[AdamJacobMuller]

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?

[plorg]

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.

[overfeed]

> why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems?

It means any rando can now retroactively surveil[1] board members' movements, if they choose, rather than the police or rando-at-city-hall selecting targets.

1. This is what the ciry leadership thought of first, hut the general problem is rich/powerful interests who can fight this are now potential targets of surveillance by anyone. Funny how unplanned egalitarianism consistently results in shutdowns of systems designed to work under a power imbalance.

[wan23]

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?

[mc32]

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” personæs.)

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]

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.

[_DeadFred_]

Wouldn't this only be true if the camera's are primarily used by non-government entities? Once their income/use is primarily from the government they become an agent of the state and relevant laws apply, no? Wasn't this how they were able to FOIA 'private' parole officers in the south a couple of years back? Or they could 'constructively' construed as being a public entity? Private parole officer, private care providers, etc have all been ruled to in fact be constructively agents of the state and the rules (not necessarily FOIA in each instance, but even tougher constraints that would easily apply as precedent for FOIA) applied to them.

[tptacek]

No, that's not how it works. So far as I know, FOIA basically never compels private entities to do anything. It can compel usage by the public body, in many (but not all) cases. But FOIA isn't going to let you crack open an Atlassian (or Flock) database, unless something truly novel happens in FOIA jurisprudence.

We might be talking past each other, because this stuff is subtle. But basically: whoever's doing the actual document production under FOIA, it's got to be a public body. If you're a commercial SAAS serving a public body, and you've got data that FOIA says needs to be produced, that's the public body's problem, not yours.

[trollbridge]

If their data is 100% sourced from public data, its public data.

[tptacek]

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]

> ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)

Not potential problems, actual existing problems: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...

[tptacek]

Worth being specific here: the problem this page is discussing isn't ALPRs per se, but automatic ALPR data sharing.

[8note]

> ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)

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.

[jolmg]

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]

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.