Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
Yeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
Not automatically. There's aleeady case law(0x1) that ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records, even though the data are stored by Flock (a private vendor), not directly by the city.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
IANAL: That court's decision was based on the contract w/ Flock. It does not move the needle wrt public records.
I may read the decision, testimony, and any amicus briefs. During the 00's, Wash Citizen's for Open Govt had a prominent blindspot wrt tension between privatization and public records (in the shape of Tony Nixon). I'm curious if they were involved with this case, and if their positions have matured.
It's clear in context that they mean your background in computer security and political activism, I don't know where you are getting the idea that it's an comment on your ethnicity.
> at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
They de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance.
