zlacker

We knew this going in with Flock: that with full sharing to Flock's network of law enforcement agencies, we'd be trusting our data to every one of tens of thousands of tiny, often completely unaccountable police departments around the country, many of whom wouldn't give the slightest possible fuck about whether they were contravening our own department's general orders. That's why we disabled sharing, first to any out-of-state departments, and then altogether; PDs that wanted data from us could simply call us up on the phone like human beings.

It was implied, both by our department and, more vaguely, by Flock, that sharing was reciprocal: if we didn't enable it, other departments wouldn't share with us. That's false; not only is it false, but apparently, to my understanding, Flock has (or had?) an offering for PDs to get access to the data without even hosting cameras of their own.

That obviously leaves Flock's own attestations of client data separation, and I get the cynicism there too, but basically every municipality in the country relies on those same kinds of attestations from a myriad of vendors, and unlike Flock those vendors have basically nothing to lose (since nobody is paying attention to them).

I think you can reasonably go either way on all this stuff. But you can't run these stacks in their default configuration with their default sharing and without special-purpose ordinances and general ordinances governing them.

I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.

>>tptace+(OP)
> I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.

What’s an ALPR General Order and a ALCU CCOPS ordinance? How did you get them passed?

>>mulmen+0U
A General Order is a documented police policy.

Flock is an ALPR.

CCOPS is a model ordinance that requires board approval for any surveillance technology deployments.

>>tptace+aY
Cool, thanks! Any suggestions on how to get something like that implemented in my city?

>>mulmen+h11
Find the most important message board or mailing list that politics in your municipality happens on. For us, it's 2-3 Facebook Groups (I wish it weren't, but it's not even a little up to me). Learn as much as you can about how things work, be generally helpful on the forums, volunteer when opportunities open up, get to know the people on your police oversight and technology boards (you probably have both), and start talking to them about this stuff.

Anybody interested in more details, you can reach out and I can shoot you our General Order. I should write this up somewhere.