alt Hacker NewsJust 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.
Replies
If their data is 100% sourced from public data, its public data.
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.