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."

Comments

Love it

[Anonymous Coward]

Be part of the solution - not part of the problem.

Re:Love it

[hawguy]

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.

Re:Love it

[Anubis IV]

You're missing the point. Manually redacted footage will still be available via FOIA request, and unredacted footage will still be available in court. These over-redacted clips are designed specifically so that they can be publicly posting to the 'net at the end of each day, without anyone ever having to make a FOIA request at all. And they're not blurred to the point of uselessness; they're blurred to the point where you can't see details, but you can see when something is happening that warrants further attention.

The idea is that by posting them immediately, it will increase transparency by giving the public a means to sift through recent footage and find incidents that may be of interest, without compromising the privacy of the individuals involved. By enabling the public to more or less go on fishing expeditions on their own time without costing the police any extra time or effort, it benefits the public since they are more capable of finding incidents, and it benefits the police since the FOIA requests they'll be dealing with (they claim that a minute of footage takes an hour to redact on average) will hopefully be more narrow in scope, since the requestors would have been able to sift out the majority of the irrelevant footage in advance. The end result is more capability to discover unreported incidents, more awareness of what's actually going on, less time spent manually redacting irrelevant footage, and a greater capacity for handling FOIA requests.

It's a win-win, and it's by no means useless. It actually strikes a great balance between protecting the privacy of those being filmed and making the body cam footage readily available so that the public can better oversee the police.

I'm extremely surprised...

[ckatko]

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.

Re:Please, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Please, no.

[meta-monkey]

Now it won't just be arrests, though, but any interaction with police.

We just see the way this goes. Some tiny little thing gets taken out of context and posted online and people go fucking rabid, for and against.

There was a story a few weeks ago from Australia (just as easily anywhere in the US, though) about a guy who was "creep shamed" as a pedo when he was really just taking a selfie with Darth Vader as a joke to send to his kids. tl;dr mom sees guy take pic near her kids, flips, takes pic of him, posts online, 20k + views, death threats, cops, psychological trauma, etc etc.

And then of course there was a backlash against her (I'm not sure if her identity was revealed) with all the anti-moral panickers having a moral panic about moral panics. As terrible a mistake as she made, she doesn't deserve death threats either. If you think she does, congratulations on being part of the problem.

I just wonder how good the redaction can be that you can't match somebody up. It's not to hard to imagine the same kind of scenario playing out. Guy's at the park with his kids, kids are out of sight, cop asks the guy what he's doing here "Oh I'm here for the kids." "Hmmm...all right then..." Internet Super Hero catches sight of this, snaps a pic, finds the footage on the police website later "EVERYBODY WATCH OUT FOR THIS PEDO HE 'GOES TO THE PARK FOR THE KIDS!!!!'" Face is blurred and speech is altered, but it's clearly the same guy. Time/place/clothing.

Then of course there's all the other interactions with police where they're not talking to a suspect. What about interviewing victims? If somebody calls the cops on an abusive spouse do they now have to worry that their dirty laundry is going to be on the internet for everybody to see? How hard will it be to match up victims based on...who knows...addresses, landscape features, google street view data.

Same with the mentally ill. Bipolar family member having a manic episode and slipping into psychosis and you need help to get them to the hospital? Gotta think twice about making that call now. And yes, yes, I know there have been a few instances of cops hurting or killing a mentally ill person when their family called for help, but it's very rare compared to the number of times they're the only way to get a suicidal or psychotic person to the hospital for treatment. But now you're adding definite privacy concerns to rare brutality concerns.

Even if they can't identify you, you know some asshole is going to turn this into a game. "Post the funniest/most fucked up police footage." When I was younger and stupider I played a game with people on a forum once where you went to the sexual predator watchdog website where you could put in an address and it would show you the registered sex offenders on a map and you'd find the creepiest looking mugshots/conviction list near you and try to outdo the other people playing the game. I feel pretty ashamed of that now. But, well, it's going to happen.

I'm all for body cams, but man, I just think there's got to be a better way to oversee the program to protect people who have interactions with police than publishing the videos for everybody to see. Some kind of civilian oversight board that approves requests. 99/100, a time you're interacting with police is not a good day in your life. You're either a victim or a suspect, and you don't deserve to have one of the worst days of you life broadcast, particularly in these hyper-sensitive days of internet mob moral justice.