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The Body Cam Hacker Who Schooled the Police
New submitter Cuillere writes: In the fall of 2014, a hacker demanded the Seattle Police Department release all of their body and dash cam video footage, prompting chaos within the institution. Although it was a legal request per Washington state's disclosure laws, Seattle's PD wasn't prepared to handle the repercussions of divulging such sensitive material — and so much of it. The request involved 360 TB of data spread across 1.6 million recordings over 6 years. All recordings had to be manually reviewed and redacted to cut out "children, medical or mental health incidents, confidential informants, or victims or bystanders who did not want to be recorded," so fulfilling the request was simply not within the department's capabilities. Thus, they took a different strategy: they hired the hacker and put him to work on developing an automated redaction system. "Their vision is of an officer simply docking her body cam at the end of a shift. The footage would then be automatically uploaded to storage, either locally or in the cloud, over-redacted for privacy and posted online for everyone to see within a day."
Be part of the solution - not part of the problem.
"...so you see, Your Honor, that's why all the footage is completely black, end to end, and we have no useful footage of the incident in question."
Man requests video footage via FOIA, earns job categorizing and sanitizing video footage to allow release to public in compliance with both FOIA and privacy laws. System ends up better off and expects to work in a transparent manner.
Move along...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
give me all of your money!
OK, here is a job counting it
Are we just talking about blurring faces?
I am 100% for body cameras on all police. But when that footage goes public, it becomes a possible intrusion into my civil liberties. What if I get arrested on a bogus child sex abuse charge? Facebook provides a good model of what will happen. The perp goes up on a police blotter for mug shots, it goes viral, and even after he is cleared, FB stalkers turn into real life stalkers, pulling up into the driveway in the dead of night and flashing their brights into the living room, or publicly commenting that if they see them on the street, they're as good as dead. Such a thing happened to a friend of mine, and this bullshit mob justice has to stop.
The only way to protect the rights of the accused is to hide police-public interactions behind an wall of secrecy. Want body cam footage? Or a mug shot? Or an arrest history? Get a subpoena, and it better be relevant.
What about the innocent people being filmed by the police, and by innocent I mean those who have not yet been proven guilty? Or does Seattle also have some magical hacker system that can provide due process and justice within the same 24 hour period?
I'm extremely surprised to hear that a police department--when faced with legal requests from an unimportant regular joe--actually went out of their way to implement an elegant system to an issue instead of dragging their feet. None of us would have been surprised to see a police department throw a wrench into the system.
I'm honestly considering writing them a letter thanking them for their exemplary compliance. Good cops need to know we support them.
Is the police force going to keep the original, unredacted, footage someplace? If not then that is tampering with evidence and is a crime.
For court purposes, there can't be any redaction.
Because as soon as you start snipping out bits, you lose context and some of what actually happened.
The full video must be available for scrutiny ... or you'll get the 5 seconds which supports the police version of events, or which has been edited to alter the sequence of events.
Part of the reason people are starting to insist on body cameras is we don't trust the police. Because increasingly the police are not trustworthy, and don't know or care what the law says.
Which means all of this raw video should be held in escrow where the police have no ability to alter or delete it.
If the police hold it, and have the power to edit it ... suddenly it becomes a less trustworthy record.
So when the police start claiming they need to redact it, they better have the ability to provide the un-redacted version for court proceedings.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
BOOM Ima hacker now!
Seattleite here. Please note that SPD is under federal oversight and this is good progress but there's a bigger story/problems with SPD (as I'd guess with many PDs).
I was also present when the hacker in question got arrested in the initial incident, was the final Urban Golf event (bar crawl hitting foam golf balls with real golf clubs through the city, tended to get a bit out of hand) in Seattle. I and about 10 other people gave up our IDs, he did not and went to jail.
Quote of the evening from the dickish officer in charge: "If I see one more person dressed in Argyle tonight, they're going to jail."
-S
What kind of mentally deficient person wrote that summary? A programmer or professional video editor would be the one hired to do that job, not a hacker. Did they lose the password to the video system? Otherwise he's not a hacker.
They are running a filter on the video footage that reduces to video equivalent of line art so that details such as facial features, distinguishing marks, license plates, etc. are no longer visible. Audio continues to be a problem but they are exploring various solutions. Pretty clever solution actually. I assume for evidentiary footage an unmanipulated version is being kept as well. This is very similar to a video library where a "preview" copy is rendered at a low resolution to save space/bandwidth and access is granted to everyone and the high quality copy is kept in reserve and can be requested upon demand.
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This is another case of people wanting to make police so accountable they are willing to compromise their own privacy and spend millions of dollars country wide doing it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it enough to be able to get specific recordings on demand? I mean, if a cop kills someone the video of the incident is required, not the other 5 TB recorded that day.
This data should only need to be pulled out where abuse is suspected or complaints are made about an officer's behavior (because they know it can be proved via the body cam).
This is terrible.
Just how are body cams supposed to do their job of uncovering and providing evidence of police misconduct if the footage can be redacted, automatically or otherwise? These people are public servants who have a history... an especially ugly and heinous history in the last year or so... of misconduct on the job and dodging accountability for said misconduct. I don't have any particular expectation of privacy from my employer during the performance of my job. Why should they?
Imagine all the people...
This does not sound like traditional police behavior. GOOD FOR THEM.
You're making fun of Tumblr, but you're triggered by a pronoun....
...where he posted a video where a woman who had been arrested over a DWI had her social security and home address read aloud at the station. He then laughed about it and defended his actions until we finally got the mods to awaken and remove the video. He's a real piece of work.
Their self-inflicted problem is trying to store the video for eternity.
If they established a policy where video not required for cases/prosecution were deleted after ~1 month, they'd only have a few GB of data to worry about.
Well now we have another use for that NSA storage facility =)
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not FOIA; the FOIA response is to say "yes, we can do that, and we will charge you our cost of x$/hr of footage". The FOIA does give an exemption of that cost for media requests, though for fishing expeditions we still have the option of charging our costs for complying with the FOIA request. I still think, though, that it's dumb that we have to charge roughly $3.50 for most that are asking for 2-3 properly identified and easy to find documents. It probably costs us that much to estimate the cost and accept the payment.
Come on, a police department taking something that could cost them millions, plus bad media and turning into something good? Heads will have to roll for this decision.
Feds + Hacker/Cracker = Fracker.
Remember when there was a difference between hacker and cracker?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Part of the problem is this:
Q. How long are the videos kept?
A: Current policy is to indefinitely keep video recordings dealing with crimes. The Seattle Police Department is working with Department of Justice monitor Merrick Bobb to finalize policies for the body-worn cameras.
Are they deleting videos that DON'T deal with crimes after a set period? And why in God's name are they kept indefinitely? Anything the DA doesn't elect to prosecute should be deleted fairly quickly. Anything that hints at police misconduct or a criminal charge against an office is kept for the duration of the State Statute of Limitations.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Amending public records laws to require individuals to grant permission to release personal information prior to releasing records? And go allow charging for material, if the law doesn't already, so fishing expeditions would be to expensive.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
A man made a legal request, but some how the moronically ignorant blogger is now claiming that he is hacker.
He didn't school anybody. He hasn't even delivered the work he was hire for (ie: haven't finished the job).
So how anything related to this article turns into the word HACKER ??
Better stay away from "Blurred Lines", you you may get sued by Marvin Gaye's family.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
How on earth can opening the footage to the public NOT compromise privacy? I asked a cop on a streetcorner for directions the other day, he gave them, I thanked him and went on my way, no problem. I consider that to be a private conversation (it reveals my whereabouts that day and tells where I was trying to go). I don't want video of it to be a public record open to "fishing expeditions" by random jerks (think of Facebook mining all that video to build into consumer profiles). If the cop had beat me up when I asked for directions, then there'd be an active dispute so I'd want to be able to get the video as part of a possible court case, but not for "fishing". Or if there's an investigation against the cop (someone says he was in another town committing a murder at that time, and he wants to use the video as an alibi) that's fine. The basic principle in the US constitution is the "case or controversy" clause that says you can only go to court over a dispute that YOU are involved in, not sticking your nose into the business of third parties. Getting the video should be comparable. Unless there's an actual dispute involving the person requesting the video, nobody (including the police department and the cop wearing the camera) should be allowed to see the video and it should be deleted after 1 year.
Sorry, no mod points for you today.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
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cf 1984
im sure the IT department loves him
A few bad apples in the police
are making videos necessary
which is making privacy on a bad day impossible.
Having the video's seems good.
Releasing them willy nilly seems bad.
Perhaps the rule should be that they can be released to anybody in them
but that this does not give the person holding the tape the right to
release photo's of anybody else except the policeman.