
Going Quiet: More States Are Hiding 911 Recordings - danso
https://www.propublica.org/article/more-states-are-hiding-911-recordings-from-families-lawyers-and-the-general-public
======
tzs
Similar issues can arise with police body cameras. Seattle's initial attempt
to use body cams had to be stopped because all of the footage was available
under state open record laws, and someone was filing requests for all of it
and putting it up on YouTube. This was a massive violation of the privacy of
numerous people caught on those videos. Police go into people's home, often
uninvited and on short notice, and can easily see intimate and private details
of those people's lives.

At first Seattle tried editing the footage before release to redact parts that
might violate the privacy of anyone other then the officers and alleged
criminals. I don't remember how many officers were involved in the initial
body cam deployment, but it was enough that they generated so much footage
that they didn't have the budget to edit it. I remember at one point they were
even asking hackers for help with automating some of this.

A couple years or so later, they resumed using body cams. I'm not sure how
they dealt with the privacy issues.

~~~
pfranz
I wish I had more concrete information, but I remember hearing about one
police department treating bodycam recordings in public and in private places
differently for this reason. I imagine the officer would tag it when they left
their shift or offloaded the footage.

In general, I've heard reviewing the footage is a huge undertaking and an
unexpected burden. I wouldn't be surprised if, like many backup systems,
they're not often tested and found to be insufficient when they go to pull a
video...but, then again, they also deal with evidence which has similar
requirements.

~~~
djakjxnanjak
A system with enough manual control that the officer has the task of tagging
and offloading the footage sounds like a system where inconvenient footage
will be mysteriously deleted.

~~~
pfranz
I feel like that's being addressed as body cams get rolled out. I've heard
about procedures to address faking damaged equipment and other excuses for
"missing" footage.

Cruisers have had video for awhile now, so it's not completely new.

------
decasia
I generally support regulations that protect privacy, as I'm sure most of us
do. But they can come at a very real human cost, as in this case. Especially
when it comes to regulations that affect people who aren't able to express
their preferences (because they have died, are incapacitated, are not able to
think clearly for whatever reason, etc), any general rule is going to lead to
some bad outcomes.

FWIW I tend to think 911 calls ought to be public because they are public
records. There are probably ways of making them public but not completely easy
to access (eg, you could only listen to a specific record on site in a records
archive). That would at least guard against the problems of releasing
everything on the internet, which would impose major reputational risks to
everybody who ever made a 911 call.

~~~
ghaff
This is one of the privacy conundrums that we mostly have never come to grips
with. There are a lot of things that would seem to be legitimately public
records.

But there's arguably a big difference between records that you have to go to
some county clerk's office to access and possibly provide at least a cursory
justification for doing so and being able to click a few keys on your computer
and skim through records for the hell of it.

Both are public at some level but one is not like the other.

~~~
dvtrn
Could you articulate this “big difference” a bit more? So far the only one I
can parse from your comment is ease of access, driving to a clerk versus
walking to my desk.

That doesn’t seem particularly convincing. Or at least I don’t see how this
feeds into the privacy “conundrum”

~~~
reacweb
You can read the car plate of cars passing in front of you. It is public
information. If you can easily gather the location of all cars at any time, it
becomes a big privacy problem. You can identify husbands cheating...

~~~
wool_gather
Indeed. I can't help thinking that the fact that some piece of tech makes a
_qualitative_ change like this means that there's some fundamental flaw
somewhere with the way we associate a person with a public record or
identifier. But I'm not really sure what that flaw is, or what to do about it.

~~~
pixl97
Nobody is sure how to solve it because the problem is with people and the
culture we have built around having actual privacy in the past. Technology has
essentially robbed us of it, which is problematic as technology solves lots of
other problems so we just cant get rid of it.

This is really similar to the music industry and the problem of piracy. Bits
are easy to copy and hard to prevent the copy of.

------
justin66
It's instructive to look at why the ACLU went from supporting to not
supporting the statute in RI:

 _Supporters of the bill included the Rhode Island chapter of the American
Civil Liberties Union.

Steven Brown, the ACLU chapter’s executive director, said the organization’s
support was based on the “privacy values in not having these often very
intimate types of calls just available to everybody in the public.”

But over the years, the interpretation of the law by the courts has been
“problematic,” Brown said, because judges have denied access to 911 recordings
even when they would serve the public interest. He said the ACLU would support
adding a “good cause mechanism” in the law to allow for the release of 911
calls if it can be shown that there is an “important public service in knowing
what’s in those calls.”_

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vorpalhex
Making 911 calls available because "your family wants to know" seems to be too
far of a violation of privacy. While I feel sorry for the person who lost
their brother, he can go to court and ask for the records to be released -
which seems about the correct amount of privacy protection for something like
this.

~~~
ceejayoz
I understand the privacy side of things, but I'm suspicious of the motive.
We've seen with police body cameras that the cops are quick to release
exonerating ones, but "we don't release evidence during a pending
investigation, but trust us, the video is exonerating" in cases where the
footage is damning.

~~~
usrusr
Police have massive short term gains from going against the rules. It makes
their jobs easier (short term), safer (short term), more apparently successful
(short term). Plus plenty of law enforcement exclusive privileges ready for
abuse. Taken together this creates a massive demand for oversight and
accountability, and big incentives to undermine those.

None of this exists in the field of EMTs. When they "hide behind data
protection", it would be to protect against frivolous litigation after honest
mistakes, which I find not only understandable but also preferable. If I ever
need one of them, I'll surely want them to give their best medically rather
than spending cycles on court-proofing their process.

~~~
ceejayoz
911 calls are hardly limited to dispatching EMTs, though.

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kdmccormick
I think a reasonable compromise would be a sort of "public-by-default after X
number of days, but private if requested so by caller".

I understand the utility of them being public. On the other hand, I have made
911 calls that I definitely don't want to be publicly available, especially
online where voice-recognition tools could be used to find a specific person's
calls.

~~~
dkural
This would protect people making calls based on racial profiling - "man
walking in my neighborhood while black".

~~~
kdmccormick
Protect them from what? Public shaming by people who look them up in
databases? Being racist isn't illegal.

I'm inclined to think that this is less important than protecting the calls of
people who had mental health emergencies and the like.

~~~
rolltiide
> Protect them from what? Public shaming by people who look them up in
> databases? Being racist isn't illegal.

Retribution, that was obvious to me.

Examples: Physical violence as retribution is illegal, while being kicked off
of board seats and other areas of influence isn't. Being 86'd (banned) from
private establishments isn't illegal.

All is possible.

------
DoctorOetker
This should probably be handled the same way as donating your dead body for
science (or profit): make this an individuals own choice. This improves
societal cohesion: if the individual allows the release of this private data
when it concerns him- or herself, any designated people are free to request
this data, and each one of them should be free to share this freely, it's up
to the individual to choose discreet people if so desired, avoiding anger
between the mourning individuals with respect to the state. It also improves
cohesion between individuals and the state in aother way: if the deceased
chose to _not release_ such private data, then the mourning individuals will
be less angry at the state and more angry with the "poor" decision of the
deceased...

As with all such systems you get the endless meta-fight of opt-in versus opt-
out: as a stoichiocrat, my preferred solution is to provably flip a random
coin toss, such that anyone who cares about this setting must explicitly opt-
in or explicitly opt-out, _those who act careless simply do not care_ about
their setting, and the conundrum of systemic bias in the sense of all opt-in
versus all opt-out is avoided. The probability of the coin toss can even be
set identically to the fraction of people who explicitly opt-in vs explicitly
opt-out (in example if 90% of the populace ignores the setting, and 7% opt for
release and 3% opt for privacy after death, then for the 90% without
explicitly stated preferencee a random 7 out of 10 people will have the
details released and 3 out of 10 will have the details withheld)

~~~
hacker_123
I haven't heard the label stoichiocrat[1] before, and Google search only finds
this HN page. Do you know if many others share these views, and if they've
ever been implemented?

It's easiest to think of rules in a black and white, opt-in or opt-out way,
and I hadn't considered the probabilistic option.

[1] Without knowing the words, I think you mean "stochiocrat", which would be
related to "stochastic" and probabilistic. Google found one result for this,
but it didn't provide good context; I think it was referring to how Venetian
Doges were elected [2]. "Stoichiocrat" would be more related to
"stoichiometery", coming from a Greek word that can mean "element".

[2] [https://theumlaut.com/mechanism-design-in-the-venetian-
repub...](https://theumlaut.com/mechanism-design-in-the-venetian-republic-
bbedc3a25ea0)

~~~
DoctorOetker
You are correct, "stoiciocrat" cf "stoichiocracy" is apparently not the
correct term. When I learned about this concept about 8 years ago [1], I seem
to misremember this to be the word on wikipedia. Apparently the correct
spelling is _" stochocracy"_ although the results are very few if I try to
look them up today. I was referring to concepts that seem to be more
conventionally called sortition (apparently the better term at least in
academia according to Google Scholar result counts), demarchy, random
ballot...

[1] The history page of "stochocracy" at wikipedia suggests this wasn't my
imagination:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stochocracy&actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stochocracy&action=history)

I also remember distinctly the page about the Kleroterion / Cleroterium, which
I highly encourage to read:

[http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.ht...](http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html)

While I still consider myself a "stochocrat", this is but one of my many
ideologies.

I believe many different forms of governance are the best depending on the
problem class or issue class, or properties of the problems themselves. For
example a the problem "choose or design a setup to isolate heavy water from
naturally abundant water" will not fare well under sortition, since it
requires expertise. On the other hand, problems that have been broken down to
such simplicity that anyone could execute it, but that typically suffer from
corruption by a minority fare better under sortition: perhaps the selection or
patrol routes and the assignment of cops to groups that run the patrol routes,
would make it harder to initiate corruption, if you do not know ahead of time
who will be your colleague, nor when or where.

Most decisions are not made by governments, but by individuals, and nowadays
also computers (or this could perhaps more properly be seen as amplified
decisions by programmers).

So if you ask "Do you know if many others share these views, and if they've
ever been implemented?" I can not really answer, at least in the past systems
have existed where people were raised with the concept of sortition, and all
systems indoctrinate the next generation with the importance of itself. If you
ask a person on the street what they think about sortition, they will probably
not know the word nor the concept, and after explaining mechanically how to do
it, they would probably consider it crazy and inapplicable to _any problem_. I
think the number of people wanting to learn more about sortition would
increase if not only explained mechanically, but also the properties (good and
bad) were explained.

Have they ever been implemented? I consider it an important part of Athenian
democracy. Also sortition is alive and well in many systems and places, think
of sortition of a jury of peers, think of implicit sortition in mining a block
in the Bitcoin system, think of explicit sortition in Algorand, ...

Note the last 2 examples are digital systems: a requirement for sortition to
work is that "nearly anyone can satisfy the task" (such as verifying the
signatures of transactions, and checking for sufficiency of funds, which any
computer could do in principle) as opposed to "design a lock-in amplifier".

I apologize for my incoherent writing style

------
dev_dull
Our litigious society has driven us in two directions: limiting liability and
secrecy. Limiting liability by outsourcing important functions to contractors,
who can absorb a lawsuit and simply go under. A government has effectively
unlimited liability since it can raise taxes, and can't easily go under, which
leaves it broadly exposed. And secrecy like this article.

Something will have to give or we'll see more and more of these trends.

------
rb808
No other country in the world makes emergency calls public, I dont see why US
calls are.

~~~
peteretep
American police are absurdly trigger-happy compared with other rich
countries[0], maybe this helps counter that?

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_countries)

~~~
darkpuma
What happens when you adjust those figures for something like differences in
private gun ownership rates between populations? It seems obvious that America
has the most guns, and that having so many more guns than anybody else
probably causes a dramatic increase in the number of _justifiable_ homicides
police are involved in.

------
ardani
Charge the requesters a review fee, per minute of footage?

That way you can categorize the video on demand, and release it as a public
good after. The categorization would need an appeals process.

Categorization would be akin to: release now, release in a year (for
embarassment), release in 30 years (for crimes) and perhaps never release
(murder scenes etc., but let it bitrot in a cabinet for 30 years first).

If you're poor you can ask a privacy and open governance charity to buy a
block of footage encompassing the footage you need.

Perhaps someone could write an RFC for this and send it around police
departments. It should be framed as a minor source of income and that it may
be a fun occasional distraction to some agents - if the tooling has a
sufficiently powerful playback and fast-forward function.

------
gumby
Seems like the caller's interest should trump that of the victims' families,
and doing so could make the system safer.

If you are taking drugs with someone and they look like they are dying it
should definitely be safe for you to call 911, even if you are participating,
or are somewhere you shouldn't be, or don't have a visa, or whatever.

If you break into a building, perhaps to steal, and your companion falls and
breaks a limb you should definitely be able to call 911 (bad luck for your
companion who will surely be arrested though).

A person's heart stops, you call 911, the try CPR and they die anyway (well,
they're already "dead" if you're doing CPR). You shouldn't have any liability.

Grand juries and review boards could still confidentially review 911 calls for
cases like this, where the family fears malpractice by the first responders.

== This is no different for why TSA should not screen for drugs or anything
but weapons that could threaten a flight; why people not already in the court
system should not be arrested in courthouses (or nearby). Why people who are
here illegally should get vaccines and drivers' licenses. What seems "unfair"
can actually promote the public welfare.

~~~
wool_gather
> A person's heart stops, you call 911, the try CPR and they die anyway (well,
> they're already "dead" if you're doing CPR). You shouldn't have any
> liability.

There's already some kind of provision for this in many places; it's known as
a "Good Samaritan law".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law)

------
born2discover
This is sad to read. I understand the will to protect the privacy of the
people calling in, but wouldn't the public interest prevail in some cases?

What I mean by that is, when weighing between keeping 911 records sealed for
the sake of privacy; against releasing them to the public for the sake of
public service (for example for performance review, reconstruction of the
chain of events ...), shouldn't the public's interest prevail (as in many
versus one)?

~~~
darkpuma
You're failing to consider the possibility that there is a _public interest_
in maintaining privacy for 911 calls. It could be the case that people are
more hesitant to call in something if they know the recording will become
public. This could conceivably do more harm to the public at large than
keeping the records private would.

------
BurningFrog
Having 911 recordings public is one of the most insane things about this
country.

Why not make my doctor visits public too?

~~~
_jal
911 recordings are records generated by public servants, and have implications
for the wider public. This is similar to court records, which are also
default-public.

Unless you're contagious, your health has no wider public implications. And if
you are, your wishes are also going to be ignored.

~~~
BurningFrog
> _This is similar to court records, which are also default-public_

It's hard for me to see how the trial of a rapist is similar to a rape victim
calling for help.

The trial needs to be public so we can monitor the application of justice in
the legal system.

The details of somebody's worst moments of their life needs to be public
because...?

If I ever need to call 911, I want to only focus on getting help fast. But as
it is, I also need to think about how I'll sound if this call is being played
on the news or Twitter.

~~~
Nasrudith
It is important conceptually because it involves essentially a petition of
government power and a check on abuse on both sides.

If they provides absolutely horrible public service as in callously calling
the rape victim a slut who deserves it and then later denied the misconduct
and circles the wagons that is important.

Or if the abuser of the calls isn't held accountable.

Transparency vs privacy isn't a straightforward matter and there is ample room
for debate and differences in opinion.

~~~
tzs
Using them to monitor abuse does not require making them public. It just
requires making them available to those who claim they were abused, or if they
did not survive their estate or whoever would have had medical power of
attorney for them or someone similar.

------
jcoffland
The problem is lawyers not privacy. The 911 operators and the state obviously
don't want sued.

~~~
tialaramex
If you don't want a source used in civil courts you can just tell the courts
they are't allowed to use it.

That's what is done for accident investigation. Accident investigators need to
understand what actually happened, not just a bunch of useless backside
covering as everyone tries to avoid getting sued. So, their evidence just
isn't admissible in civil courts. An investigation by, say, the NTSB or
analogous organisations in many developed countries produces a public report,
but you can't take that report into a civil court because it says in the law
and on the report that it can't be used that way.

It would probably take more effort to ensure this was effective in the
revenge-hungry United States of America than in countries where the mainstream
zeitgeist incorporates the understanding that hurting somebody else doesn't
fix anything, but it could be done.

