Slashdot Mirror
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."
Their names show up in the police blotter anyway. You are not anonymous until proven guilty.
No, he is indeed part of the problem.
If a software can automatically redact the footage based on non-trivial criteria, then it can also run all sorts of metadata collection, turning every single policeman into a walking surveillance device. If you see a policeman on the street, then your location will be recorded, tied to your identity and stored forever.
Of course, it's possible that this happens already...
Did you read the article? The software blurs the image (or does edge detection, not sure which they are using) to make it possible to see activities without identifying people. So he basically made it impossible to do any kind of identity detection on the processed footage. There's nothing keeping the police from doing so on the original footage, but this guy isn't responsible.
And you believe that the blurred copy is the one that is archived and reviewed for security, and future use in court? the only copy? rather than the original footage that could actually be used to prove a particular person is the one who did something? Sorry, that sounds inconsistent.
Why doesn't anyone read the articles any more?
This guy has nothing to do with the original footage -- the originals are still used for court and other police use (internal affairs investigations, etc). This guy's job is to automatically redact videos so they can be released to the public without paying police to sit down and manually review every video.
He was the winning entry in the SPD's 'hackathon' to produce a video redaction system to meet their needs (his request for video was also the main reason for having the hackathon in the first place buts that's not important).
He pretty much meets the definition of hobbyist hacker from Wikipedia or the #3 definition of hacker from webster "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer".
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
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."
So that's how the grunge phase ended in Seattle. You got yourselves a real fashion police!
How on earth can opening the footage to the public NOT compromise privacy?
Check the article. They provide examples of over-redacted footage. Had you looked at them, you wouldn't be asking the questions you are.
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
All audio is removed from the over-redacted footage and techniques are used to ensure that people are not readily identifiable. Seriously, just go look at the examples.
And I hate to break it to you, but any video recorded of you by an officer already is a matter of public record. Those "random jerks" just need to file a FOIA request to get the video. And in some states, such as Washington, they can even file those requests anonymously. Any interaction you have with a police officer is a matter of public record, whether you like it or not. This doesn't change that.
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.
Oh, definitely. Great plan. Hey, I think the following people may want to review any available footage the police have regarding their "disputes", but for some reason none of them are speaking...oh, that's right, it's because they were all murdered at the hands of police officers. And what do you know? In the two cases below where footage was available, the police officer is facing murder charges, while in the third one, they aren't. How strange.
1) Walter Scott
2) David Kassick
3) Michael Brown
Those were just off the top of my head. But while simply trying to dig up links for those three, I found out that Olympia, Washington police shot two unarmed brothers at a grocery store yesterday, that a rookie cop in New York fatally shot an innocent, unarmed man who just happened to step out of an apartment at the wrong time, that a cop in South Carolina shot an unarmed man at a traffic stop when the man turned to grab his driver's license, that Anaheim, California cops fatally shot two unarmed men in back-to-back days...the list goes on.
Honestly, it's really depressing. I'm finding more articles about shootings I didn't know about than I am about the high-profile ones I was already aware of. And all of those but the last one are from just the last eight months.
Suffice to say, I vehemently disagree with you.