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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."
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?
Videos are redacted for casual public viewing, because there are laws about the privacy of minors, the mentally ill, etc.
A courtroom is not the same thing: it is not casual, and judges and juries can view video in private to protect the identities of witnesses (like children or mafia informants) or innocent bystanders disclosed. The videos shown to a jury will not be redacted.
The Swiss have a good solution to this problem -- privacy laws, guaranteed in their constitution. It's illegal to report on things like arrests or legal proceedings until after such proceedings are concluded. Their privacy laws are most famous for money laundering, but they're important and the rest of the world should adopt them too. There are better way to collect tax than spying on everyone's bank balances anyway.
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
This does not sound like traditional police behavior. GOOD FOR THEM.
I wouldn't call being specific about what you want a "limitation".
Requesting it all is a stupid stunt.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.