The only political party to even mention this as a problem was the pirate party back 15 years ago, and even then it never became a major issue that got discussed. Like paying with credit cards rather than physical cash, people see it as convenience or just as the way things now work.
- 0_____0 1y agoLooking for context here: how do Swedes view their government? Do they feel represented by, it, trust their governments etc.? My perception as a USian in a coastal, progressive state, is that trust in government is quite low. Municipal and county governments do OK, but federal and to some degree state governments seems to have priorities that are wildly divergent from our own.
- tptacek 1y agoI'm in Chicagoland (in Oak Park, directly adjacent to the west side of Chicago) and it literally depends on which suburb you're in. Oak Park is hostile to ALPRs. Berwyn, our neighbor to the south, and River Forest, to the west, are carpeted with them. They're there because people want them.
- 0_____0 1y agoFound this amazing redlining map. I think I've highlighted Berwyn. I don't have knowledge to contextualize the map but I'm curious if any patterns from the HOLC map are strongly present in your area now. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/IL/Chicago/area_descriptions/B98#loc=13/41.8522/-87.7382 https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/IL/Chicago/a...
- chasil 1y agoYou can find installed Flock cameras around the world with this site: https://deflock.me/ https://deflock.me/
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThis is missing the Lowes and Home Depot security cameras.
- aerostable_slug 1y agoIt shows the Lowes & HD cameras near me. The map depends upon volunteers to enter data IIRC.
- chasil 1y agoI didn't know that these stores were doing this. https://flowingdata.com/2025/08/08/lowes-and-home-depot-are-sharing-customer-data-with-law-enforcement/ https://flowingdata.com/2025/08/08/lowes-and-home-depot-are-...
- AyJayColumns 1y agoThat’s because you haven’t submitted them yet :) It’s crowdsourced via OpenStreetMaps
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThe truth can hurt, law doesn’t victimize someone for being held accountable.
- acaloiar 1y agoIt's interesting that even people who are anti-Flock have been convinced to refer to Flock's camera products as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). This is similar to how Google has convinced Android users to refer to installing apps from stores other than the Play Store as "side-loading". It's a distraction. Make no mistake -- Flock cameras are mass-surveillance tools with the ancillary use case of automatic license plate reading. I encourage anyone discussing these products not to refer to them as ALPRs, unless specifically discussing their license plate reading functionality.