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Seattle Police Held Hackathon To Redact Footage From Body Cameras
An anonymous reader writes: Hackathons are common these days, but you don't often hear about events hosted by law enforcement. That's what the Seattle Police Department did on Friday, with the solitary goal of finding a good way to redact the video streams taken by police body cameras and dash cameras. Seven different teams demonstrated solutions, but in the end, none thought automation could realistically handle the task in the near future. "The Washington State public records act requires that almost all video filmed by any government agency – including police – be disclosed upon request. The only real exception is for video which is part of an open case currently under investigation. However, various parts of the state code include other restrictions – the identity of minors cannot be disclosed. Requests from victims or witnesses who may be at risk if their identities are disclosed also must be honored. However in all such cases the video still must be released – it is just the faces or other potential identifying characteristics, which might include gender or even a person's gait – which need to be blurred and redacted." The city just started a pilot program for body-worn police cameras.
Dashcams stay on the cruiser which is always in a public space. There is no need to redact that video unless you have something to hide.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
We'd all better become Glassholes really quickly.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The footage should be sent straight to several different server centers across the nation. In these places would be people who are paid to watch police all day. They can flip switches and hold conversations with the police. They can ask them how they're doing, their plans, what's been going on, and make sure the police are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Police could get disciplinary action if they turn their cameras off when the observer switches to them and voice or camera is off. Also with all the footage streamed to central server locations, no one place could "delete the evidence"
Duh, redact it by putting a black rectangle over the feed.
just go the area with poor cell coverage and then the video feed stops and the cops can't be at fault.
"Just wait until a gang of thugs beats you to a bloody pulp and rapes your girlfriend.
You'll be thinking differently about the cops then."
See how you can make this argument more effective by removing unnecessary racism?
That they can't change the law?
The ideal system would: 1) Have all data collected by the camera (or other sensor) stay encrypted, even from the officer. 2) Have all data collected move off the device and onto secured servers. 3) The device(s) have a visible identifier (light?) to indicate they are functioning properly. 4) If the device malfunctions, the officer becomes a civlian not a police officer. On a side note, how bout one the terms of service of being a publically elected official being a publically visible NSA scan on the official for their term of service.
We need to go past simple rules which can be changed at whim. We need to mandate encryption of all video and the decryption keys must be stored with a 3rd party who will only release an individual key in response to a court-issued warrant. Not just a court order that any court clerk can sign, but a full-blown judge-signed warrant. We also need official data-expiration policies such than anything older than a year is deleted unless there has been a petition to preserve it - and that's a mere petition to preserve, you'll still need a warrant to decrypt but preservation pending a warrant needs to be easy enough.
If we don't make access physically difficult (versus administratively difficult) it is inevitable that these videos will end up in databases the way license plate scans have. And ten years down the road when Moore's law has kicked up our computational power up by another 100x they'll be running facial recognition, voice recognition, engine-sound recognition, gait-recognition, etc on the videos and data-mining the F out of it so that it becomes a tool for oppression worse than no video at all.
There are a lot of valid reasons to make the video available to the police - better supervision, training (replay their own mistakes as well as study the mistakes of others), etc. But, everything in life is a trade-off and the price of those minor beneficial uses will be state abuse of the camera footage. The only way to preserve liberty is to design the system such that no one, no one at all, has unrestricted physical access to footage.
You mean in the real world there are conflicting priorities and complexities?
But this is Slashdot - I demand that the situation be simple and resolvable by unidirectional moral outrage!
Make it law at a federal level that if a case hinges on the presence or absence of video then the case automatically goes in the civilians favor (unless the video shows otherwise). And the video must be uncut and continuous (no taking a couple seconds out to "improve" the video).
I won't talk to the police with video cameras. No redaction necessary. Lay on more stones!
Police Chief: "Videos are for evidence, not transparency"
The important question is and always ought to be, are those whom the redaction laws are meant to protect going to feel safe otherwise? I suspect that the concern is not that a gang member will use a FOIA request to get the video clip, but that a news broadcaster will, will air it, and the gang member will see or hear of it.
The 'magically turn that face into an address' process is something known as 'facial recognition' and 'memory.' You do it every time you recognize somebody and remember where they live and/or frequent.
There's a reason laws against witness tampering and the like exist, you know. It's because people really will do this, and a lot of people believe--rightly or wrongly--that if all the witnesses are gone, the case will fall apart.
Privacy for me, but not for thee.