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Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

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Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#51

Post by butvacuum »

floatrock wrote: post #26
mixmastamyk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?

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…

This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times and the employees involved can be asked directly, under oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.

Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#52

Post by butvacuum »

tptacek wrote: post #35
trollbridge wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit. Generally I'd predict that it's…

The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras.

Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time.

I suspect an organized campaign will sink the cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#53

Post by chasil »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #45
chasil wrote: post #38

You can find installed Flock cameras around the world with this site: https://deflock.me/

This is missing the Lowes and Home Depot security cameras.

I didn't know that these stores were doing this.

https://flowingdata.com/2025/08/08/lowes-and-home-depot-are-...

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#54

Post by Ajedi32 »

belorn wrote: post #16

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…

Unless you implement a way of stopping people from leaving until they pay (which is really expensive and inefficient), collecting data on who owes you money is sort of unavoidable, no? It's only when that data starts getting collected en masse for no good reason and retained ~forever that we start to run into problems.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#55

Post by amarant »

amarant wrote: post #46
0_____0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking 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.

First actual swede to reply here it seems! It's not a very simple question to answer, but I'll do my best. In general terms, most Swedes trust the government and all government agencies to do their job in a fair and just way, barring the occasional case of incompetence. When a Swede say they don't trust the government, in my experience, they typically mean that they disagree with the current government on matters of…

I felt a need to expand on this. In Sweden, the various agencies are independent from the elected politicians to some degree. This means that while I personally do not trust the current government, I do still trust, for example, the tax agency.

The Swedish tax agency is very different from the American IRS, or at least the impression I have of the irs as a Swede who's never been to the USA for longer than it takes to switch flights, but consumes a likely unhealthy amount of social media which is typically full of Americans.

In Sweden, the tax authority kinda do your tax fillings for you. They send them to you electronically once per year, and give you the chance to correct any inaccuracies, add any information they might have missed etc, and then sign the final result.

I don't think I'm the only one who signs those declarations without even reading them. Regardless of who is currently prime minister, the tax agency typically get it right, and I trust them enough to just accept what they say, and attach my legally binding signature without reading.

I'd estimate about 95% of my Swedish friends do the same.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#56

Post by tptacek »

0_____0 wrote: post #49
tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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.

Found 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/a...

You don't want to get me started on this.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#57

Post by tptacek »

butvacuum wrote: post #52
tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit. Generally I'd predict that it's…

The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras. Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time. I sus…

It's not really meaningfully different than existing closed-circuit cameras and bodycams, except for the ALPR plate/ID records they create, which states are simply going to exempt from FOIA, as Illinois did.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#58

Post by salawat »

tptacek wrote: post #56
0_____0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found 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/a...

You don't want to get me started on this.

places soapbox

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#59

Post by johnnyanmac »

some_random wrote: post #28
qchris wrote: post #18

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.

Not sure I can agree anymore in 2025. Maybe in 2027, hopefully.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#60

Post by vel0city »

floatrock wrote: post #26
mixmastamyk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?

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…

I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good.

What Is a Photocopier?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE

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