Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to-release

by pavel_lishin • 8 months ago

207 79 8 months ago

neuburger.substack.com

tptacek11• 8 months ago

They're not panicking about this in Illinois, because Illinois exempts raw ALPR footage from FOIA.

This page is blogspam, though.

pavel_lishin2• 8 months ago

Both good points; I should have linked the original post at https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...

dang• 8 months ago

Changed above from https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/11/cities-panic-over-ha.... Thanks!

dedup-com• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?

tptacek11• 8 months ago

I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.

barbazoo• 8 months ago

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.

floatrock• 8 months ago

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.

qchris• 8 months ago

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_random2• 8 months ago

Hockey is a game, governing is not.

th0ma5• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

tptacek11• 8 months ago

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.

pavel_lishin2• 8 months ago

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...

8note• 8 months ago

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.

plorg• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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?

overfeed• 8 months ago

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.

belorn• 8 months ago

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_____02• 8 months ago

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.

tptacek11• 8 months ago

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.

LadyCailin• 8 months ago

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.

amarant3• 8 months ago

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!

maxeda• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

inChargeOfIT• 8 months ago

A month or two after a visit to Iceland (my favorite country by far by the way), I received a ticket in the mail for speeding. It included a picture of the car I rented and a closeup of the driver's face- a face that did not belong to me (presumably another renter).

Luckily, a quick phone call and a copy of my drivers license cleared things up, but systems like these inevitably lead to "guilty until proven innocent" scenarios instead of "innocent until proven guilty".

estimator7292• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

potato37328422• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

This made it interesting for me driving through Europe with my Canadian-plated vehicle.

Plenty of boom gates did not open

Eddy_Viscosity2• 8 months ago

How long before face readers are everywhere and sending bills to your home when you use a public toilet as a fee or cross the street wrong as a fine. Meanwhile every movement is logged forever. I've heard China already has this, and most people see it as dystopian and bad and ripe for abuse. But in countries like Sweden, trust in government is high, and convenience is convenience, so it becomes a norm that no one questions. This, imho, is not a good thing.

chasil2• 8 months ago

You can find installed Flock cameras around the world with this site:

https://deflock.me/

kevin_thibedeau2• 8 months ago

This is missing the Lowes and Home Depot security cameras.

chasil2• 8 months ago

I didn't know that these stores were doing this.

https://flowingdata.com/2025/08/08/lowes-and-home-depot-are-...

aerostable_slug• 8 months ago

It shows the Lowes & HD cameras near me. The map depends upon volunteers to enter data IIRC.

AyJayColumns• 8 months ago

That’s because you haven’t submitted them yet :) It’s crowdsourced via OpenStreetMaps

mensetmanusman• 8 months ago

The truth can hurt, law doesn’t victimize someone for being held accountable.

acaloiar• 8 months ago

It's interesting that even people who are anti-Flock have been convinced to refer to Flock's camera products as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).

This is similar to how Google has convinced Android users to refer to installing apps from stores other than the Play Store as "side-loading". It's a distraction.

Make no mistake -- Flock cameras are mass-surveillance tools with the ancillary use case of automatic license plate reading. I encourage anyone discussing these products not to refer to them as ALPRs, unless specifically discussing their license plate reading functionality.

Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings

Related Stories