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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."
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.
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.
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.
You are not anonymous until proven guilty.
No one should be subject to a trial of public opinion, period.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
give me all of your money!
OK, here is a job counting it
Well more like "You can have all the cash you want, as long as you find a way to make it unusable as currency, yet still detectable as cash".
No one should be subject to a trial of public opinion, period.
No one should be subject to secret arrest and detention either. It's unfortunate that we rush to judgement, but part of the reason to publish arrests is to protect those arrested.