Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
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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.
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.
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/IL/Chicago/a...
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!
The Swedish tax agency is very different from the American IRS, or at least the impression I have of the irs as a Swede who's never been to the USA for longer than it takes to switch flights, but consumes a likely unhealthy amount of social media which is typically full of Americans.
In Sweden, the tax authority kinda do your tax fillings for you. They send them to you electronically once per year, and give you the chance to correct any inaccuracies, add any information they might have missed etc, and then sign the final result.
I don't think I'm the only one who signs those declarations without even reading them. Regardless of who is currently prime minister, the tax agency typically get it right, and I trust them enough to just accept what they say, and attach my legally binding signature without reading.
I'd estimate about 95% of my Swedish friends do the same.
The above combined with the to me foreign notion that tax filings could be considered private(in Sweden, everyone's income and their complete tax filings are public information) probably makes it problematic for them to just send it out willy nilly. What if they sent you the wrong filings?
Based on a very widespread stereotype about Americans, I imagine the irs would get sued.
But, as previously stated, I've only been in America long enough to switch planes, so my guess is likely to be inaccurate!
On the digital ID part, the government + regulated industries like banking will enforce validating specific types of IDs via third party companies and data sources to use said government / regulated industry services - which is used as a hacked duct tape and silly string version of digital ID. Other than that… yep you got it.
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.
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".
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.
i always found this so weird, it's like a stalker's paradise
Plenty of boom gates did not open
There's a real problem though- anybody (might need to be a US citizen) can FOIA any document anywhere in the US that's not excluded. When they can punt you to the paywall and then reply with a generic reply to a birth cert it's one thing.
When you have to actually find people to do the work of reviewing ALL video footage as $small_fraction of 200million people request every second of recorded footage from every camera... You're(as a city) kinda screwed. If they claim privacy they have to be able to prove it but can charge slightly more. But, if they don't then they have to provide the specific request (possibly a little more- say 1hr segments) at a cost representative of the labor involved... Which doesn't include the cost of trying to staff a FOIA center larger than your city.
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.
Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to do anything directly.
Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time.
I suspect an organized campaign will sink the cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
That seems like the incentive structure of the law working as intended.
We know there's no retention because they say there is no retention and we believe them.
Why is this so hard to accept? Do you think people can lie?
Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.
Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.
What Is a Photocopier?
Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).
“Oh, sorry, we are dealing with unusually high wait times. The current wait time is 8 hours” type stuff.
Malicious compliance isn’t just for individuals!
For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.
First example is that most folks don't care about police checkpoints, simply because they are rare, and when they do happen they are over pretty fast. You do have some that care and think they are an infringement of rights, but they are a loud minority, and even those that do have issues with them, just bite the bullet and provide them their license and tell them where they are going.
Some things we don't care that much about is simply because they can't be abused that much. For example, majority of the population doesn't care too much that the NSA is hoovering up all traffic including encrypted traffic, because there's no way to practically decrypt it a mass scale.
But if quantum computing or some other method makes it cost effective and allows them to effectively decrypt this traffic, we would see a lot more people calling their lawmakers complaining of government overreach.
Another current example is that most people never cared about the fact that ICE or border patrol can require ID and have warrantless stops within 100 miles of a border simply because the stops weren't front page news.
I seem to recall FOIA provides pathways for overloaded clerks in situations where there's mass requests. But, it only grants an extended period in which to respond (eg, 14 days instead of 48hrs). But, you can take escalate with the State government like you can with denied requests.
This is tinted with my knowledge of my Locaal (long a), and the areas I've made FOIA requests with.
And, turns out if you want to affect change- you have to make the bureaucrats care- Not the officials.
You literally can't be a high touch, high jackboot, administrative state unless you have enough wealth to skim off it to run your enforcing operation.
There's a reason that places with less wealth to dip into are either more hands off or go full speed trap town to pay for it all.
Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/08/08/lowes-and-home-depot-are-...
This page is blogspam, though.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We might be talking past each other, because this stuff is subtle. But basically: whoever's doing the actual document production under FOIA, it's got to be a public body. If you're a commercial SAAS serving a public body, and you've got data that FOIA says needs to be produced, that's the public body's problem, not yours.
Not potential problems, actual existing problems: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
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.
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.