Good, such records shouldn't be exempt. So what if they were gathered by a third party, it was a service carried out under request of the local government/law enforcement, and paid for by public money.
Such records shouldn't exist in the first place. I agree they shouldn't be exempt if they do, but let's not just accept that it's okay to have a fleet of cameras recording us 24/7 everywhere we go, managed by a private entity, accessed freely and without any probable cause by local and federal agencies who don't even communicate with each other.
It was argued that making the Flock data public violated everyone's privacy. It's important to stress and remind everyone the privacy violation occurred the moment pictures are indiscriminately taken, processed by AI, and stored for every single car that passes by. Not to mention family homes, pedestrians, and other things being captured in the process.
We are only a couple steps away from doing the same thing for pedestrians. Why not just take pictures of every single person walking by now? This already happens in some places. Flock is paving the way to make it a government sanctioned mass surveillance program.
Not quibbling, but preservation and production of these records has really minimal connection to the public purpose behind sunshine laws. It reveals the fact of suspicionless mass surveillance, but the monitoring is not of or about government functions. Clearly the drafters of a law were not imaginative enough to foresee the dystopian turn government has taken, but let’s face it: if someone put that surveillance camera in the courthouse, which is more connected to public sunshine, the analysis might have gone differently.
Sounds more like an argument against the cameras at all, which in turn is an argument for keeping the footage public; as hard as it is to get most people to care about surveillance, hiding the recordings would only make it harder. Any remote possibility of something like this eventually is going to start with people being uncomfortable with it, and that's not going to happen if we aren't forced to confront the full implications of it.
Plus, there's the usual concerns of how easy it is to craft narratives by showing only bits and pieces of what happened. If law enforcement is going to be using this footage as evidence for arrests, it's definitely better that that people can have their lawyers review the public record for footage that might paint things in a different light. Sure, prosecutors should theoretically be required to share potentially exculpatory evidence with the defense, but there's no shortage of known instances where that didn't happen, and the system should not be set to to make the availability of information even more unbalanced than it already is
