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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.
FOIA requests should not apply to police cams or 911 calls. The FOIA has a clear exemption
for where the privacy of the individual will be violated. Here is a good summary of how the
FOIA interacts with privacy laws: http://people.howstuffworks.co...
From the GeekWire article:
However, Seattle Police officials also admitted that about 90 percent of the video officers create probably needs no redaction at all. That’s because members of the public have no right to expect privacy in their interactions with police, unless they are juveniles or a witness or victim whose safety might be at risk if their identity is known.
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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.