[HN Gopher] Cities panic over having to release mass surveillanc...
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Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
Author : pavel_lishin
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-11-17 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neuburger.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neuburger.substack.com)
| tptacek wrote:
| They're not panicking about this in Illinois, because Illinois
| exempts raw ALPR footage from FOIA.
|
| This page is blogspam, though.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Both good points; I should have linked the original post at
| https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
| dang wrote:
| Changed above from
| https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/11/cities-panic-over-
| ha.... Thanks!
| dedup-com wrote:
| It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather
| generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K.
| They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA
| requests, hence "panic".
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in
| IL.
| barbazoo wrote:
| If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can
| imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help
| either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually
| reduces the demand.
| stemlord wrote:
| they can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with
| butvacuum wrote:
| FOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting
| a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20.
|
| There's a real problem though- anybody (might need to be a
| US citizen) can FOIA any document anywhere in the US that's
| not excluded. When they can punt you to the paywall and
| then reply with a generic reply to a birth cert it's one
| thing.
|
| When you have to actually find people to do the work of
| reviewing _ALL_ video footage as $small_fraction of
| 200million people request every second of recorded footage
| from every camera... You 're(as a city) kinda screwed. If
| they claim privacy they have to be able to prove it but can
| charge slightly more. But, if they don't then they have to
| provide the specific request (possibly a little more- say
| 1hr segments) at a cost representative of the labor
| involved... Which doesn't include the cost of trying to
| staff a FOIA center larger than your city.
| floatrock wrote:
| Service fees is the counter-tactic here.
|
| If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and
| distribute the video clips and time gets billed to
| $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient,
| asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of
| urgency behind them?
|
| I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how
| defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation
| paths here.
| tptacek wrote:
| Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably
| fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees
| for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit
| with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal
| representation on contingency.
| trollbridge wrote:
| It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor
| should be able to assist them in these data requests,
| too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the
| data. My own opinion is that vendors who collect data
| from governments like this should be subject to foia
| themselves.
| tptacek wrote:
| Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more
| authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not
| going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with
| FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already
| been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's
| super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie
| people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit.
|
| Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be
| able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to
| do anything directly.
| butvacuum wrote:
| The real one is people coming up with minor, but
| recognized, reasons to request footage from different
| cameras.
|
| Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's
| a huge difference between things like Obama's birth
| cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire
| US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min
| segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different
| camera, date, and time.
|
| I suspect an organized campaign will sink the
| cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not
| retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how
| TXDOT handled this.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's not really meaningfully different than existing
| closed-circuit cameras and bodycams, except for the ALPR
| plate/ID records they create, which states are simply
| going to exempt from FOIA, as Illinois did.
| butvacuum wrote:
| This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a
| County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a
| CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back
| a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled
| they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy
| 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times
| and the employees involved can be asked directly, under
| oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.
|
| Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title
| companies are absolute scum.
| vel0city wrote:
| I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio
| charging $2 per page for copies of public documents.
| NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from
| that case, pretty good.
|
| What Is a Photocopier?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE
| qchris wrote:
| You know, in hockey there's sometimes a saying that "if you're
| too small to carry your gear bag, you're too small to play
| hockey." Feels like there might be some kind of moral lesson
| there for this situation.
| some_random wrote:
| Hockey is a game, governing is not.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| If the local governing body is too small to handle the
| requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken
| just because there are too few clerks?
| lazide wrote:
| Even big cities (and companies!) do this all the time.
|
| "Oh, sorry, we are dealing with unusually high wait
| times. The current wait time is 8 hours" type stuff.
|
| Malicious compliance isn't just for individuals!
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| My city of 200K provided me with redacted bodycam video a
| month _after_ the defendant 's sham trial. The police are
| just too busy you see.
| some_random wrote:
| I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this
| case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts
| of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the
| reason why is not "because the city is too small to
| handle FOIA requests".
|
| For another example, some rural localities want to
| restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is
| expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really
| don't know.
| butvacuum wrote:
| _winners bell SFX_
|
| I seem to recall FOIA provides pathways for overloaded
| clerks in situations where there's mass requests. But, it
| only grants an extended period in which to respond (eg,
| 14 days instead of 48hrs). But, you can take escalate
| with the State government like you can with denied
| requests.
|
| This is tinted with my knowledge of my Locaal (long a),
| and the areas I've made FOIA requests with.
|
| And, turns out if you want to affect change- you have to
| make the bureaucrats care- Not the officials.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Have less laws then.
|
| You literally can't be a high touch, high jackboot,
| administrative state unless you have enough wealth to
| skim off it to run your enforcing operation.
|
| There's a reason that places with less wealth to dip into
| are either more hands off or go full speed trap town to
| pay for it all.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If they can't afford to provide the service, then they
| can't afford to provide the service. In this case, they
| simply can't afford to video anything that would require
| redaction for FOIA requests. Stanwood joining with Camano
| Island or Marrysville, it's still a rural area that can't
| afford it.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Using invasive surveillance tech to govern is not needed
| then. If you can't handle the full service (on both ends)
| of the technology, then you can't deploy it and have to use
| regular old police work or legacy techniques to enforce it.
|
| Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not sure I can agree anymore in 2025. Maybe in 2027,
| hopefully.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| FOA requests are a part of the total cost of ownership of these
| products. At some point a vendor, the state, a consultancy was
| negligent in this fact, and we should not entertain ideas of
| minimizing the issues I agree. Cities is the correct term,
| below that size are villages and hamlets and if they are
| incorporated they are a city.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to
| release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the
| systems?
|
| It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that
| footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of
| the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it
| seems like something which most police departments and
| municipalities are already doing with footage from other
| scenarios like body cameras?
| jolmg wrote:
| My 2 cents: Police body cameras capture events at random
| locations. These other cameras are fixed in place and can more
| reliably be used to stalk people.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| There's also tons of these. I feel like I don't see a police
| cruiser every time I drive somewhere, but I do pass by a
| couple surveillance cameras.
|
| If I assume that 1/3rd of my city's sworn officers are on
| duty at any time, there's literally more cameras than
| officers around town.
| mc32 wrote:
| Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow
| Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach.
|
| ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and
| others wanting to track someone (imagine "Hollywood"
| personaes.)
|
| It'd be a bad precedent to follow, but they could. I wonder
| what Tiburon will be doing. They've had ALPRs since forever as
| they only have one road in and one road out, so it's easy for
| them to do.
| tptacek wrote:
| Just raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I
| remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the
| PD keeps on hand from Flock searches.
|
| There is an interesting thing happening in FOIA law here in
| WA (you'd never notice it from this spammy article, though).
| A pretty common FOIA exemption is for data not managed by a
| public body, but via some commercial vendor. FOIA generally
| only allows you to demand production of (1) actual documents
| that (2) the public body has (3) on hand (or are generally
| deemed to have on hand, such as email records).
|
| So it's pretty legally dubious that you can use FOIA to
| compel production _from Flock_ (you can probably compel, from
| the public body, any number of reports Flock can generate ---
| we 've done that here for our Flock network and sharing
| configurations, for instance).
|
| Here it sounds like a WA judge might be saying that some
| corpus of data _Flock_ maintains is effectively public data.
| If that 's the case, that's a novel interpretation.
| trollbridge wrote:
| If their data is 100% sourced from public data, its public
| data.
| tptacek wrote:
| That is not remotely how it works in Illinois. It's not
| even how _public data held by public bodies_ works: you
| can generally only compel production of specific
| documents that already exist.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers
| and others wanting to track someone (imagine "Hollywood"
| personaes.)_
|
| Not potential problems, actual existing problems:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-
| te...
| tptacek wrote:
| Worth being specific here: the problem this page is
| discussing isn't ALPRs per se, but automatic ALPR data
| sharing.
| 8note wrote:
| > ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers
| and others wanting to track someone (imagine "Hollywood"
| personaes.)
|
| the stalker is gonna be a cop with full access to that data
| though. if its good enough to be in cops hands, who are
| utterly unaccountable to anyone, its safe enough to be in the
| general public's too.
| plorg wrote:
| They may feel (or their counsel may suggest) that it presents
| more of a legal risk than it's worth. A prudent city government
| would have evaluated this _before_ installing such equipment,
| but maybe we can be generous and imagine that being subject to
| such litigation revealed a mismatch between their legal
| evaluation and the judiciary 's.
| wan23 wrote:
| Maybe think about it narrowed down to an individual level -
| maybe you installed a camera or two around your property for
| whatever useful reasons like monitoring your children, and then
| later you find out that you are required to share all of your
| footage with some other entity (e.g. the police) in a way you
| did not sign up for. Would you choose to release your footage,
| or would you take the cameras down?
| belorn wrote:
| Here in Sweden, the use of license plate scanners has become the
| norm for basically all parking houses, bridge tolls and road
| tolls. Even if you don't install the app or become a "member" of
| whatever system they are using, the license plate scanners is
| still used to detect when you enter or leave, and in some cases
| they automatically look up your home address to send you the bill
| with zero interaction with the driver. Even if they offer
| alternative ways to pay, by for example sms, it still uses the
| license plate scanner when you leave.
|
| The only political party to even mention this as a problem was
| the pirate party back 15 years ago, and even then it never became
| a major issue that got discussed. Like paying with credit cards
| rather than physical cash, people see it as convenience or just
| as the way things now work.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Looking for context here: how do Swedes view their government?
| Do they feel represented by, it, trust their governments etc.?
|
| My perception as a USian in a coastal, progressive state, is
| that trust in government is quite low. Municipal and county
| governments do OK, but federal and to some degree state
| governments seems to have priorities that are wildly divergent
| from our own.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm in Chicagoland (in Oak Park, directly adjacent to the
| west side of Chicago) and it literally depends on which
| suburb you're in. Oak Park is hostile to ALPRs. Berwyn, our
| neighbor to the south, and River Forest, to the west, are
| carpeted with them. They're there because people want them.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Found this amazing redlining map. I think I've highlighted
| Berwyn. I don't have knowledge to contextualize the map but
| I'm curious if any patterns from the HOLC map are strongly
| present in your area now.
|
| https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/IL/Chicago/
| a...
| tptacek wrote:
| You don't want to get me started on this.
| salawat wrote:
| _places soapbox_
| LadyCailin wrote:
| I can't speak to Swedes, but as an American Norwegian, I can
| say that the level of trust in Scandinavian is WAY higher
| than in the US. It's not utopia, of course, (see Chat
| Control, for instance) but you really can trust the
| government here to take care of things when it goes off the
| rails for whatever reason.
| amarant wrote:
| First actual swede to reply here it seems!
|
| It's not a very simple question to answer, but I'll do my
| best. In general terms, most Swedes trust the government and
| all government agencies to do their job in a fair and just
| way, barring the occasional case of incompetence. When a
| Swede say they don't trust the government, in my experience,
| they typically mean that they disagree with the current
| government on matters of policy, not that they suspect it of
| corruption.
|
| I myself don't trust the current government, in that I think
| they will likely make the wrong decisions on important
| matters, I think they have the wrong priorities, and their
| argumentation is often insincere. I do not, however, suspect
| them of anything more nefarious than engaging in right-wing
| populism(by Swedish standards, our default is considerably
| further left than America's)
|
| A coup attempt by a government official in Sweden, such as we
| have seen in the USA and Brazil among other places recently,
| seems to me about as likely as our current prime minister
| turning out to be a literal lizard-man.
|
| Do note that I'm speaking rather broadly here, and only about
| my perception of the majority of Swedes. I have ties to
| northern Sweden and Stockholm, but very few to the south, so
| regional variance might also be a factor to consider. Most
| Swedes live in the south, where my connections are few.
|
| Hope this sheds some light for you!
| amarant wrote:
| I felt a need to expand on this. In Sweden, the various
| agencies are independent from the elected politicians to
| some degree. This means that while I personally do not
| trust the current government, I do still trust, for
| example, the tax agency.
|
| The Swedish tax agency is very different from the American
| IRS, or at least the impression I have of the irs as a
| Swede who's never been to the USA for longer than it takes
| to switch flights, but consumes a likely unhealthy amount
| of social media which is typically full of Americans.
|
| In Sweden, the tax authority kinda do your tax fillings for
| you. They send them to you electronically once per year,
| and give you the chance to correct any inaccuracies, add
| any information they might have missed etc, and then sign
| the final result.
|
| I don't think I'm the only one who signs those declarations
| without even reading them. Regardless of who is currently
| prime minister, the tax agency typically get it right, and
| I trust them enough to just accept what they say, and
| attach my legally binding signature without reading.
|
| I'd estimate about 95% of my Swedish friends do the same.
| maxeda wrote:
| Unlike toll roads and parking lot entrances it seems like these
| cameras are being installed for the sole purpose of
| surveillance and tracking peoples movements.
| PrairieFire wrote:
| Same is true in Iceland. It's just the established norm. Much
| less costly vs installing gates and barriers and payment
| terminals and easier to add paid parking to non traditional
| locations where constricting entry/exit to barrier'ed lanes
| would be a challenge or impossible. Shifting the payment
| experience to the user's smartphone. It's still a bit foreign
| to visitors from places where this isn't the norm but for
| Iceland and Icelanders it works well and is a non issue.
|
| To be fair, the relationship between the Icelandic people and
| their government and their corporate class is wildly different
| vs that in the US in 2025 to say the least.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| My last job paid for parking in one of these places. When the
| CEO stopped paying (long, very stupid story) without telling
| us, the parking company sent me, personally, to collections
| despite having zero responsibility to or interaction with these
| people.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Unless you implement a way of stopping people from leaving
| until they pay (which is really expensive and inefficient),
| collecting data on who owes you money is sort of unavoidable,
| no? It's only when that data starts getting collected en masse
| for no good reason and retained ~forever that we start to run
| into problems.
| m463 wrote:
| In the US a lot of the bridge tolls are automated, or became
| automated during the pandemic. With no going back.
|
| You either have to create and account and register your
| vehicles by license plate, or you get a toll in the mail that
| must be paid either by mail or online.
|
| I got behind on a few of these and got fined, I think maybe 5x
| the price tacked on.
|
| I would love to just pay in cash each time I use an
| infrequenlty-crossed bridge.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Toll collection in most states used to be a mostly graft
| operation. They'd make insane salaries for what they did and
| the jobs would be handed out based on political connections.
| Basically welfare for the deadbead family members of the
| politically useful. In my state they had a union and it took
| forever to get rid of them. When they did get rid of them the
| tolls basically halved for no change in revenue because
| that's how much cash was going missing.
| thousand_nights wrote:
| doesn't sweden just.. list everyone's full name, address, job,
| birthday, age and stuff on a public website?
|
| i always found this so weird, it's like a stalker's paradise
| testing22321 wrote:
| This made it interesting for me driving through Europe with my
| Canadian-plated vehicle.
|
| Plenty of boom gates did not open
| chasil wrote:
| You can find installed Flock cameras around the world with this
| site:
|
| https://deflock.me/
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| This is missing the Lowes and Home Depot security cameras.
| chasil wrote:
| I didn't know that these stores were doing this.
|
| https://flowingdata.com/2025/08/08/lowes-and-home-depot-
| are-...
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| It shows the Lowes & HD cameras near me. The map depends upon
| volunteers to enter data IIRC.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The truth can hurt, law doesn't victimize someone for being held
| accountable.
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