“Some schools in the United States may require 70% to pass:

A: 93-100% B: 85-92% C: 77-84% D: 70-76% F: 69% and below”

Our rural Illinois school district was one of these.

That’s standard US grading.

You sure you should be driving in your condition, son?

http://archive.org/details/20130206SeattleCityCouncilDrones

@mayormcginn

I spoke with SeattlePD Chief Diaz & we agreed to end unmanned aerial vehicle program so SPD can focus on public safety & community building

3:53pm – 7 Feb 13

Here Mr. Mayor you have to wear this camera around your neck all day.  The feed will be open to anyone who cares to watch… you don’t want to?  Do you have something to hide?

Technology just changes too fast to for law to keep up.  We need to fight the behavior.

Exactly.  But as long as the electorate is only thinking about the short term costs and benefits, this kind of globally Good Thing simply can’t happen.  It’s a crying shame, and I wish more people would think about usage and behavior.  But it would seem that the general public is only interested in spoon-fed snippets on the scale of less than a year (eg Anonymous DDoSed a server for a few weeks, until we got bored.  And Occupy Wallstreet (or any occupy for that matter), who’s heard about an occupy movement since October?)

What I am NOT okay with is having a 24/7 camera in the sky looking for people growing pot or warrantlessly tracking people.

The problem isn’t the tech.  The problem are the laws.  If the police want to stalk someone, they should have to get approval and follow due process.  I’m even okay with this being a temporarily secret process where it doesn’t become general knowledge until a trial or a reasonable length of time.

We can’t fight the tech.  The tech is going to change by the time we have laws in place to control it.  Technology just changes too fast to for law to keep up.  We need to fight the behavior. 

I’d rather not be recorded by the government constantly, and banning comprehensive surveillance is definitely best for the people.  I guess, knowing that I’m constantly tracked online and taking my privacy into my own hands has given me a bit of a jaundiced view of the situation.  It’s best to lobby hard against this surveillance, but I’m sure they tide of technology will make it just far too tempting for governments to monitor what everyone does all the time they’re in public.  It’s becoming too easy and cheap.  And the people don’t seem to notice as long as the local governments don’t do flashy stunts like buy drones.

Granted there’s a very slippery slope if that happens. If the city’s allowed to put up half a dozen cams in a block sized area with the highest % of violent crime, what’s to stop them from canvassing the whole town.

But still, if I have to choose which encroachment on civil liberties to fight, I’d worry more about drones than stationary cameras.

It all goes back to Franklin of course: “Those who would give up fundamental liberties for a little temporary security deserve neither”

I’ve been given 3 tickets by the red light cams and successfully contested both. Early on they’d ticket people who were in the intersections as the lights turned red. And early on, the yellows only lasted 3 or 4 seconds. Now everyone comes to a screeching stop when the lights turn yellow. I’ll bet the data would show there’s been an increase in rear end collisions since they put up the cameras. It might have decreased T-Bones, but I wouldn’t assume by very much. I’d hazard a guess that impaired drivers miss the lights at a fairly constant rate cameras or not.

Everyone knows the red light cameras are entirely a revenue generator, and the city doesn’t care whether or not they actually reduce injuries and deaths.

Though it was the right thing to do, I think this was largely a political maneuver.  McGinn is up for reelection, he’s tied his reputation to his Chief of Police (who leads a force found by the US DoJ to engage in constitutional violations one in five times they use force) he has nearly a dozen competitors for Mayor, and one of those competitors is Bruce Harrell.  Harrell is chair of Seattle City Council’s Public Safety, Civil Rights, and Technology Committee.  This week, Harrell introduced a bill (C.B. 117707; supporting memo, CRS report on drones in domestic surveillance referenced within; video of the hearing, and some good reporting on it) that would put some limits on the use of the two drones SPD bought last year with DHS grant money.

I suspect that bill will die now that the pressure is off. Instead, I would like to see it modified to be a bit less specific to drones, achieving the following:

Restrict city staff use of facial recognition and other biometric identification technology on any device to confirming the identity of the target of a warrant
Forbid city staff from equipping any remotely-operated or autonomous device with weapons
Forbid city staff from conducting general surveillance of the public with any device
Forbid city staff use of any remotely-operated or autonomous recording device without warrant

But that seems unlikely, because people are so focused on the hot-button topic of drones.

Much focus will be shifted to a H.B. 1771 in the Washington Legislature, which would establish “standards for the use of public unmanned aircraft systems.” It’s a good start, and it would be nice to see statewide regulations so cities whose citizens don’t have the gumption that Seattle’s do will also be somewhat protected, but I don’t think it goes far enough.

Meanwhile, the same police department who scrapped the two drones, who were recently forced into a consent decree by the DoJ because of their rampant abuses of power, have secured more grant money from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to deploy a network of 30 pole-mounted surveillance cameras, 160 wireless access points, and miles of fiber optic cable around the city, “for port security.” The same grant—which they administer for everyone in the area—resulted in them purchasing cameras “for the stadiums and things” to which they have at least partial access, says Seattle Police Department Commander of Special Operations, Assistant Chief Paul A. McDonagh #4708 (the same guy who was head manager of the SPD East Precinct when in 2010 they and the Mayor side-stepped City Countil and snuck surveillance cameras into my neighborhood park before we successfully lobbied for their removal). McDonagh says the primary use of this $5MM system will be overturned boats and kayaks. “I don’t call it a surveillance camera—surveillance to me implies someone is sitting there watching it all the time. These are just cameras watching a general area,” he says.

The wireless surveillance mesh network project “is borderline problematic,” says another Mayoral candidate, ex-police officer and current member of City Council, Tim Burgess.