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| Flock camera Bruxton via Wikimedia Commons CC0 1.0 |
(Vox and The Washington Post published this week on Flock cameras, in paywalled stories.)
Comedian John Oliver subjected police surveillance technology to his usual gratifying, if NSFW, raking over the coals, surveying the likes and inadequacies of ShotSpotter (purported audio detection of gunshots), Stingray (interception of cell communication), Fusus (live feed-map interfacing), and Flock cameras (tracking by car license plate; recently at Vox). Even for those of us who've worried about these technologies for some years, the show is, as always, worth the watch.
I write about the Last Week coverage here for a collateral point, which is to highlight the use of state FOIA. Abuse of surveillance systems has been revealed in many an investigation by requests for public records, namely, surveillance access logs.
The Oliver segment related, for example, reports of suspiciously high incidents of tech and law enforcement personnel viewing surveillance feeds from places such as gyms without any apparent legitimate purpose, not to mention extended surveillance of persons not yet suspected of any specific wrongdoing, with problematic implications in racial profiling.
To investigate for themselves, Oliver's team used the California Public Records Act over the course of three years to interrogate the police department in Rialto, California, over its use of Fusus. Rialto was noteworthy, because the city required new businesses, as a licensing condition, to connect live-feed cameras to the police Fusus network.
In response to a request for police emails mentioning Fusus, the city first said it had none, Oliver reported—
which seemed implausible. So, we filed a much broader request and over the next two years, they sent us 28 pages, which still didn't seem like all the material they probably had. So, last February, we said, f— it, send us an export of your whole log database for Fusus, showing us every time your officers peaked at a privately owned camera. We asked for it as a searchable digital file as the law requires. But instead, what they did was send us a 30,413 page PDF.
Fortunately, HBO, per Last Week, had the resources to convert the PDF to a searchable, digital file. Among the findings, police "access[ed] cameras at the Rialto Days Inn for hundreds of hours, including the one facing the pool."
I've been working in freedom of information law, especially access law, for more than 30 years, and it's lamentable that the FOIA compliance playbook, especially at the municipal level, hasn't changed. The go-to tools to obstruct access continue to be:
- simply and outrightly deny that responsive records exist;
- deter the requester with an outrageous fee demand (if not here);
- delay, often by under-producing or redacting, to cost the requester time and resources to follow up; and,
- if ultimately compelled to produce, render records useless through tactics such as over-production and medium or format regression.
Having just concluded a term on the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee, working closely with FOIA officers, I want to be quick to acknowledge that there are countless dedicated public servants working hard to serve requesters honestly and fairly, often at the hazard of facing off with their own supervisors. The same is true at the state and local level, and I don't want to generalize unfairly to denigrate the work and sacrifices of so many. The situation is surely a case of the bad apples that spoil the bushel.
Kudos to HBO and Last Week for their tenacity in shining light on a spoiled bushel.
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