Seattle Police hackathon to redact video streams recorded by police cams

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-police-hackathon-substantial-first-step/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+geekwire+%28GeekWire%29

by theoutlander • 12 years ago

67 42 12 years ago

geekwire.com

smtddr• 12 years ago

>However, Seattle Police officials also admitted that about 90 percent of the video officers create probably needs no redaction at all. That’s because members of the public have no right to expect privacy in their interactions with police, unless they are juveniles or a witness or victim whose safety might be at risk if their identity is known.

Even assuming this hackathon(first-ever apparently) meant well, in the context of recent events and the main purpose of these cameras being introduced, this hackathon has horrible optics. Also, this quote implies a separation of "members of the public" and "police" which is a very big part of the problems we see today. The police are(or at least should be) considered part of the public(more specifically, the community they work in) and they themselves should not expect any privacy while on duty. This separation is a catalyst to apathy.

indlebe• 12 years ago

^^ Anyone care to provide comment on why this is getting down voted?

calvin• 12 years ago

Tone. Sarcasm. Structure of the argument.

techsupporter• 12 years ago

I think you're conflating the semantics of English with what was actually trying to be accomplished. This isn't about protecting the officer's privacy; it is established in Seattle, King County, and Washington that officers can be photographed and recorded while undertaking their official duties.

The opposite, however, is not true. Individuals--the set of humans who are not police officers undertaking duties--do have an expectation of privacy except when the law or common practice says otherwise. For example, I have no expectation of privacy when walking down a public street. I, unlike a police officer, do have an expectation of privacy when I am at work, except from my employer.

The Seattle Police Department has a bad reputation inside Seattle. (King County's Sheriff isn't too far behind, sadly.) As a voting resident of Seattle, I am thrilled both that the police department is working on it and that the City Council is holding them to reforms.

orasis• 12 years ago

Ah, cool, so geekwire.com is an Onion subsidiary, I hope?

tomschlick• 12 years ago

Why? There is a real need to protect sensitive information from being released. Minors, Confidential Informants, video of the inside of someone's house... all things that shouldn't be released except under special circumstances.

yarrel• 12 years ago

That's totally the only things this will ever be used for.

JshWright6• 12 years ago

I am far from an apologist for law enforcement, but this is a completely reasonable effort that I would fully support.

As an example, cops show up on most EMS calls around here. I must admit, I find it a bit disquieting when a cop wearing a camera walks in while I'm providing care... Especially since HIPAA does not cover cops, so there is no legal protection for the information that ends up on the camera, only department policy. I would feel much better if I at least knew it was going to be automatically redacted, with the original video only available under a subpoena.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

After all that's been happening, your first thought is still how to protect the cops from looking bad on camera?

Then we'll just get to a point where the situation with the camera recording is actually worse than what we have now, because the cops we'll get only recording that benefits the cops, and none of the recording that doesn't.

It seems the government can "swing the pendulum" as much as it wants against the People, but it seems nobody wants to swing the pendulum against the government too much. God forbid the People get "too much power".

mafuyu• 12 years ago

He is talking about the privacy of the patients, not of the cops.

JshWright6• 12 years ago

I don't follow how you interpreted what I said as wanting to "protect the cops from looking bad on camera".

I am a paramedic. I take care of people in very compromising positions (most people don't worry about getting dressed if they're having a heart attack at 2am). I worry that _their_ privacy needs to be protected.

This also isn't simply about 'modesty'. There are many ways medical information could be used against someone (denied a job, denied housing, denied various forms of insurance, etc...). There are many reasons personal medical information needs to be protected.

theoutlander• 12 years ago

Just trying to wrap my head around what you're saying. Are you in favor of this because it can also cover you from legal scrutiny for mistakes made while providing care?

jackvalentine• 12 years ago

He's saying that it's not in the public interest for his patients medical issues to be easily available.

FreeFull• 12 years ago

I'm thinking it's more about ensuring the patient gets medical privacy. Medical information in the wrong hands can wreak havoc.

aarongolliver• 12 years ago

Patients expect and deserve their medical privacy, which would get violated when a police camera records them receiving treatment. He is in favor because patient's private medical records shouldn't be automatically made part of the public record just because a cop walks in the room.

JshWright6• 12 years ago

It is ingrained in my head that the patient's privacy is of utmost importance (second only to the actual care I'm providing).

Having a camera in the room just runs counter to that idea, and makes me uncomfortable.

headShrinker3• 12 years ago

You are making all sorts of assumptions when the views of others were clearly expressed in previous comments. You seem hell bent on your own talking point regardless of that the actual comment's point was. Either you are being dense or you are trolling...

jlarocco• 12 years ago

When I started reading I expected to be upset by this, and expected it to be some kind of abuse, to hide bad behavior by cops.

I was glad to see it's actually quite reasonable.

That said, I'm not sure how it could ever be completely automated, short of accurate face recognition software trained with everybody in the region.

JshWright6• 12 years ago

Why would it need to be everybody in the region? Why not redact everyone by default, except for folks who have been whitelisted (cops, mostly... though I would have no problem with other emergency services workers being whitelisted as well).

Obviously this is far from a simple task (how would you know if someone was on duty, etc), but it's certainly not impossible.

jsprogrammer• 12 years ago

There needs to be a focus on the architecture of the entire system. What should be redacted and why? How do we ensure that only copies are redacted and that the original is always available?

The code used should be free and open source. The hardware it's running on needs to be known, inspectable, and tamper-proof.

It's probably a good idea to get these questions answered first/soon. Proprietary and secretive code can stay entrenched for a long time and I'm not sure we want that.

rday2• 12 years ago

I know there are two sides to every story.

I know that more positive public interaction with the police is a Good Thing.

I just wonder why, as developers, we build tools that are used to oppress and capable of supporting oppression.

Unlike people who built large infrastructure in the past, we aren't slaves. We aren't starving indentured servants. So we have other options.

Why do we develop Prism. We do we develop tools to erode net neutrality. Why do we start hacking at the tools to erase police action before we understand the how and why behind the use of those tools.

Maybe its just been a long Sunday.

krapp2• 12 years ago

The people who built PRISM, no doubt, believed that what they were doing was necessary for the good of the country, and probably still do. As you say - two sides to every story.

alexqgb• 12 years ago

It's also entirely possible that the people who built the system did not do so thinking or believing that it would end up being used in the way it has been, and that their good faith was taken advantage of by incapable or self-serving managers unworthy of the trust that their positions require.

The human links tend to be the weakest ones.

SolarNet• 12 years ago

Unlike PRISM with it's dubious value of doing good (and the massive damage it did to related liberties), this has an actual public service (with relatively little potential damage).

If you are receiving medical care do you want everyone to know about it just because a cop walked into the room?

If you are a minor should your sealed records be more easily determined? (because a cop recorded them)

If you are a victim of a crime should your identity be made knowable to others who may wish to silence you? What about witnesses?

Note what the article said: The video must be released! Even if it's mostly blurred out. If it's suspicious then the police department can be sued to get the full video.

The problem is that we don't have the open source (or for that matter publicly available private technology) technology to easily deploy a verifiable DRM (which is what we want, we want to manage the digital rights of how this video is edited) system. The police of Seattle are willing to equip every officer with cameras "TODAY", "right NOW", except and besides some problems. This was a question of "how can we solve this problem so that we can do this thing". It doesn't have to be perfect.

aswanson• 12 years ago

There should be a hackathon/kickstarter to get these cams to a low enough price where every officer in the country is wearing one, with no redaction. Seriously, a beagle board black costs $45; a camera and associated housing, battery, and software should not run the price over $1500-$2000, as Taser et. al. are charging.

jrochkind1• 12 years ago

The 'problem' they are trying to solve in this article, where open records requests mean that all such video is public -- makes it clear that what you are asking for is basically universal surveillance of everyone, available to everyone.

Which, of course, is where we seem to be headed anyway, and I think a significant portion of the audience on HN has no problem with it or is in favor of it.

I think it's distressing.

cinquemb• 12 years ago

What we have in our world today is closer to universal surveillance of everyone, available to the few. The few, of which we know to due to the declining information asymmetry over our collective human history, are just as susceptible to all the things that make us human.

The reasons those on here give is along the lines of: because HIPAA, because it may be embarrassing for me if I get caught on video in some compromising way, because I might not get that job/promotion/etc (which seem to not be the ones we hear parroted in the news i.e. terrorism, to justify current asymmetries, not to mention no questioning of the utility of a job done by people which people seem to implicitly equate to be the only way resources can be allocated to people in any system).

I have yet to see those then go on to acknowledge in their plausible theoretical scenarios (that probably already happen to some degree without [sous]surveillance available to all easily) that because I may think I was wrongly looked over/scrutinized, what would stop me from then doing the same to those who would wield such over me in those same situations or anyone else?

I can see why it can be distressing if one is convinced that the way one grows up, is normalized to, generally reinforced by their society at large (and maybe less so as time goes by as society…changes) and finds solace in such way of being, figures that is the way the world must be. The unswaddled babies and young children uploaded to internet by their parents (and their parents friends and relatives) without any say, will probably wonder why all the old folks of their time care much when all they have known will be what is so foreign us today.

JshWright6• 12 years ago

So... let's say I know an ambulance responded to your house two weeks ago, in the middle of the night, and I want to know why (for... reasons...). I can't go as the EMS agency, or the hospital, as HIPAA prevents them from releasing any information. However... If I know a cop was there, then I can leverage the fact that the video his chest recorded is a matter of public record and find out for myself.

Wouldn't you want that video redacted in that case? There are plenty of other scenarios I can think of where redaction is very appropriate.

williamstein• 12 years ago

The guy (Timothy Clemens) who started this used to work with me on Sage and in particular, the Sage Notebook (http://sagenb.org/), a few years ago. Anyway, he was very into volunteering to help with open source software.

sargun• 12 years ago

What's the status of Sage these days?

bsder• 12 years ago

A nice idea, but the problem is that any of the video is going to be problematic.

The fact that I know that Video X at Specific date/time/place identifies someone means I can now correlate other records with it. In the case of witnesses, that's probably an issue.

They would be better having a discussion about controls on who can view such videos. For example, lawyers and juries see things under seal all the time. Also, it would be good for there to be a destruction date or a lockdown date at which point it requires more paperwork to get at the video. So, the general public can request within a year, legal requests to 3 years, judicial requests to 5, and destruction after that unless involved in a case.

Yes, I want the cops on video to be required to release to the press. But I also don't want to be front and center just because some cop walks by.

remarkEon• 12 years ago

"Li stated that hundreds of video files – including the 350+ terabytes already archived by SPD – could be uploaded and audio-indexed."

I live in Seattle and have interacted with SPD a few times. Never have seen a camera on anyone. That's a lot of data. Dashboard cams, I suppose?

Seattle Police hackathon to redact video streams recorded by police cams

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