Cities Panic over Having to Release Mass Surveillance Recordings
9 comments
·November 17, 2025dedup-com
mixmastamyk
Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?
AdamJacobMuller
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?
jolmg
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.
mc32
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’s 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.
xnx
Panopticams
bell-cot
I'm hearing some new lyrics for Behind Blue Eyes from this...
tptacek
They're not panicking about this in Illinois, because Illinois exempts raw ALPR footage from FOIA.
This page is blogspam, though.
pavel_lishin
Both good points; I should have linked the original post at https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
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".