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Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

seattletimes.com

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Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#201

Post by alexpotato »

mulmen wrote: post #175
wrs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ev…

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…

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...

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#202

Post by potato3732842 »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #193
potato3732842 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire. This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd l…

This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level. People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifter…

>This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.

Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.

Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.

This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.

>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.

This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk

The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.

The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.

And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#203

Post by estearum »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #76
estearum wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Data Show Trump Would’ve Released as Many Border Crossers as Biden" from the right-wing Cato Institute > As I previously demonstrated, President Biden removed a higher percentage of border crossers in his first two years than Trump did during his last two years (51 percent versus 47 percent), despite Trump having to deal with many fewer total crossings (Table 1). Congress right now is in a bipartisan state of denial…

> Biden has deported vastly greater numbers and a higher share of crossers, but it has not deterred people from crossing. ICE and Trump seem to be enough deterrent now, considering how the land encounters have reduced. > The logistics are such that once arrivals exceed the deportation machine’s capacity, people will find out and even more will come. This explains the huge ice funding increase.

Yes, breaking asylum and due process laws will be a deterrent. The question was always how to deter immigration legally, which prior POTUSes thought they had to care about.

Re the funding increase:

People to put handcuffs on wasn’t the bottleneck, so no it doesn’t. Immigration courts are the bottleneck, and actually jamming more low-level or non-offenders into the system exacerbates that problem.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#204

Post by duped »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #73
notepad0x90 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border? When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.

> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border? Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules. In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red…

If the light never turned green you'd bet your butt that plenty of people would run the light.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#205

Post by wmf »

potato3732842 wrote: post #130
pton_xd wrote: post #12

What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.

They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.

When history is racist, only racists will read history books.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#206

Post by mschuster91 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #169
mschuster91 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from. That's because the local authorities aren't the final customer. The final customer is the federal government, they want allllll the data.

And Garrett, the founder, has what even he calls a quite literal, not aspirational/visionary/metaphorical, aim that "We want to eliminate all crime."

Dear God I hate this particular breed of techbros. These people don't give a damn about democracy, about human rights or anything else other than their stab at entering the history books in a "positive" light...

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#207

Post by christophilus »

giantg2 wrote: post #127
jajuuka wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.

"Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation." This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.

Exactly. Same goes for expansion of presidential powers. It’s all fun and games as long as your “good” team controls the executive, but there will come a time when bad guy takes over. A good system of government limits the impact any single bad player might have.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#208

Post by relaxing »

adrr wrote: post #161
sleepybrett wrote: post #90

No they turned them off because it turns out those cameras are public records and all their citizens can make requests for ALL THAT DATA.

Couldn't they just not log the license plates and only look for license plates on the list like stolen cars, stolen plates, amber alert etc? Why do they a need a list of all cars that the camera saw?

To run fishing expeditions.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#209

Post by BobaFloutist »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #10
fuzzylightbulb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these acti…

In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes. If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.

Ok, and a real-time-only (as in it literally, physically has no onboard or networked storage and only generates data exactly when it hits a plate that's already flagged, or is false/doesn't match the car and the system to flag a plate requires a warrant) flock system would face vastly less opposition than the fishing-expedition-enabler that currently exists. Yet somehow that's never on the table.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#210

Post by anigbrowl »

cipehr wrote: post #52
Eisenstein wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us. At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.

Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public? The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera. The question here is if a public/government agenc…

You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.

https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/4241/e...

Japan has set about harmonizing its privacy laws with the GPDR and similar for business purposes.

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