Here in Sweden, the use of license plate scanners has become the norm for basically all parking houses, bridge tolls and road tolls. Even if you don't install the app or become a "member" of whatever system they are using, the license plate scanners is still used to detect when you enter or leave, and in some cases they automatically look up your home address to send you the bill with zero interaction with the driver. Even if they offer alternative ways to pay, by for example sms, it still uses the license plate scanner when you leave.
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.
Same is true in Iceland. It’s just the established norm. Much less costly vs installing gates and barriers and payment terminals and easier to add paid parking to non traditional locations where constricting entry/exit to barrier’ed lanes would be a challenge or impossible. Shifting the payment experience to the user’s smartphone.
It’s still a bit foreign to visitors from places where this isn’t the norm but for Iceland and Icelanders it works well and is a non issue.
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.
A month or two after a visit to Iceland (my favorite country by far by the way), I received a ticket in the mail for speeding. It included a picture of the car I rented and a closeup of the driver's face- a face that did not belong to me (presumably another renter).
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".
In the US a lot of the bridge tolls are automated, or became automated during the pandemic. With no going back.
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.
Toll collection in most states used to be a mostly graft operation. They'd make insane salaries for what they did and the jobs would be handed out based on political connections. Basically welfare for the deadbead family members of the politically useful. In my state they had a union and it took forever to get rid of them. When they did get rid of them the tolls basically halved for no change in revenue because that's how much cash was going missing.
Unlike toll roads and parking lot entrances it seems like these cameras are being installed for the sole purpose of surveillance and tracking peoples movements.
Looking for context here: how do Swedes view their government? Do they feel represented by, it, trust their governments etc.?
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.
I'm in Chicagoland (in Oak Park, directly adjacent to the west side of Chicago) and it literally depends on which suburb you're in. Oak Park is hostile to ALPRs. Berwyn, our neighbor to the south, and River Forest, to the west, are carpeted with them. They're there because people want them.
Found this amazing redlining map. I think I've highlighted Berwyn. I don't have knowledge to contextualize the map but I'm curious if any patterns from the HOLC map are strongly present in your area now.
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.
I felt a need to expand on this. In Sweden, the various agencies are independent from the elected politicians to some degree. This means that while I personally do not trust the current government, I do still trust, for example, the tax agency.
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 fact that we can't do this in the US boggles my mind. So the data is already reported to the IRS, yet I have to fill out a tax return containing the same data, and then I'm responsible if it's screwed up? Why can they not just send me a bill if they already have all the data, then I dispute it if there's a problem?
I don't claim to know or understand, but I can venture a guess: as far as I can tell, America doesn't really have a good digital identity solution. In fact, given the frequent online discussions about whether it should be allowed to vote without physical identification in America, I'm given to believe that you don't have a good personal identity system at all!
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.
I can’t speak to Swedes, but as an American Norwegian, I can say that the level of trust in Scandinavian is WAY higher than in the US. It’s not utopia, of course, (see Chat Control, for instance) but you really can trust the government here to take care of things when it goes off the rails for whatever reason.
Unless you implement a way of stopping people from leaving until they pay (which is really expensive and inefficient), collecting data on who owes you money is sort of unavoidable, no? It's only when that data starts getting collected en masse for no good reason and retained ~forever that we start to run into problems.
My last job paid for parking in one of these places. When the CEO stopped paying (long, very stupid story) without telling us, the parking company sent me, personally, to collections despite having zero responsibility to or interaction with these people.
How long before face readers are everywhere and sending bills to your home when you use a public toilet as a fee or cross the street wrong as a fine. Meanwhile every movement is logged forever. I've heard China already has this, and most people see it as dystopian and bad and ripe for abuse. But in countries like Sweden, trust in government is high, and convenience is convenience, so it becomes a norm that no one questions. This, imho, is not a good thing.
It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
You know, in hockey there's sometimes a saying that "if you're too small to carry your gear bag, you're too small to play hockey." Feels like there might be some kind of moral lesson there for this situation.
If the local governing body is too small to handle the requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken just because there are too few clerks?
If they can’t afford to provide the service, then they can’t afford to provide the service. In this case, they simply can’t afford to video anything that would require redaction for FOIA requests. Stanwood joining with Camano Island or Marrysville, it’s still a rural area that can’t afford it.
I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests".
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.
I think this is where the conversation is from theoretic vs practical limits. Most folks don't care about government overreach until it affects them or theirs personally. And because of costs, government overreach has been theoretical versus practical. And even when practical, it's more whiteglove treatment.
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.
Using invasive surveillance tech to govern is not needed then. If you can't handle the full service (on both ends) of the technology, then you can't deploy it and have to use regular old police work or legacy techniques to enforce it.
Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.
FOA requests are a part of the total cost of ownership of these products. At some point a vendor, the state, a consultancy was negligent in this fact, and we should not entertain ideas of minimizing the issues I agree. Cities is the correct term, below that size are villages and hamlets and if they are incorporated they are a city.
If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.
FOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20.
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.
Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data.
My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.
Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit.
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.
The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras.
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.
It's not really meaningfully different than existing closed-circuit cameras and bodycams, except for the ALPR plate/ID records they create, which states are simply going to exempt from FOIA, as Illinois did.
Sure. But until then, the US at large can hammer them to dust. And, I expect adding ALPR to an exemption was for simplicity's sake- since it's already general knowledge they don't have to create anything for a FOIA request. Easier to just make it explicit so they can point to the law/code.
Not sure where you got the idea I thought TXDOT was not being honest. No retention, live public views, only keep aggregate metrics needed for traffic flow (the official purpose for those cameras- PSA's for traffic jams and expansion plans.).
Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.
I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good.
There's been multiple incidents of that. Including one where they wanted a per page fee for a DVD. Did not go well for the recording office.
Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).
This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times and the employees involved can be asked directly, under oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.
Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.
It's interesting that even people who are anti-Flock have been convinced to refer to Flock's camera products as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).
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.
I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems?
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?
They may feel (or their counsel may suggest) that it presents more of a legal risk than it's worth. A prudent city government would have evaluated this before installing such equipment, but maybe we can be generous and imagine that being subject to such litigation revealed a mismatch between their legal evaluation and the judiciary's.
> why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems?
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.
Maybe think about it narrowed down to an individual level - maybe you installed a camera or two around your property for whatever useful reasons like monitoring your children, and then later you find out that you are required to share all of your footage with some other entity (e.g. the police) in a way you did not sign up for. Would you choose to release your footage, or would you take the cameras down?
Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach.
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.
Just raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the PD keeps on hand from Flock searches.
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.
That is not remotely how it works in Illinois. It's not even how public data held by public bodies works: you can generally only compel production of specific documents that already exist.
Wouldn't this only be true if the camera's are primarily used by non-government entities? Once their income/use is primarily from the government they become an agent of the state and relevant laws apply, no? Wasn't this how they were able to FOIA 'private' parole officers in the south a couple of years back? Or they could 'constructively' construed as being a public entity? Private parole officer, private care providers, etc have all been ruled to in fact be constructively agents of the state and the rules (not necessarily FOIA in each instance, but even tougher constraints that would easily apply as precedent for FOIA) applied to them.
No, that's not how it works. So far as I know, FOIA basically never compels private entities to do anything. It can compel usage by the public body, in many (but not all) cases. But FOIA isn't going to let you crack open an Atlassian (or Flock) database, unless something truly novel happens in FOIA jurisprudence.
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.
> ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)
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.
My 2 cents: Police body cameras capture events at random locations. These other cameras are fixed in place and can more reliably be used to stalk people.
Here in Sweden, the use of license plate scanners has become the norm for basically all parking houses, bridge tolls and road tolls. Even if you don't install the app or become a "member" of whatever system they are using, the license plate scanners is still used to detect when you enter or leave, and in some cases they automatically look up your home address to send you the bill with zero interaction with the driver. Even if they offer alternative ways to pay, by for example sms, it still uses the license plate scanner when you leave.
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.
Same is true in Iceland. It’s just the established norm. Much less costly vs installing gates and barriers and payment terminals and easier to add paid parking to non traditional locations where constricting entry/exit to barrier’ed lanes would be a challenge or impossible. Shifting the payment experience to the user’s smartphone. It’s still a bit foreign to visitors from places where this isn’t the norm but for Iceland and Icelanders it works well and is a non issue.
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.
A month or two after a visit to Iceland (my favorite country by far by the way), I received a ticket in the mail for speeding. It included a picture of the car I rented and a closeup of the driver's face- a face that did not belong to me (presumably another renter).
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".
In the US a lot of the bridge tolls are automated, or became automated during the pandemic. With no going back.
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.
Toll collection in most states used to be a mostly graft operation. They'd make insane salaries for what they did and the jobs would be handed out based on political connections. Basically welfare for the deadbead family members of the politically useful. In my state they had a union and it took forever to get rid of them. When they did get rid of them the tolls basically halved for no change in revenue because that's how much cash was going missing.
Unlike toll roads and parking lot entrances it seems like these cameras are being installed for the sole purpose of surveillance and tracking peoples movements.
Looking for context here: how do Swedes view their government? Do they feel represented by, it, trust their governments etc.?
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.
I'm in Chicagoland (in Oak Park, directly adjacent to the west side of Chicago) and it literally depends on which suburb you're in. Oak Park is hostile to ALPRs. Berwyn, our neighbor to the south, and River Forest, to the west, are carpeted with them. They're there because people want them.
Found this amazing redlining map. I think I've highlighted Berwyn. I don't have knowledge to contextualize the map but I'm curious if any patterns from the HOLC map are strongly present in your area now.
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/IL/Chicago/a...
You don't want to get me started on this.
places soapbox
First actual swede to reply here it seems!
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!
I felt a need to expand on this. In Sweden, the various agencies are independent from the elected politicians to some degree. This means that while I personally do not trust the current government, I do still trust, for example, the tax agency.
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 fact that we can't do this in the US boggles my mind. So the data is already reported to the IRS, yet I have to fill out a tax return containing the same data, and then I'm responsible if it's screwed up? Why can they not just send me a bill if they already have all the data, then I dispute it if there's a problem?
I don't claim to know or understand, but I can venture a guess: as far as I can tell, America doesn't really have a good digital identity solution. In fact, given the frequent online discussions about whether it should be allowed to vote without physical identification in America, I'm given to believe that you don't have a good personal identity system at all!
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!
American here; very accurate.
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.
I can’t speak to Swedes, but as an American Norwegian, I can say that the level of trust in Scandinavian is WAY higher than in the US. It’s not utopia, of course, (see Chat Control, for instance) but you really can trust the government here to take care of things when it goes off the rails for whatever reason.
Unless you implement a way of stopping people from leaving until they pay (which is really expensive and inefficient), collecting data on who owes you money is sort of unavoidable, no? It's only when that data starts getting collected en masse for no good reason and retained ~forever that we start to run into problems.
My last job paid for parking in one of these places. When the CEO stopped paying (long, very stupid story) without telling us, the parking company sent me, personally, to collections despite having zero responsibility to or interaction with these people.
This made it interesting for me driving through Europe with my Canadian-plated vehicle.
Plenty of boom gates did not open
doesn't sweden just.. list everyone's full name, address, job, birthday, age and stuff on a public website?
i always found this so weird, it's like a stalker's paradise
How long before face readers are everywhere and sending bills to your home when you use a public toilet as a fee or cross the street wrong as a fine. Meanwhile every movement is logged forever. I've heard China already has this, and most people see it as dystopian and bad and ripe for abuse. But in countries like Sweden, trust in government is high, and convenience is convenience, so it becomes a norm that no one questions. This, imho, is not a good thing.
It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
You know, in hockey there's sometimes a saying that "if you're too small to carry your gear bag, you're too small to play hockey." Feels like there might be some kind of moral lesson there for this situation.
Hockey is a game, governing is not.
If the local governing body is too small to handle the requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken just because there are too few clerks?
If they can’t afford to provide the service, then they can’t afford to provide the service. In this case, they simply can’t afford to video anything that would require redaction for FOIA requests. Stanwood joining with Camano Island or Marrysville, it’s still a rural area that can’t afford it.
I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests".
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.
I think this is where the conversation is from theoretic vs practical limits. Most folks don't care about government overreach until it affects them or theirs personally. And because of costs, government overreach has been theoretical versus practical. And even when practical, it's more whiteglove treatment.
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.
winners bell SFX
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.
Even big cities (and companies!) do this all the time.
“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!
My city of 200K provided me with redacted bodycam video a month after the defendant's sham trial. The police are just too busy you see.
Have less laws then.
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 invasive surveillance tech to govern is not needed then. If you can't handle the full service (on both ends) of the technology, then you can't deploy it and have to use regular old police work or legacy techniques to enforce it.
Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.
Not sure I can agree anymore in 2025. Maybe in 2027, hopefully.
FOA requests are a part of the total cost of ownership of these products. At some point a vendor, the state, a consultancy was negligent in this fact, and we should not entertain ideas of minimizing the issues I agree. Cities is the correct term, below that size are villages and hamlets and if they are incorporated they are a city.
Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?
If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.
they can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with
FOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20.
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.
I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.
Service fees is the counter-tactic here.
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.
Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data. My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.
Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit.
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.
The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras.
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.
It's not really meaningfully different than existing closed-circuit cameras and bodycams, except for the ALPR plate/ID records they create, which states are simply going to exempt from FOIA, as Illinois did.
Sure. But until then, the US at large can hammer them to dust. And, I expect adding ALPR to an exemption was for simplicity's sake- since it's already general knowledge they don't have to create anything for a FOIA request. Easier to just make it explicit so they can point to the law/code.
Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
That seems like the incentive structure of the law working as intended.
> Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
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?
Not sure where you got the idea I thought TXDOT was not being honest. No retention, live public views, only keep aggregate metrics needed for traffic flow (the official purpose for those cameras- PSA's for traffic jams and expansion plans.).
Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.
I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good.
What Is a Photocopier?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE
There's been multiple incidents of that. Including one where they wanted a per page fee for a DVD. Did not go well for the recording office.
Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).
This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times and the employees involved can be asked directly, under oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.
Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.
You can find installed Flock cameras around the world with this site:
https://deflock.me/
This is missing the Lowes and Home Depot security cameras.
I didn't know that these stores were doing this.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/08/08/lowes-and-home-depot-are-...
It shows the Lowes & HD cameras near me. The map depends upon volunteers to enter data IIRC.
That’s because you haven’t submitted them yet :) It’s crowdsourced via OpenStreetMaps
They're not panicking about this in Illinois, because Illinois exempts raw ALPR footage from FOIA.
This page is blogspam, though.
Both good points; I should have linked the original post at https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
Changed above from https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/11/cities-panic-over-ha.... Thanks!
It's interesting that even people who are anti-Flock have been convinced to refer to Flock's camera products as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).
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.
I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems?
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?
They may feel (or their counsel may suggest) that it presents more of a legal risk than it's worth. A prudent city government would have evaluated this before installing such equipment, but maybe we can be generous and imagine that being subject to such litigation revealed a mismatch between their legal evaluation and the judiciary's.
> why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems?
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.
Maybe think about it narrowed down to an individual level - maybe you installed a camera or two around your property for whatever useful reasons like monitoring your children, and then later you find out that you are required to share all of your footage with some other entity (e.g. the police) in a way you did not sign up for. Would you choose to release your footage, or would you take the cameras down?
Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach.
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.
Just raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the PD keeps on hand from Flock searches.
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.
If their data is 100% sourced from public data, its public data.
That is not remotely how it works in Illinois. It's not even how public data held by public bodies works: you can generally only compel production of specific documents that already exist.
Wouldn't this only be true if the camera's are primarily used by non-government entities? Once their income/use is primarily from the government they become an agent of the state and relevant laws apply, no? Wasn't this how they were able to FOIA 'private' parole officers in the south a couple of years back? Or they could 'constructively' construed as being a public entity? Private parole officer, private care providers, etc have all been ruled to in fact be constructively agents of the state and the rules (not necessarily FOIA in each instance, but even tougher constraints that would easily apply as precedent for FOIA) applied to them.
No, that's not how it works. So far as I know, FOIA basically never compels private entities to do anything. It can compel usage by the public body, in many (but not all) cases. But FOIA isn't going to let you crack open an Atlassian (or Flock) database, unless something truly novel happens in FOIA jurisprudence.
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.
> ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)
Not potential problems, actual existing problems: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
Worth being specific here: the problem this page is discussing isn't ALPRs per se, but automatic ALPR data sharing.
> ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)
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.
My 2 cents: Police body cameras capture events at random locations. These other cameras are fixed in place and can more reliably be used to stalk people.
There's also tons of these. I feel like I don't see a police cruiser every time I drive somewhere, but I do pass by a couple surveillance 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.
The truth can hurt, law doesn’t victimize someone for being held accountable.
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