The Eyes of Chicago are on YOU

Mayor Daley of Chicago and Ray Orozco, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, announced that he would like to see CCTV cover the city.

What might come as a surprise, is my support of this plan. However, I have grave concerns over who has access to the system and retention of video.

As of now it appears only 911 dispatch operators have access to the network currently in place. As the system grows to cover the city, my concern is that other divisions will be granted access to the system and abuses will follow without strict legislation defining limits.

My next concern, peeked by a Facebook posting between Dr. Zimmer and Dr. Walker, both of UW-Milwaukee, relates to saved video. Will video of the system be archived or recorded. I am sure there is already in place an option to record video feeds to assist as evidence in court and review for further clues, if need be. However, will all video feeds be recorded? If so how long will the video remain archived?

In addition will the video be made available through Freedom of Information Act requests, it is after all a publicly created 'document' and as Illinois law says, "…it is declared to be the public policy of the State of Illinois that all persons are entitled to full and complete information regarding the affairs of government […] Such access is necessary to enable the people to fulfill their duties of discussing public issues fully and freely, making informed political judgments and monitoring government to ensure that it is being conducted in the public interest." (5 ILCS 140/1)

It has been many years since Katz v. United States where the "reasonable expectation" of privacy was born. But it is my opinion that an individual, even in public, has an expectation to not be monitored and recorded for their time in public spaces. Simply, I can agree that an expectation of privacy in public is non-existent. This is based partially on the thought that no one would follow all the actions of an individual, but the ability for the State to record the actions of anyone in public from the time they enter the public space until they leave amounts to nothing more than stalking.

Perhaps video surveillance, open to the public, covering all governmental offices is in order. (Slight joke)

Copyright infringement

Professor Tomas Lipinski hinted at a great research topic during a visit to the seminar class I am taking this semester. However, it was the consensus of the seminar class that the information for the research may not be available because of legal or public relations issues.

So I have come to the blogospere to ask if anyone has any information about the following data or how to obtain the data.

Under 17 U.S.C 512(c)(3)(a), "a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider". In this case I am specifically looking only for data from higher education institutions; colleges, universities, etc. I would like to know the number of notices and, though I doubt possible, the outcome of those notices. How many instances was 17 U.S.C 512(c)(3)(g) asserted.

My immediate thought it that the various Freedom of Information Acts from state to state can be used to obtain this data. Has/does anyone have any information or knowledge of gathering this data?

The goal of this investigation is to see how the process is working for analysis purposes.