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."
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.