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Comment by cipehr | Hacker News Reader

A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests...

> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.

Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...

> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.

This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?

IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.

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I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.

> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.

So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?

This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...

So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.

Very tinfoil hat of them.

The journalists didn't make this connection, it was a topic of discussion at the city council meeting. And the result of that discussion was to suspend the cameras anyway, out of concern that ICE could end up with the the Flock data, even if they hadn't already. It would have been odd for the journalist to report on the outcome and leave out the event that prompted it.

Yes. Because Flock literally cannot be trusted.

As an ex-Flock employee in my county alone, Flock's "Transparency Report" only lists -half- of the agencies using Flock.

I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us.

At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.

Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.

The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?

The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.

If your neighbors were across the street and had their blinds open could you point your camera at their window and take pictures?

License plates were designed to be read and visible and they show that the vehicle is registered, but what about inside the vehicle? Do we have privacy in there?

What exactly does 'in public' mean? And why shouldn't someone have privacy from being recorded and their movements tracked even if they are in public?

None of these things are a given. The rights we have are because we decided they were important. There is no reason we can't revisit the question as situations change.

Might make sense to revisit the constitutionality of license plates, rather than try to attack public recording.

They're demanding you show your "papers" registration at all times without articulable suspicion you've committed a crime/infraction. The fourth amendment arguably protects us from the government requiring us to show us our papers at all times when we're travelling in the most common form of conveyance.

Abolishing license plates could be a solution if complicating identifying cars is what you want. It would do nothing about face recognition.

> The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?

This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.

Awesome, thank you for the input. I suspected NASA was operating this way, but I had no idea there was a period of exclusivity. In the case of NASA, the private companies are those like JPL and the sorts I guess?

I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?

I read about this regarding Hubble imagery, but pretty sure it applies to all missions funded by tax payers. The teams requesting time from the platforms are granted exclusive time to work out what they need so they can publish their papers for credit and what not.

One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.

Fascinating thank you.

> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.

Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.

You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.

https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/4241/e...

Japan has set about harmonizing its privacy laws with the GPDR and similar for business purposes.

> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

Not parent poster, but yes!

What people expect are outcomes. The mechanics they know of for how data is/isn't available is merely how they reach their reasonable expectation.

I expect that almost nobody I meet in public is a Stasi informant.

P.S.: To put it another way, a major purpose law is to clarify and codify the expectations the people. Not just expectations of privacy, but expectations of when we have liberty to observe or record.

We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.

In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.

There is certainly some expectation of privacy in public. California at least has anti-paparazzi laws covering some of this.

> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

Sure. The expectation is that your every move in public is not being recorded and stored on a central system that the government, and by extension various kinds of bad actors, can access.

In a society where the government's role is to defend its citizenry rather than participate in their exploitation, this would be an easy choice.

US governments (both federal and local) face some challenges here, because "defend its citizenry" is not really one of its main goals.

> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.

Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.

Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.

If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.

Feels way different when it's one rando doing it than when it's a government or BigCo with government integration doing it.

I think it's less of a revision and more a return to a core meaning.

Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.

I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.

From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?

I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?

As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.

Your first paragraph doesn’t just beg the question, it outright harasses it.

…and identify or track suspects?

For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…

> Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies

The problem with this is, that in the age of put-as-much-data-as-we-have-in-some-us-megacorp-managed-cloud this does not mean anything anymore. I may sound paranoid but it's just the truth. There is an abundance of general evidence for this, but even more, there is evidence that Flock data has been shared with parties in the US government who weren't "allowed" to access them.

Your sentence makes it sound like they have a document somewhere in their office that has not shared with anyone else. But that's wrong. They have a document on servers ran by a shady company (prob. AWS, Azure, Google), managed by another even shadier company (Flock). The police department has no idea who can see it, and who can't.

I can only speak for myself, but I do not have a problem with enforcement of immigration laws at all. What I do have a problem with is how it is enforced [1,2] and how the general surveillance is handled, especially by Flock [3,4] and the US Government [5], but, to be honest, in the whole US.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/21/you-feel-like-your-lif...

[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-power-abuse-cas...

[3] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-pushback

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/22/warrantle...

[5] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/mass-surveillance-trump-era

> Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects?

Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?

> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?

Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?

You sound like great fun at a party.

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