31–40 of 83 posts
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You 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.
Hockey is a game, governing is not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You 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.
Hockey is a game, governing is not.
Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.
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Service 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 her…
Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
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Or 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 fo…
Just 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…
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Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data. My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.
Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to do anything directly.
Here 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…
To be fair, the relationship between the Icelandic people and their government and their corporate class is wildly different vs that in the US in 2025 to say the least.
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Just 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…
If their data is 100% sourced from public data, its public data.
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Hockey is a game, governing is not.
If 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?
“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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hockey is a game, governing is not.
If 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?
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.