Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings • Hacker News Board

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#81

Post by butvacuum » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 2:07 AM UTC

msla wrote: post #72

butvacuum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this. We know there's no retention because they say there is no retention and we believe them. Why is this so hard to accept? Do you think people can lie?

Not sure where you got the idea I thought TXDOT was not being honest. No retention, live public views, only keep aggregate metrics needed for traffic flow (the official purpose for those cameras- PSA's for traffic jams and expansion plans.).

Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#82

Post by butvacuum » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 2:12 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #57

butvacuum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. But until then, the US at large can hammer them to dust. And, I expect adding ALPR to an exemption was for simplicity's sake- since it's already general knowledge they don't have to create anything for a FOIA request. Easier to just make it explicit so they can point to the law/code.

Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

#83

Post by butvacuum » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 2:16 AM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #60

floatrock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's been multiple incidents of that. Including one where they wanted a per page fee for a DVD. Did not go well for the recording office.

Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).