Seattle City Council Governance, Equity, and Technology Committee 5/21/19

Good morning, and thank you for being here for the Governance Equity and Technology Committee.

We have two items on our agenda today.

One will be a modification to our rules and procedures for the City Council, and the other one will be a discussion on the ordinance relating to surveillance technology and privacy protections.

And so, as usual, we'll start off with public comment.

We have a couple of people signed up.

I'll call you out in the order with which you've signed the document.

And we have McKenna Lux and Cynthia Spies.

I'm not sure how to pronounce that.

Please.

Good morning.

I'm McKenna Lux.

I'm the Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at the Council on American Islamic Relations of Washington State.

I'm here today to express concern over the council's proposed blanket approval of current practices around SDOT's use of license plate readers and CCTV traffic cameras and hope to ensure that the council takes full consideration of input from the working group and community members around technologies under review.

We've seen the consequences before of unregulated use of surveillance technologies, notably with the NYPD's surveilling the Muslim community in New York, using tactics including license plate readers, which are under review here as well.

In order to prevent future abuse, we need to ensure that concerns raised by stakeholders and impacted communities are addressed in strong and comprehensive ways.

The Seattle Surveillance Ordinance is the strongest measure adopted by an American city to provide regulations and oversight of surveillance technologies, and we applaud the city's leadership and partnership on this issue.

As pioneers in this area, we need to ensure We have an obligation to ourselves and to the rest of our country who are watching us as a model to ensure responsible and strong efforts are taken and we need to ensure that community input is heard and valued.

I would be very ironic if our carefully created process, which again many others are looking to as a model, resulted in a trust us approach simply approving existing agency processes without considering whether civil liberties concerns have been fully addressed.

The recommendations of the working group and of focus groups for future review groups should not only be included in SIR write-ups, but rather should be addressed through concerted efforts to set limitations on the use of surveillance technology, to conduct studies on societal impacts, reform training or curriculum to ensure compliance, or any other effort deemed appropriate for the technology under consideration.

We as a city need to set a precedent of proactively preventing misuse rather than trusting the agency promises are sufficient.

And I urge you today to further review the working group's concerns and recommendations before voting on the ordinance.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Hi, I'm Cynthia Spees.

I'm a member of the public, an independent security researcher, and a Seattle resident.

Members of the public and the Surveillance Advisory Working Group have read the SIRS, participated in the engagement meetings, and devised the feedback provided.

This feedback is not haphazard.

The CTO and Council should thoroughly heed all of the concerns raised.

Transparency is necessary, but not sufficient.

The purpose of the surveillance ordinance was not just to provide transparency, but also to enable improvements and refinements be made regarding the use of these technologies.

The council should not rubber stamp the existing usage of these technologies as described in the CSRS.

Concrete technical and policy feedback has been provided, but not followed.

The privacy of Seattle residents must be rooted in a strong foundation of one written policy or ordinance for the respective technologies, including employees trained to use those technologies.

Technical controls, such as granular access control and logging, which should be designed to fit the policy, not the other way around.

And three, written contracts with third parties as applicable.

Any one of these three alone is insufficient.

The working group has pointed out gaps in all three of these areas in regards to these SDOT CSRS.

Please consider the working group's feedback.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you for your comments.

We have another speaker, Marguerite Richard.

We're joined by Council Member Mosqueda.

Good day, everyone.

I'm I'm really concerned about the way this nation is going as far as I think you're talking about, I guess, in baiting people's privacy.

And I feel like I've been treated less than a human being.

And this is 2019. I think it all is race baited.

And some people would say not, but I believe that it is, because of the attack that seems to happen on low-income people.

Every issue that I think was ever developed was developed because of the poor people.

So they tried to figure out what kind of way they could disrupt poor people's lives and interrupt them and make them feel like they're not a part of society.

And I think it's wrong.

So I don't know what you're going to do in the end.

But I think the voices of the people are speaking out as far as what's going on.

And it takes a whole lot of minds to come together and come up with offenses towards people.

And I think that's what they're saying.

They're saying, why are you so involved in my life?

And you can't even, like they said, why don't you sweep around your own front door before you try to sweep around mine?

So really trying to figure this out why you're so hell bent on disrupting other people's lives.

And some people would call it fascism, but I just call it life because anything can happen on life's highway.

It's like one minute we're looking at one situation in the next minute, like the fire in California.

of burning people out of their houses and homes.

So there's a whole lot of stuff that you're not going to be able to do nothing about anyway, because that's just what's going to happen.

That's the way nature planned it.

And so I don't, like I said, I don't know what you're going to do.

Thank you.

That concludes those who have signed up for public comment.

Did I miss anybody that needed to speak?

If not, I'm going to close the public comment section and we're going to move to our first agenda item.

I do want to say for the record that council member Herbold is under the weather and wanted to send her regards, and so we wish her a speedy recovery.

And Council Member O'Brien could not also make it as well and will monitor this and is certainly fully engaged on the issue.

And he shared that with me yesterday, but just had a conflict.

So there we have it.

So why don't we read the first item into the record.

And I've always asked Ketel to join us.

I think he's the only guest.

Resolution 3 1 8 8 6 a resolution revising certain general rules and procedures of the Seattle City Council amending attachment 1 of resolution 3 1 8 0 6 chapter 11 Okay introductions and I read in mr. Keto Freeman council central staff

So I'm here pinch-heading for the city clerk's office representing their good work with the council president's office to amend the council rules.

The proposed changes to the rules generally would augment standards for conduct at public meetings.

I'll just briefly describe what Resolution 31886 would do and also describe a proposed amendment to the resolution.

So resolution 31886 would add a new rule related to abusive or harassing conduct.

This is a rule that's generally applicable to behavior in all city facilities.

Specifically, that new rule would specify that engaging in abusive or harassing behavior may subject a person to immediate exclusion from a council meeting for up to one year.

The rule also defines abusive and harassing behavior as behavior that purposefully or recklessly alarms other people and that serves no legitimate advocacy purpose.

The rule goes on to give some examples of abusive and harassing behavior, including use of obscene language or gestures, assaults or threatening behavior, and also sexual misconduct, such as indecent exposure, offensive touching, or sexual harassment.

The proposed changes would also modify current standards for exclusion to allow council members to exclude members of the public who have engaged in disruptive behavior at multiple meetings.

The current standard allows for exclusion for disruptive behavior at consecutive meetings or meetings within the same 30-day period.

So that's what resolution 31886 would do.

There's a proposed amendment to the resolution.

This is version two, so it's attached to the agenda.

That proposed amendment would clarify that exclusion is not the only remedy for engaging in abusive or harassing behavior, and that if the behavior meets the elements of a crime, the council may also pursue criminal sanctions.

Very good.

Pretty straightforward.

Do you have any comments, Council Member Muscat, you'd like to make?

Thank you, Mr. President.

I want to say thanks to you and to your leadership for advancing these policy changes.

Over the last year, year and a half, we obviously know that when we get elected, we sign up for being the target of public comment.

We want people to come and share their expressions of their interest in policy change.

their frustrations with what they'd like to see changed in the city.

This is all absolutely covered within First Amendment rights.

What we didn't sign up for is to be the targets of sexual violence and the targets for harassment and intimidating language.

When we sat up here about two months ago and had to be subject to threats of sexual violence, I think that is where, for me, we really had the opportunity to draw a line in the sand.

Yes, we want to hear from members of the public, and absolutely I want to hear with folks who disagree with me.

I don't want anybody, including myself or any of my staff members, to be the subject of violence or intimidation.

And I think that that's true for anybody who's coming to testify in these council chambers as well.

This is a place for public policymaking.

Ideally, it's a place for a civic discord.

And ideally, it's a place for us to disagree, but not be attacking individuals or threatening individuals.

I think that this document helps us both protect individuals who've been elected, our staff, and members of the public who've come and want to share their opinion, and to do so in a way that's both heard and being respectful.

So I appreciate this, and I do think that this sends a message that intimidation, harassment, assault, and threats of sexual violence will no longer be tolerated in these chambers, and I appreciate you advancing these efforts.

Well, thank you, and well articulated.

You know, we have nine different council members and a mayor, and I suppose that in public meetings, they have different styles.

And I've always tried to err on the side of freedom of speech and freedom of opinion, but with zero tolerance toward threatening behavior.

And I mean, zero tolerance.

And so I think these are well-placed policies.

I look forward to supporting them.

And so I'll advance them for a vote, and we'll bring it to the full council.

I did want to say, I asked staff to look at the issue of what tools commission chairs and board chairs have at their disposal as well.

Because one of my concerns, and I talked to people on the Women's Commission, as an example, that as they continue, and these are volunteers, often meeting in a public asset like this building, they could be subject to the same kinds of conduct.

And so I want to make sure they have the tools.

And so whether we have to pass a resolution or FAS has to pass an ordinance, or we have to pass an ordinance on FAS's behalf, I want to find out such we can make sure that they have the adequate tools to conduct their meetings appropriately.

And I'm just not sure of that issue.

So, so that's going to be some more work we'll look into offline.

Okay.

So I have to make an amendment because we did the, add the, the concept based on some feedback that to alert the public that in addition to exclusion, they, there could be criminal sanctions.

And so that is the amendment one.

So I'm going to amend, the resolution, and I'll call it Amendment 1, which describes that additional language that's in the amendment talking about there could be criminal sanctions in addition to exclusion.

So I'll move Amendment 1.

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

The ayes have it.

So now I'll move to pass Resolution 31886 as amended.

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

The ayes have it, and again we, just as a matter of policy, we send.

these documents out to the ACLU and the Muni League and the Human Rights Commission and some other, I don't think we sent the Human Rights Commission.

Oh, we did send the Human Rights Commission and some of the other commissions.

And so we try to, even on something we think that should be well supported, we don't take that for granted and try to do our outreach.

And so we didn't have any opposition to this.

And so, okay, so we'll present this to the full council at our next meeting.

And thank you, Ketel, for your stellar work as usual.

All right.

Okay.

Now for the surveillance technology, please read it into the record and our guests can come forward right now through the gate.

Council Bill 119519, an ordinance relating to surveillance technology implementation, authorizing approval of uses and accepting the 2018 surveillance impact reports for the Seattle Department of Transportation's use of closed circuit television traffic cameras and license plate readers.

OK, I'll wait for everyone to get settled.

I'm going to ask the two of you that if a council member does come, I'm going to ask you to move down, because as a reserve first, we have more of a council member.

But I think this is a full house.

Why don't we start with introductions?

Greg Doss, Council Central staff.

Ginger Armbruster, Chief Privacy Officer for the city.

Saad Bashir, CTU.

Sam Zimbabwe, SDOT.

And Jason Cambridge, the interim ITS manager for SDOT.

Charlotte Lende, the Community Technology Advisory Board.

Shankar Narayan of the Community Surveillance Working Group and the ACLU.

OK, very good.

So I do want to, I don't want to violate any HIPAA issues by saying, Greg, thank you for coming in.

I know you have a cold, and so you were a trooper today, so thank you for that.

Are you going to be able to hang with us during this discussion?

I am.

I'm just going to be brief and let the departments do most of the speaking.

OK.

And why are you sitting on this end of the table?

We're not just kidding.

And we worked on this initiative, sick and safely, for you to take those days.

I told him.

I told him.

I was willing to actually postpone it, but I know I had a lot of people vest on us.

By example here at the city.

OK, so Greg, why don't you tee it up, and then we'll just dive into the ordinance.

All right, well, Council Bill 119519 is before you today pursuant to the surveillance ordinance that was passed about two years ago.

It requires that any existing or new technology that can be considered surveillance come before the city council for approval.

We have before you today two technologies, SDOT's traffic cameras and SDOT's ALPR, the license plate readers.

both of which the department will go into how they use the devices and into some depth about how data is maintained, recorded, and security is provided.

You'll also hear today from the working group chair who has some general concerns about the surveillance ordinance and then also some specific concerns about the technology.

And with that, I'm just going to step back and let Seattle IT tell you about the technology.

And so I think that's a great introduction.

So the way I thought this could proceed, there's a lot of discussion we had about the process, about these are the first two of many of that.

So I would want to reserve that more overarching conversation till the departments have presented the first two slides.

technologies and then let's talk about the process where it can improve and just sort of free flow from there if that's acceptable.

Okay.

All right.

I was going to lead this off.

There's a presentation.

Do we need to have somebody bring that up for us?

Oh, it's right there.

The magic of technology.

We were going to take a couple slides just to review what went into building these so that you understand what we are doing to be compliant with the law.

So I'm going to start off, Ginger Armbruster here, telling you a little bit about what our team has been up to.

So I'd like to start with the fact that the privacy office was tasked with taking the CTO's requirements for the ordinance and getting these completed.

Privacy offices was created in 2015 to uphold the privacy principles that this body voted in by resolution.

So that's part of what we do.

Then we were tasked with this.

The ordinance itself took effect in September of 2017 and was amended last year to include an external working group.

We're all aware of that.

The council reviews and approves for continued use or acquisition anything deemed to be a surveillance technology.

The definition is provided here.

Any piece of hardware, software, portal, or other that observes or analyzes the movement's behavior or actions of identifiable individuals in a manner that is reasonably likely to raise concerns about civil liberties, freedom of speech, or association, racial equity, or social justice.

And then a CIRR must be created for each existing proposed technology.

On the other side of the slide is what we found.

We did a sense of audit.

There was a self-audit by all departments.

And then we helped with the final few hundred technologies that we considered could be possibly surveillance.

And this is what we landed on.

There's 29 of them, three in City Light, three in Department of Transportation, two of which we'll discuss today.

three fire department, and 20 in Seattle Police Department.

And of those 20, half are in special investigation units like Internet Crimes Against Children, so really specified for certain uses.

We grouped the presentation of these technologies per council request.

The idea of putting one a month in seemed overwhelming for this body, so we were requested to group them in a logical grouping.

We landed on, it's changed a couple of times by other requests, specifically by the working group to start off with something kind of a little easier and smaller to digest as we get used to this process.

So the first two that are before us today are from SDOT.

There were two that were going to be from FHIR, but with help from the working group identified some holes in the policy.

and some dated material.

The very first of these SIRs were supposed to be sent in last year.

They've been sitting on a shelf for a while.

We need to update to reflect recent policy changes.

So those will be later.

But this is basically what it looks like.

This is the first round in May.

We have some more in July.

We have some more in November that are planned.

And then from there, the last group.

I think you saw it.

So what is in a SIR?

They're long.

We've all sort of been remarking on that over the last few days.

They're long because of the requirements in the ordinance.

We didn't do this to you to give you lots of nighttime reading and give you pounds of material to read.

They're long because of the information required.

So CSRS required and we project manage these with departments.

It's their information.

We help project managers to make sure you're getting a repeatable process and a document that we believe is coherent and hits all the bases.

So the first part of this is a privacy impact assessment.

It's a term of art in the privacy world.

It's what we do for any technology that has serious privacy risk associated with it.

It's a series of questions that are outlined in the ordinance.

So everything about data that's collected, managed, shared.

noticed or not noticed, all of the things that we would look at to see how is the data managed around privacy principles.

So that is the first part of this.

It's probably the meat of the SIR and ranges from 30 to 50 pages.

So that's kind of what that is.

It's documenting all the policies that regulate.

and all the use case information that is included.

The next part is also required by the SIR, by the ordinance, and that's financial information.

Some of this is difficult to get at for technologies that have been in place for a while, but we've done our best to give you an idea of what it costs to maintain and to acquire the technology.

It will probably be easier when we have new things to bring to this body.

The next is something we added as a way to try to get at some of the racial equity disparate impacts of the technology wherever we can.

We have a process at the city for looking at that through a toolkit and some of those questions we've adapted for this purpose.

The next is public engagement.

I'm going to go into that in a little bit of detail in a moment.

The next is the Privacy Civil Liberties Impact Assessment the working group has prepared, and then the CTO response to that.

And finally, the appendices and supporting documentation, which is really the bulk of this.

This is where the policies live, this is where the detail, this is where public comments live, all the materials that we used in public engagement.

So that's what all that is.

So all this takes a long time to create.

And I wanted to make this point so that you understand that this is a process that we've been working on for almost two years now.

The first part of this process to create a SIR is to draft the thing.

And it takes somewhere between two and three months working diligently and iteratively and collaboratively with departments.

to answer all of the questions required in the ordinance.

So that's the first part, and that is a back and forth process as we realize policies are not present, things are not clear, this doesn't work for me, let's make it into better English, those kinds of things.

The second is a public comment period.

Traditionally this is a 30-day type thing where we give the public an opportunity to comment.

We do public engagement, which is also required by ordinance.

Series or at least one meeting needs to be noticed and needs to be information provided in multiple languages, needs to be accessible, those kinds of things.

So that comments can be gathered and included in the body of the SIR.

The next, we do it, yeah.

Can I ask a question about the public comment piece?

Yeah.

When that is conducted, a forum, an example is convened, are we going over multiple SIRs or one at a time?

Can you talk to me about that?

We have tried to group them.

So we have conducted several of these now.

We find that individual, if I just talked about one technology, not very many people are going to show up.

If I talk about surveillance in general and have several technologies to discuss, that seems to get more interest from the public.

So we try to group them by let's get a couple from police, let's get a couple from Department of Transportation.

We try to group them in some meaningful way.

Also by which group is up.

Next to be transmitted to this body for for consideration try to get through those as well So we do some and I'll talk more about what goes into all that in just a moment public comment analysis We try to figure out what the themes are we're required by the ordinance to do that to give you an idea of what are some of the things that came up in the course of public comment if we if we have some The working group does their review, that's a six-week by ordinance, and they have the option to take an additional two.

I think we've mostly seen eight weeks for this as they've gotten themselves up and going, but that takes some time for them to review.

And then we have an opportunity to have a CTO response.

We sort of wedge that in at the end.

We have just a few days to do that process if we keep up to the master list that we've submitted to you all.

And finally, that's all happens before it gets to you guys for your review.

So good six to seven months, not a lot of wiggle room in terms of making that much shorter.

So I just wanted you to be aware of that.

And then public engagement, I want to spend a moment on.

I think one of the important parts of this ordinance was to provide transparency and an opportunity for the public to comment and provide their perception of these technologies.

So the first one up there, Shankar, you'll see yourself.

The first one was on police technologies, and it spoke to a variety of technologies.

I think this was at the Columbia Library.

So we do public meetings and venues where we can try to get out to folks we hope will come and share their perspective.

In addition to that, excuse me, I'm getting over the cold you have, community meetings for any department that have standing meetings.

So police, SDOT, some of the departments have existing community meetings where we can take an opportunity to either get them to the public meetings we're having or get comment generated there.

Department of Neighborhoods did some focus groups for us to try to get at some community folks that we perhaps didn't have come to public engagement and go to them.

We have a website we're required to do so we can publicly post SIR drafts.

We also included video of departments discussing the use of the technologies.

So right below where that picture is, that's a screenshot of our public-facing website where we put coming events, calendars, and under that surveillance tab, all kinds of resources in languages, translated, et cetera, for folks to access.

We also have an opportunity for comment on surveillance technologies.

And I'll say that that comment button probably gave us more public comment than we got in any other way.

So it's been a good outreach.

And the videos were available on YouTube.

Seattle Channel helped us out.

And we had thousands of hits.

So people really got a chance at least to see what the technologies were if they didn't comment.

Social media advertising, we did outreach that way and got a few more people to comment and to show up.

We also have opportunities for email and actual letters.

We got a few letters from folks.

So that's what public engagement looks like.

It's a big time consuming but important part of this.

And we extended our public comment period by a month because of the snow in Seattle squeeze.

We made it variably longer if we were required.

Working group members, you're familiar with everyone.

Nagin, I believe, will be moving on, so there'll be a space made available, but these are all the folks that now are contributing to the working group.

And I wanted to give you what have we been up to since 2017, not to toot our own horn, but for you to understand that we have been working hard in the background to get things done.

The first part of 2017 or last part of 2017 was the surveillance ordinance audit, which I explained to you.

We went from hundreds of technologies down to the 29 we determined.

We submitted the first version of the master list to the city clerk at the end of October or November.

And then we created a SIR template and began our project management with each department who had identified technologies.

In 2018, we had our first quarterly reports.

Those have been going into the city clerk and available.

Those are the surveillance determination reports required by the law.

that ask us to look at everything we've acquired that was not surveillance so that you have an opportunity to decide if you still want it to be considered.

We created the public website.

We started, oh, and then the working group amendment happened.

We had a lull in this as we were considering adding the working group.

So we had a few months out where we were stalled.

But we had the first CIRS completed for beginning of review, public comment review in September, and then the first public engagement meeting was in October.

And in 2019, we had the working group added, public comment period in February-March for the group two technologies, and then we were able to submit one and two, part of two, to the working group.

We still have two more that we are waiting to submit to them.

And finally, group one, consisting of two technologies, is ready to go to council.

So this is what our activity has been to date, and I'm happy to answer any questions that will come to you later about detail that you may require.

And with that, I'm going to turn this over to colleagues in ISTOT.

So I'm going to just spend a second to set the context, and then Jason will dive into some of the technical details.

We're very happy to be here as part of this.

I think it's been a lot of work by staff, as Ginger mentioned, just a lot of work across Seattle government to get to this point, but very happy to have gotten to that point.

We're talking about two technologies today that are very focused on traffic management and incident management to keep Seattle moving.

We've seen the fastest rate of growth of any city in the country, among the 50 largest cities, without expanding our roadway capacity to handle that.

And so we've had to look for all the different ways that we can manage traffic, manage the flow of people and goods throughout the city, and at the same time we've had increasing expectations from the public about their ability to plan their trips and plan for reliable, efficient transportation, no matter how they're getting around.

We've also seen, and we will continue to see, events that change our traffic patterns on a daily and on a longer term basis.

We manage through the viaduct closure, buses coming out of the downtown transit tunnel, but we also manage incidents on a daily basis and coordinate our response to those with WSDOT.

So we're trying to use technology in a responsible way that manages through these day-to-day challenges that we face.

You can go to the next slide.

So there's two technologies that we have here today for review are traffic cameras and license plate readers.

primarily to provide situational awareness to our staff and across Seattle government and be able to respond quickly and transparently to these incidents as they come up.

They've been very critical for us in providing us information, but also providing the general public with information about day-to-day traffic management.

Jason is really the technical expert on a lot of this stuff, and so I'm going to let him dive into the details, but look forward to questions about how this integrates into all of the things that we're doing at SDOT.

Thanks, Sam.

So at SDOT, we have a dedicated staff who are working 24 hours a day and seven days a week in our Transportation Operations Center to help keep the traffic in our city moving.

And they're using a variety of methods to understand the prevailing conditions on our streets.

They're listening to the police scanners.

They're seeing a feed from computer-aided dispatch for both police and fire.

They're working closely with the state DOT and their traffic management center, monitoring social and traditional media.

Also, we can learn about the incidents that are impacting our streets and participate in a coordinated effort to clear those incidents as quickly as possible.

And one of our primary tools for reaching that objective is the use of traffic cameras.

And we're not alone in using traffic cameras in this way.

Virtually every DOT in every state uses them in a similar fashion.

And we have 241 cameras installed throughout the city on our major corridors, which are remotely controllable from our center.

We also support additional users in other departments and other remote SDOT facilities.

We have a user in the Special Operations Center for SPD, in the Fire Alarm Center for the Fire Department, the Executive Protection Unit in the Mayor's Office, in our Emergency Operations Center that's activated during large regionally impactful events.

Question?

Jason, yeah, I think you're getting ready to.

answer the question I have, but let me just be clear in my question.

Sure.

So the 241 cameras, whether they have CCTV capability or not, there are other cameras in our rights of way and on our streets not owned by us, by, let's say, the federal government as an example, correct?

Or, well, let me just stop there.

There are other cameras out there.

And Shankar, you could chime in too.

You're looking at me with...

That would not be a program that I would be involved with, so I don't have...

I know that's outside of the SIR.

I'm trying to get a lay of the land of what's out there in the real world.

So I understand this SIR covered the 241 cameras, correct?

Correct.

Okay.

So let's talk about, there are other cameras out there owned by other governmental agencies that are still viewing us, correct?

Yes, President Harrell, we had had a discussion about some of the federal cameras.

I can't remember if it was this committee, but the issue had come up and, you know, these cameras had appeared in an alley.

We did some investigation.

It was clear that they were federal government cameras, but beyond that, you know, it seemed as if the rules applying to the cameras were not clear and beyond the control of this body.

And private commercial owners are free to install cameras facing outward, of course, as long as it doesn't have, I think, audio recording, as I understand it.

But there's hundreds, if not thousands, of private cameras out there, too, I take it, correct, in this world of cameras.

Yes, that is correct, President Harrell.

We would say that the legal question of, for example, whether you can simply face your ring camera out onto the street and record everybody who's there, as opposed to someone approaching your door, is unsettled.

That's a good point.

But I think it's unsettled from a legal standpoint.

But I think there, well, those even the ring items you can get at Costco, out early, those record audio as well, by the way.

So in any event, and the port, do we know if the port of Seattle protecting their ports, do they use camera technology as well within our city?

Does anyone know?

We know there are a lot of surveillance cameras, those are outside of this ordinance, security type cameras that are used to protect property and I'm sure the port has.

And the reason I'm going on this line of questioning is I want the public to know that while we are looking at these 241 cameras, and trying to protect privacy, we are doing it somewhat in the context of I think there are thousands of cameras still out there that are not covered under this privacy work that we're doing.

And I think that's an important context to have as we look forward.

Now, to go back to what we have as a city of Seattle, Jason, you're saying, You were saying the 241, whether they have CCTV capability or not, I thought you were saying there are other cameras by our emergency center somewhere, or are all those cameras you were referring to covered under these 241?

All the cameras are covered.

License plate readers can also be defined technically as a camera.

Okay, very good.

Thank you.

Please proceed.

Sure.

So all the users that I was describing go through a training program and are provided our policy, which states that they must contact the operations center prior to moving any particular camera.

And we try and be completely transparent in our use of these cameras, and we provide all of them to the public on our traveler information web map as live streaming video.

And during this past winter snow event, We saw requests for that video go up over a thousand percent, which is evidence to us that people are using these cameras to try and make more informed and safer trip planning decisions.

Council Member Skid has a question.

Can you elaborate a little bit more on what the training looks like?

When we say training, sometimes it's not fully inclusive or engaging.

For example, we have a effort that we're undertaking here to reevaluate the training that we have for sexual harassment prevention in our own legislative department.

The training is about 15 minutes online.

That's not actual training that I think syncs in with folks.

So what's your training look like?

So for the onboarding of a new operator in the TOC, it's a 30-day process.

I have a list of all those requirements and kind of a daily outline of what they're learning each particular day.

They're shadowing a senior operator during that time who is also giving them the knowledge on how to conduct their day-to-day operations.

We also have policy around the use of the cameras that they're trained on during that time.

And I was going to get into that later, but they're simply trained to never zoom in to an extent where they can determine a person or a license plate while using the cameras.

They're simply for use to conduct traffic management.

We go and train them on how to use the system and provide them the same policy.

It's not the same 30-day onboarding because they are working for other departments, but we try and stay in close contact with them if there's new software updates, et cetera.

We inform them about that, and we all kind of collaborate to make sure we have an understanding of how the camera should be used.

Thank you.

So we use them to detect incidents and verify their severity.

We can then right-size our response by determining if it's a short or a long-term event and react appropriately.

We then start taking action.

We put messages on signs, communicate.

using social media and other communication tools, and coordinating with the police department, the fire department, the state, and metro to help clear the incident as quickly as possible and to inform travelers about upcoming congestion.

We also use cameras to discover new detour routes.

We can then create diversion plans and monitor those routes to make sure they're behaving as we expect.

They're also incredibly useful during large planned events like Monday night football games.

We can use the cameras to view traffic patterns around the stadiums.

to send and update messaging and also modify signal timing to help alleviate congestion during those large events.

They have additional uses as well for the department.

We can verify that the messages on our signs are displaying as we intended.

And also we work very closely with the traffic signal team in SDOT, so we can use them.

Often we get notified that traffic signals are not functioning as expected.

For example, we were informed that some traffic signals on East Marginal Way had gone dark.

We're able to verify that with the traffic cameras and then dispatch electricians who are armed with generators to get them up and functioning again to help mitigate that unsafe situation.

And again, the traffic signal timing engineers, they're responsible for making sure the timing on most of our primary corridors is functioning optimally and they can subsequently look after they've implemented new timing changes at the cameras to make sure that indeed they're functioning as well as they can.

So a couple of quick examples of, incidents that we've managed, one with visual verification capability and one without.

So the first one here is the crab truck.

It was kind of a notorious event that happened in 2016. So we learned from computer-aided dispatch at 2.39 p.m.

that there was an incident on the viaduct.

So immediately using a camera, we were able to verify that.

a semi-truck heading northbound had rolled over onto the barrier.

And with two minutes, we're posting messages, tweeting about the incident, going through all of our protocol and updating the appropriate personnel and SDOT about the incident.

And because we visually confirmed that it was severe, we dispatched our response team immediately and they arrived at the scene at 2.50.

So within 11 minutes, we had a team on the ground, we were able to make a full assessment of the scene and continue coordinating the response from there.

Did the crab survive?

The crab are frozen, no.

They did not make it.

And here's a situation where we didn't have the same visual verification.

So late last year, a semi-truck hauling steel ball bearings lost its load on Southwest Genesee Street in West Seattle.

Again, the incident appeared on computer-aided dispatch feed at 416. But our response team doesn't prioritize incidents like this with no visuals because it can be difficult to determine the severity or the traffic impact simply by using the CAD feed.

and they typically wait for SPD to request traffic control assistance.

And so after receiving that request, they ultimately arrived on the scene at 5.04 p.m.

and only then was it confirmed that the roadway was closed to traffic and we began sending messages and taking further action.

So this lack of visual confirmation delayed our response, creating nearly 50 minutes of lag when comparing the two incidents.

So we do have a couple of opportunities to ensure that people's privacy is protected through the use of the technology.

The first thing we do is take advantage of a feature in the cameras called privacy masking.

So you can actually go into the software, the camera's user interface, and draw a polygon onto the view that will obscure whatever is behind it.

So in this slide, it shows a camera that's installed at 5th and Madison.

It's installed near a residential tower.

and we've issued the privacy masking where it's appropriate and just gone through the exercise of looking at all of our cameras.

Those that are installed near private property, we've just put in the privacy masking.

We also, and most importantly, just train everybody, like I said, to never zoom in to an extent where they can identify a person or a license plate while they're using the cameras to perform traffic management.

I'm going to come back to that slide when we have more of a conversational piece.

I'll share with you and the public an interesting, piece of information that years ago when we were sort of alarmed by the use of technology around our port and whether it rotated or not into residences, I said that literally outside of my office here at City Hall.

less than 10 feet outside of my window that has no blind well it blinds always up is a camera and it's on me every minute of the day and I asked well who's watching me every day because it's a it's one of these cameras and I was told that it's shaded like that and I said well Well, who controls that?

He or she could push a button and it's unshaded, right?

And we had an interesting conversation.

Interestingly enough, that camera's since been removed.

I mean, within the last year, it was there for seven or eight years.

But that's a very important intersection right here, because you have the municipal tower, you have the police department, you have City Hall.

It warrants safety measures, and so I wasn't complaining about the camera, but it is a little area working 10 feet away from a camera on you 24 hours a day.

I understand.

And in some instances, we have also put like a physical barrier, like a blank sign, so just to completely make it impossible for the camera to view beyond that point.

I think that's an important distinction.

I think that when we were working on Seattle City Lights guidance for the AMI

We continue to hear sort of examples like that.

Well, we don't do that in practice.

We don't do that in practice.

In practice, we put this protection in place.

And I think that's the crux of the conversation.

What do we do in practice versus what are we putting in policy so that no matter who's in your positions as directors or in our positions as city council members, or even your positions as community advocates and subject matter experts, that our policies are very clear.

So I think that sort of underscores my questions and concerns as we move forward.

Yes, we have good practices in some cases Questionable practices and others, but the policy is I think our guiding document.

So that'll be the focus of my questions Great point great

All right, so what happens with the camera data?

Our cameras are not always being recorded.

We have specific procedures which allow SDOT employees to ask that traffic cameras be recorded to conduct traffic studies, and no other department can make similar requests.

We began keeping a log of those requests late last year, and thus far in 2019, only two recordings have been requested, so it's a fairly infrequent event.

Those recordings are kept on a server that's only accessible by SDOT's IT team.

They share a read-only link with the user, inform them that the video is available, and then they delete it after 10 days of its being created.

And this video is never shared with any other department or used for any type of legal enforcement.

Jason, may I ask a question about that?

When you say it's not recorded, I understand.

Well, it's recorded for 10 days.

It's kept for 10 days, the ones that are recording.

Yes.

But with the ones that are not recording, are they still on and just being watched live and not recording?

Or are they in the off?

So a human being is monitoring, but we're just not recording the footage.

That's right.

OK.

And that camera that we're talking about as an example that is not recording, why would it not be recording?

Are we just, are there certain areas we just say we're not recording this area?

Are there certain days of the week?

I mean, when is a decision made as to when it would record versus when it isn't?

Is it always never recording because of that area?

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, they're always never recording.

They're strictly for live viewing, understanding traffic conditions, managing traffic in real time.

But occasionally, if requested by somebody within the department, we can use them to conduct a traffic study.

An example might be if they put in new traffic signal timing and they want to verify it's functioning as well as they can, they can request 10 days worth of video, whatever the study period is, that is viewable for them for only 10 days.

We provide them a link to that video.

They can watch it on high speed and just see the results and, you know, confirm the results of their analysis.

And part of this is very educational, so thank you for your patience, at least with me.

So where we locate the cameras, the 241 cameras, I assume there's a science into that.

And can you talk a little bit about Are some of them in residential areas like with low traffic?

Are they always in four-way stop signs?

Can you just talk about the thought that goes behind where these are and generally where are they?

Sure.

So we have a citywide spanning network of intelligent transportation devices including the traffic signal system, cameras, vehicle detectors, just a variety of technology that's out there.

And so a lot of that kind of dictates where we can place cameras.

A lot of these cameras have been placed all through the years according to the objectives of various projects.

So a project might come through to add ITS, which is intelligent transportation system elements along Lake City Way, for example.

Then we would lay out the fiber optic cable, put the switches into the cabinets, connect it, go through all the rigor of bringing it back to our operations center.

That has dictated the location of many of our cameras, and so it's been kind of a, you know, since 2000 is when we began installing these cameras, so it's been a multi-year process.

We just keep growing over time, and now we're to the point where we have very good coverage over most of the primary corridors in the city, so it wouldn't be in residential areas.

It would strictly be on signalized corridors.

And we just did a spot analysis, so we compare collision history with some blind spots, so we can use the camera to see, hey, we can't see this intersection, we can't see that intersection.

So we've identified 25 more locations for cameras that should be suitable alternatives in the coming years, installed as part of the Move Seattle Levy objectives.

And so that's another part of the process is just looking at collision history.

You know, it would be very valuable for us to have a camera here due to the crash history.

And in the next several years, are we likely to, as we add cameras, just to add more cameras or do we take some of the 241 down?

Let's say we take 41 of them down and relocate them.

Is it just sort of an additional strategy?

It's an addition, but I would say that at a point we'll meet a saturation point where we can see every primary arterial in that point.

We no longer need to add cameras.

So we're pretty much not removing any cameras, we're just adding as we see the need for traffic management.

Yes.

Okay, very good.

Okay, on to license plate readers.

So we have them installed along 15 of our primary corridors in the city.

You can see the map there.

Those purple dots are the stations where they're located.

So we have 35 of them.

There's typically two cameras pointing for each of the primary directions of travel.

And as you can see, they're not installed at every intersection, but at decision points.

So when people receive the travel time information, they still have options for which ways to go when they're armed with that information.

And we partnered with the state DOT in this endeavor.

They had used LPRs in the exact same way for several years prior to us adopting the same method.

So our intent is that as travelers move from SDOT-owned and managed facilities like the West Seattle Bridge and onto I-5, we provide them information using the same system.

And that way, our data has more of a regional feel.

And as people move from the city streets and onto the highway, they'll have the same experience, at least from a travel time perspective.

Now, who decided where these 35 locations were?

So that would again be part of...

What departments?

It'd be SDOT, yeah.

So is it SDOT solely or do they consult with SPD or FIRE or...

No.

So it's pretty much an SDOT...

It'd be an SDOT project, just like I was describing.

It would place a traffic camera, License plate readers, travel time collecting technologies would also be part of what we consider when outfitting a corridor with intelligent transportation systems.

And these, in particular, are typically linked with a sign.

And so we could place the travel times that we're receiving from those license plate readers on the sign.

So when you come to it, you'd say, hey, these are the options for destinations from this starting point.

And now I can take that into account when I'm considering how I'm going to make this particular trip.

And so if I were to walk down A street, would I be able to visually see one of these on a sign or are they pretty obscure?

They are typically installed on the master arm that's supporting traffic signal heads.

I see.

So they are very apparent.

They're not obscured at all.

And the camera that, let's say you're blocking the box and you're trying to cheat and make that left turn and it flashes and you get a ticket.

That's not, those cameras are outside of the 241. Those are not recording, those are just, well, they are recording, I guess, because they, go ahead, Sam.

I was just going to say, so those are outside of both the traffic cameras that we were just talking about and outside of the license plate readers.

The license plate readers are solely feeding the real-time traffic display information that you see on the screens that Jason has a shot of.

Yeah, so those traffic speeding cameras are outside of the 241. I didn't know if those were still included in the 241, because those, I mean, obviously, they're watching people make the illegal left turns, but I assume they're always on as well.

I mean, they.

Yes, and those are traffic enforcement and outside of the ordinance.

So, we were careful to look at only the ones that are not included in the exclusion.

Very good.

Very good.

Okay.

Okay.

So, sort of, these, so we have 35 locations of the LPRs.

Yes.

Got it.

So why do we use them?

We use them to put messages on the boards, like I mentioned.

Also, we update our traveler information map with that same information.

They're also our primary measurement that indicate how well our corridors are performing, and it lets us know where to focus our attention due to an unexpected increase in those values.

We also produce and distribute a daily traffic report that includes travel times to create a congestion index.

And what it does is it looks at the previous 24 hours of travel time and compares that to the prior six months And so we can really get a view of how traffic is progressing through the city on those major corridors.

And soon we'll be implementing an automatic congestion management system that will use an increase in travel times to automatically change traffic signal timing.

So our ability to respond to and alleviate congestion will become that much more fluid and dynamic as a result.

I have to ask this.

How are we using this, though, to advance our commitment to Vision Zero and to make sure that there's connected and protected bike lanes?

We're talking a lot about monitoring traffic and vehicles, but part of the things that we're seeing, especially on 35th, as of the beginning or as in the last five days or so, is these vehicles hitting cars.

So where are we using this to advance our commitments in other areas of SDOT to create protected bike lanes?

So I think this is actually pretty integrated with our overall efforts to manage traffic and use the right-of-way efficiently.

And that means as we look to build out a multimodal network, We're not widening roads to do that.

We're building within the right-of-way, and that means using technological tools to help us manage the traffic that we have and provide those other alternatives.

So I think some of that is providing information out to people, and some of it's responding when there are incidents that affect our ability to move people through corridors.

So I think the places that are outlined and where we're tracking travel times and how we're doing what Jason talked about.

are integrally linked with all of that.

I think, and we've heard feedback separate from this process on some of the adaptive signals, that's an ongoing process which this links directly into, of how we use that information to make sure we're managing multimodal traffic and not just vehicular traffic.

And Jason, this is very helpful for me.

So I just want to keep thanking you for this.

It's very educational.

So in your experience, Sam, I guess you've worked in other jurisdictions.

LPRs are a little jarring when you really think about it, that someone is actually tracking.

where we're going.

I mean, I think we all can agree on that.

But is this almost commonplace in major cities now?

Or can you talk a little bit about how long has it been around?

And one of our great speakers mentioned the abuse in New York City.

I heard about that, but I don't know much.

Do you know of any other abuse

I don't know of other abuse situations.

I do know that this is something that's pretty standard, as Jason said, in DOTs, both at a city and at a state level, to provide this kind of information and management on major corridors.

Jason's going to talk a little bit about exactly what is captured from the LPR and how we're utilizing that, because I think we want to make sure that people understand how we're utilizing this information, how we're not utilizing this information.

Go ahead, Jason.

Great.

So here's how they work.

When a license plate comes into view, the LPR creates a digital record of that event and affixes a timestamp to it.

And we've done an analysis.

And by looking at general purpose traffic volume, we recognize that only about 5% to 10% of the plates that move through the view of a move past the license plate reader are actually ultimately used to create a travel time.

We then send that information immediately to the state to do all the processing on our behalf.

And what they do is they do plate matching.

So they recognize when the same plate has appeared at point A, and again appeared at point B, and then you have a travel time between those two points.

And so when five trips occur, they take an average of that, and that's what's provided back to the city.

In fact, it's publicly available.

This information is provided through a web service that's available for consumption by anybody who wants to write a software application or anything.

We're just consumers of the exact same type of data that the state provides to everybody.

Yeah.

I'm familiar with the open data policy that sort of governs this.

Is that 5% to 10% because of the limitations on the technology, or is that just that you're just trying to get samples?

The 5% to 10% plates that are actually captured?

I think that just it's probably a limitation of the technology.

Maybe the geometry isn't right.

Maybe there's a shadow over the license plate.

I know they have some trouble with some of the specialized plates, et cetera, is what I've learned from the manufacturer.

So I think that leads to that.

And we know that because when we receive the travel time back from the state, it says, not specifically which plates, but how many plates were used to create that travel time, which gives us a notion of how many people are making that trip.

We compare that value to general purpose traffic that we use to collect traffic volume, and that's how we determined that it was about 5% to 10% capture rate.

And Shankar, I'm aware of the lack of agreement with WSDOT that concerns your organization.

I thank you for your patience.

You're patient, and I know you're chomping at the bit to to thank you for your indulgence.

Let me just put it that way.

So is that the bounce back from watch.backtos is that a real time basis?

Is that a month later?

Or can you talk a little bit about how we capture the process by which we capture that information?

I couldn't get a fill in or write up on that.

Sure.

And that's something I probably should have highlighted more.

It's kind of a technical explanation, but essentially, on the internet, they provide a website that has explanations about all the different traffic-related data that they have available.

And they provide instructions on how to access that data.

And once you see that data, they also provide a dictionary so you can see, oh, this is what it's referring to in the data stream.

And so travel time is just another one of those data streams that's available through the internet that we're consuming, just like anybody else would have the opportunity to.

So I'm hearing your answer to say that once a person's license plate falls into that five to ten percent and they are monitored from going from A to B, almost on a real-time basis, we can then access that database to determine that A to B travel time?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So just to get a bit deeper into the details, after those plates are matched in the wash dot servers, that underlying raw data is immediately deleted.

They're never storing any of the plate information.

We're not ever storing any of the plate information.

It's not provided back to us in that data feed.

And that data feed, there probably is about a five minute lag in the time that these trips are being captured and turned into travel times.

to the point that we actually consume it and start putting it on message reader boards, et cetera.

I see.

OK.

Thank you very much.

So this is my final slide, just kind of overview of what I just said.

We delete that.

We don't delete the plate information.

Wash.deletes that plate information immediately upon making those matches.

We never receive that from the feed.

And although these systems are similar to those used by law enforcement agencies, this is a completely separate system, and it's just never used for any type of legal enforcement.

All right.

OK.

I'm assuming that that's your last slide?

It is.

OK.

So we've pretty much gone through the technical explanations of the two technologies, and so why don't we have just some discussion?

Shankar, I'm just gonna let you, I know you have a lot of concerns.

I've tried to read as much as I could.

You guys thrown a lot at me this week.

300 pages of SIRS and a lot of opinions, and so Shankar, why don't you take the floor and talk about some of the concerns that the working group has had.

Yes, thank you, President Harreld.

I appreciate this opportunity, and I want to express my gratitude to the city, departments and agencies that have been working hard to implement this surveillance ordinance.

I know that we're all sort of building the airplane as we're flying it.

It's an imperfect process and we're all learning.

So I want to acknowledge that, you know, before getting into some of these concerns.

I'm the co-chair, by the way, not the sole chair of the working group.

The other co-chair is Asha Mohammed.

And I thought it would be helpful, you know, we've heard the work the city is doing to implement the ordinance.

I'd like to also highlight some of the work that the working group has done around each of these technologies.

And then, as you mentioned, Chair Harreld, also try to get into these two specific concerns, one about the process, which I think really integrates with this conversation about what to do with these two specific technologies, and then about the timeline as well.

So, you know, to take a step back, you know, when, Seattle first implemented this ordinance in 2013. This really was the first of its kind in the country and the fact that the council came back not once but twice to strengthen this ordinance I think really shows that this is a place where we believe we can have our civil liberties and the benefits of technology as well.

So I want to restate, because I think it's always worth restating, that the ordinance is really not about saying don't use technology.

I mean, there may be particular technologies where we say that after having the discussion, but for the ones that we've just discussed, you know, I think it's the working group's assessment that It's not don't use them, it's use them with the appropriate safeguards.

And that's how to implement those safeguards is really the conversation, you know, we'd like to have.

Let's use the technology to manage traffic but have the right protections in place.

And of course, you know, I think to Councilmember Mosqueda's point, the way to do that is to figure out something that's clear and enforceable.

You know, I believe that that was the original intent of the ordinance, not just to give clarity to the city agencies, but also clarity to the public, right, so they know where to go to figure out how a given technology is being used.

You know, that's clear enforceable policy is the better way.

You know, litigation or even sort of battling it out, legislative provision by legislative provision is probably not the way to do it.

So this is also our offer of partnership.

In terms of what the working group has been doing, you know, we're really a unique body in this process.

I think there's really not another city in the country that has a group that's specifically designed to incorporate community concerns into a process like the surveillance ordinance.

And I have been seeing, you know, this process cited in more and more academic papers and more and more articles.

There are a lot of eyes on Seattle as we build this airplane while we fly it.

And, you know, we believe for that reason it's very, very important to get it right.

I think the actual group that we're working with on the working group, which I'll call the CSWG, because we love acronyms in Seattle, is remarkable.

They have engaged with these technologies, even though I am actually the only person whose day job it is on this group to look at surveillance technologies, but they have dived in.

You know, we were only appointed, you know, I think in February.

And since that time, we've managed to actually review 14 technologies, which is, you know, pretty remarkable given that, you know, this is the size of one surveillance impact report, right?

This group has managed to look at 14 of these, I think meaningfully engage with them, and importantly to provide these privacy and civil liberties impact assessments to the council.

We send each of those, you know, directly to the council as well as to the CTO's office when we produce them.

And they are really intended to be sort of a digested, sort of condensed form of everything that we have learned when going through these surveillance impact reports, including very importantly, I think, you know, the recommendations as to what's missing, right?

How do we protect civil liberties in addition to what's in the SIR?

I think it's important to highlight that we did this as well by using a very specific template to apply to each technology where we asked you know, a set of standard questions around the technology.

And I can provide those to you.

But we had a very uniform and methodical way of looking at these technologies.

Starting with the key question of what is the purpose of the technology?

What enforceable mechanisms exist in policy to limit the technology to that purpose?

Of course, what data is collected?

Key question in any surveillance technology.

In what form?

Is it aggregated?

Is it personally identifiable information, et cetera, et cetera?

And then you can really start to match whether data is collected that goes beyond the purpose, right?

And going back to that, the answer to that first question, what is the purpose?

Then you can start to develop policies that match data collection.

Questions about third parties, which third parties access this data?

How can they, how are they allowed to use and disseminate that and what documents or contracts actually say that?

And, you know, we believe that these can actually serve as useful templates for the council as you consider how to approve these technologies.

And I think in this case, we are talking about approval with some set of policies.

So that leads me to the two specific concerns that we had wanted to raise.

One is just the question of how the city can approve a set of policies that make meaningful the ways to address the civil liberties concerns that have been raised in the privacy and civil liberties assessments.

The challenge, I mean, you know, to put it very bluntly, the challenge is this is a 400-page document, and we're really looking at three scenarios, right?

I think law has stated that Council's approval of these 300-page or 400-page surveillance impact reports gives these the force of law.

And we are not sure that that's a, I mean, actually, to put it differently, we are sure that's not a good idea.

You know, we're either saying all of this is law, or we're saying part of this is law, or we're saying none of this is law.

If all of this is law, It is very, very difficult for the public to understand where the enforceable policies within this are.

And we've raised specific concerns around that in discussing this.

Unfortunately, you know, we did not have time as a working group to have a meeting with quorum where we could, you know, write a letter to the council.

But the underlying concerns have been raised at the working group.

And I think one of them is that, you know, there's a lot in these documents that isn't clearly policy or procedure.

Some of it points to outside documents that can change.

Some of it is just, a lot of it is just a reflection of current agency practice as well.

So there's a lot of questions if all of this is law I think it's going to be extremely difficult for the public to be able to figure out Let me let me understand that point In the surveillance ordinance That we drafted and passed My interpretation was not to produce a document to say all of this is law that would be a law.

I My goal, at least, was to most importantly daylight everything we're doing such that we can open up the data, open up the technology, and surface everything we're doing to first best understand it.

And then once we best understand it, we can look at what safeguards need to be put in place.

And then after that process, we can talk about changing the law.

But I saw it sort of sequentially.

I didn't see And quite canonly, I could talk to you offline or publicly about the length of these 150-page surge.

I just think, quite frankly, it's a waste of resources, but I'm going to be candid, when there's just some fundamental questions that need to be asked.

What is it used for?

How are we storing it and archiving it?

Who has access to it?

What safeguards do we have to protect us from abuse?

I mean, just some core principles.

And I think one of the points Shankar made that I would agree with is, there could be an absence of clear policies.

An example being, I'm going to make this one up, so this is not the best example, and this is always dangerous when you do this.

An example would be every department must keep a published list of who has access to the data, as an example, or the specific archived time, the period of retaining time.

It could vary from department to department, of course, depending on the technological needs.

But everyone must keep one, and we look at them, and they publish them.

Things like that are clear policies that we need to articulate.

But Shankar, to your point, saying by approving just on a one-page ordinance, we approve it, my goal is not to say this, that is the law.

I saw it sequentially, that first we're daylighting it.

And quite candidly, with SDOT and information technology as two examples.

I don't know what kind of, I need to hear a little bit about the resources you're putting into this six or seven month process, because you have many pressing needs, and this is one of them, but I didn't anticipate 150 page, sir.

I'll just be candid with you.

I can understand that.

We followed the requirements in the ordinance.

We looked at the questions that were asked, how they are posed, the answers that are requested, and it is a lengthy process.

Now, the meat of this is the privacy impact assessment, the first part.

the questions that ask about data handling, data management.

That's where policy is outlined.

The bulk of this after that piece are documentation of public engagement, et cetera.

So that's documenting our process and what we did.

That's what it takes to build these things.

But the meat of the data management, the piece that speaks to the privacy concerns and the issues around policy, et cetera, is really in the first part.

And that's where that's outlined.

We, wherever possible, included copies of policy or referenced pieces of policy that were referenced in the document.

Yeah, please.

I was going to ask you a question.

Sure, go ahead.

Well, the length of the CSRS, in your opinion, is that appropriate?

Is that just necessary to get to the issues you're trying to raise, or do you think we can expedite that to some extent?

Yeah, thanks for that question.

You know, I think you'll see that perhaps, you know, our thinking may be actually converging on this more than you anticipate.

What I will say is I think these are incredibly useful documents, and I don't at all think that they're a waste of resources despite their length.

All I'm really saying about them is that whatever you put into law to make the force of law, don't make it be this entire document.

We're in agreement.

Yeah, but I do think that this is hugely useful simply because it documents existing agency practices.

It talks about the capabilities of the technology.

There is a place for community members to go to understand how it's being used.

What that doesn't do is get us to the point where those civil liberties concerns are fully addressed because Policy is sort of in different parts of this document, and as I mentioned, you know, some of it may be outside of this document.

Some of it may not be up to date.

I mean, we found a number of those instances.

So what, and I want to make clear, ACLU and One America sent a letter to the council suggesting a solution.

the working group will have an opportunity to discuss that as well and see if they agree with it.

But the idea really is that, you know, we feel that we have actually done a lot of the work to pull out those specific policies that address the things that we think are most pressing to address.

Back to your point, Council Member Mosqueda, for example, on CCTVs, you know, on page 4 privacy and civil liberties impact assessment that we provided, the full one.

We go through what's in the existing SIR and the policy that's referenced there.

And to their credit, I think SDOT has done a lot of work to try to put some policies in place.

But we tried to figure out where it fell short in our view.

And I'm sorry, Chair, page four of your memo or page four of what?

of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Act working group.

And so there, you know, we saw one problem as being does not set forth clear use collection and retention rules.

So within that document, we actually then respond and say, that there should be a policy that makes clear that no data may be recorded or retained except for specifically defined purposes and what those purposes ought to be.

You know, simple language, all the policy in one place, and, you know, we think that, you know, whatever you do with the SIR, you could perhaps move forward with finding some policy way to include those as clear, being in one place, and enforceable.

I was going to ask for a sit to respond to that.

Go ahead.

We consulted with Gary Smith, who was involved in writing this ordinance, which you worked with him on this.

So this is largely your work and his, and I think whoever was, you were there, Council Member O'Brien was there.

His interpretation was not that the entire SIR becomes law.

His interpretation was any representation the department makes about the handling of data, so for example, data retention, data access, et cetera, whatever representation they make becomes law.

So if in the questions that you ask or that are posed and answered in the SIR about data retention, for example.

If the department states our policy and our practice is to retain this data for no time at all except in the case of a traffic study, that becomes codified when this SIR is approved.

So I just wanted to clarify for you exactly what law.

That's actually helpful because what I would.

I don't know who I'm agreeing with when I say this, but that kind of clear policy I think makes sense.

Yes.

Right?

And it should be daylighted, and we should know that.

That's not a 150-page document.

That's like three sentences.

It is, and then there's all the questions.

But yes, I hear what you're saying.

It's not the entire document.

It's the pieces where the department represents the use of data and or sharing and whatever the question happens to be.

That becomes codified.

Council Member Skater wanted to make a point.

Okay.

Thank you, Mr. President.

So I looked at this document that Shankar has held up.

This is 150 pages just on the closed-circuit television traffic cameras, sir.

So I think what we're both saying is that this document is not going to be digested by the general public, nor, frankly, do I expect this document to be interpreted by any, you know, number of folks who are working within each department.

For me, I think this is underscoring, I believe, what you're all saying, which is if this is not intended to be law, what we need is like a three to five page summary document, which I think the working group has begun to summarize some of the clear recommendations.

which actually talk about clear and enforceable guidelines.

What this is telling me is that you've done a very comprehensive analysis.

You've answered all the questions that we've asked you to.

You've talked about existing agency practices.

But what we need to complement it with is a summary document that talks about the clear and enforceable policy practices.

How is this going to, how is this technology going to be used in the future?

What protocols, what procedures are we going to be putting into place to protect civil liberties?

How are we going to ensure that future utilization of whatever technology conforms to the policy guidelines that comes from this comprehensive analysis?

So I would agree, I think, with what Shankar said and with what you said.

This is in line with what the ordinance was asking.

However, I think the missing element is what is that summary document that then we can say, here is the guiding principle.

Here is the, for lack of a better term, law that we expect you to comply with.

that actually meets our expectations as policymakers for how this new technology will be utilized to protect civil liberties and advance the policy goals that you all had with the use of the technology in the first place.

I fully agree, unconditionally agree.

And again, when I talked about sequential work, Jason's presentation is exactly, I mean, I don't know how the license plate readers really work.

I wanted to daylight the process first.

And while he said, as an example, I can't remember what part you said is not retained or however many days is retained.

Each department, we should know exactly what the retaining schedule is for the technology.

And so I fully agree that I want to get to that point where we have these clear And I think that's one of the things that we need to look at is how do we make articulable policies on the key areas, whether it's retaining, who has access, even quite candidly the training, because when I talked about that masking technology, I said, well, who's pushing the button to unmask it?

Isn't that just one key stroke away from all of a sudden I'm on TV, right?

So that's why who and what the training is, I think those are I think the city of Seattle cannot just have one that applies to all.

How many departments do we have?

I can't remember the number of departments, 38 or something, whatever.

And departments and commissions in offices as well.

So anyway, do you all want to respond in any to Shankar's concerns?

So we've been as complete and as compliant as we can possibly be to this ordinance.

And if you are looking for an additional piece of information, whether that's an executive summary or something, I think we need to figure out what that looks like.

We feel all the questions were answered adequately and representations from the department and attestations about how they use this technology were appropriate.

We are not in agreement with some of the aspects of the report you came up with.

Not a surprise.

That's not our normal operation.

However, we are are very dedicated to making sure that civil liberties, all of the issues that this ordinance is designed to meet, happen.

We would need to talk about what questions you want to highlight.

Is that an executive summary of policies or attestations about something?

I don't know what that looks like for you.

And we'll probably need to ask some detail.

Sure.

President, I'm just going to add that I think us in IT and the working group can work together to come up with what that format would look like, that consistent format that you would expect to see every time there is a SIR attached to that executive summary.

And that is the document to Shankar's point and everybody else's point would be the one that would be easily digestible, could become law, all of those things that we just talked about.

So if there was another meeting of this committee coming up in the near future, we could work in the meantime and come back with that executive summary.

And so Shankar, So to your first point, I know you have a second point that we haven't even allowed you to get to, by the way, that the question of, I think I was writing a note that all of this is law.

I want to get to that point.

I don't want that to be law because that's a bad law if it's 150 pages.

Creed.

on one, right.

But I have to tell you, I know, just to cut to the chase on another issue, that as chair of the committee, I don't really have an appetite of passing 29 ordinances, separate ordinances for each technology as well.

I have a great appetite for really narrowing down those policies that Council Member Mosqueda talks about so well on exactly, and if it's subject us to a liability, that's the price we have to pay for using this technology.

But I do want to drill those down, understanding that it could be department specific.

And last, I really, you know, the concept, I just got to ask this question.

When we talked about the first couple of SIRs, I thought we were going to do some of the easy ones first to get the, The wheel is moving a little bit.

Weren't these two supposed to be the, are these two conceived, perceived as the easier ones or the more difficult ones?

We had a couple easier ones.

We had a couple of fired cameras, fire department cameras.

One is used for a hazmat response and the other is for when a fire truck gets in an accident or one of the fire vehicles gets in an accident.

These folks very helpfully pointed out, hey, these are a little old.

Our SIRs were dated.

They had been prepared a year ago and had aspirational policy listed in them.

that we need to go update.

Did that policy happen?

Did it happen the way they said they were going to do it?

So we had to pull those, and those were supposed to be the easy ones.

So these were the next ones up.

We actually had a group of six total for this first group.

Two were police, and they were police ALPR, which is a very different use of license plate readers.

So we did our best to try to bring you easier ones.

OK, well, so these are mid-rangers.

Yeah, I'd say I'd characterize them as mid-rangers.

I mean, as you noted earlier, there have, in fact, been abuses of license plate reader technologies.

I brought along this.

I mean, you know, there are a lot of documentation, including use by a company called Vigilant that cooperated with ICE for immigration enforcement purposes.

This is the story of a gentleman who happens to be Oakland's privacy commissioner who It was Brian Hoffer and him and his brother got pulled over because they were in a rental car that had been reported stolen, and the license plate picked it up, matched it to a hot list.

Next thing you know, him and his brother are in handcuffs at gunpoint, which, you know, is unfortunate.

And, you know, this is just one documentation of what can happen if, you know, the data isn't adequately protected.

So, you know, I want to make sure to sort of wrap up this point, kind of take it as far as we can today.

appreciate the offer from the CTO's office to work together to try to figure out what the policy looks like.

But for us, you know, I'll say two things.

One is approve the technology, approve the use of the technology only with those guidelines.

Don't make it a separate process where you approve first, because my fear is the council may never come back to approve the guidelines.

We've gone 90% of the way.

The city has done all of this fantastic work.

The working group has done its work.

And my hope is that that final step of just condensing down, and I take very well your point, to condense down the essential policies that need to become law.

Make it very clear what those are.

Those have the force of law.

And within that, the agencies are then, they have clear guidelines as to how to operate the technology.

And they can make their further rules without worrying, OK, if we're changing something that's a single sentence, you know, that we said this was a practice in the SIR, you know, this also binds them if it becomes the force of law because then they can't change it.

And I don't think we want that.

I think we want those boiled down essential policies.

And the working group has made some suggestions to try to get us to that point.

Greg, did you want to say something, sir?

Yeah, I just would point out that the way that the surveillance ordinance is currently written, you would have to make some amendments because it does talk about approval of the entire SIR.

So the SIR has, as Seattle IT has pointed out, has a lot of requirements, which is why it's so long.

So I'm not to say that it can't be condensed down.

I think it can it just would require an amendment to the Ordinance to say say that the SIR summary would be approved by the council rather than the entire thing So I'm getting a little confused which isn't the first time for me in a week Go ahead counselor Muscata

I was just going to offer, Council President, that it would be helpful, I think, after the work group and director have a chance to think about what that summary document looks like to then potentially have suggestions from Greg or central staff about what potentially would need to change.

I think that, you know, like any piece of legislation, we always have to go back and make minor tweaks as we go forward.

The document itself, I think, is still critical for the development, the, you know, consolidation of it into a three to five page document.

that really points out what are the key questions that we've answered, what are the key recommendations and how will this be used in the future.

I think we can work on some language.

I even think that we have a starting place with the workgroup's template questions that they've asked and I think it gives us the beginning of it.

So I would encourage us to see what the recommendations are from the conversation and then invite suggested edits to the ordinance if needed.

Agreed.

Let me sort of tell you what I'm hearing and sort of at least my strategy.

I have no appetite to rush the approval of a SIR.

The technology is already out there.

It's just not like we have to approve the use of the technology for these SIRs.

We're looking in the rear view window on what we're doing.

I have a great appetite again for really daylighting what the heck we are doing.

The schedule, I have some flexibility, but I also quite candidly want to get this body of work done.

I don't want to, I really don't want 150 page search for every one of the technologies because I think we could really narrow down the core issues.

Those principles that Council Member Musqueda is talking about, and we're all talking about, I do want to put a lot of energy into those.

But I also think that when we go through each SIR and each technology, it's going to be somewhat unique.

I mean, who has access?

Because there's going to be cross-departmental access on a lot of these technologies as well.

And particularly when we really get into the SPD stuff, it's going to be a little tricky.

And we layer on top of that the fact that we had passed some years ago our open data initiative, and we're really trying to daylight everything, even to allow the public to get it.

Now, I have to tell you, on these two, fundamentally, and I don't know if you talked about this at a working group, and maybe CTEP talks about this.

We really haven't talked about the expectation of privacy when a person is in a vehicle, or even the use of an ORCA card.

I always just, quite frankly, I think my expectation of privacy has been diminished, unfortunately, because I just assume that with my phone being GPS-enabled, that with the Costco, what are those cameras called, the Ring cameras everywhere, with not just these 241 cameras, that if a person goes from point A, from their home to a mosque, five days a week, I assume that that issue, that fact, is not private.

And I struggle with this because 20 years ago, I would have said that's very private where a person goes, no, but I just think that in today's day, technology has eroded that.

Please.

So when you are moving about in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy in public.

However, there's sort of an open question about tracking that, tracking your location over time, over an extended period of time, just because of the proliferation of data.

There is a U.S.

Supreme Court case, I'm not, I think it was United States versus Jones, in which the justices kind of talk about this question.

In the past, If a city wanted to surveil someone, it took a lot of people and a lot of time and a lot of tools to do so, like cameras and things.

Whereas now we can use data a lot more easily.

So there's much less of an investment coming from the government to do that.

And you can get so much more information.

So that's actually kind of a policy question to look into maybe at the local and state levels about how does Washington want to view view this kind of information because at least on the federal level it's that tracking over time is open.

If I may add to that as well, we are fortunate to live in Washington State.

Our Article 1, Section 7, unlike the Fourth Amendment, does not ratchet down based on people's expectations of privacy, right?

So the Fourth Amendment, there is this debate on the Supreme Court, especially in light of this latest Carpenter case, about what the expectation of privacy is in public.

So I don't think we would agree, and speaking with my ACLU hat on, When were you not?

Fair enough, Council Member.

But in public, we believe you do retain an expectation of privacy.

I think the Supreme Court is figuring out the parameters of that and they certainly have made clear that in terms of location privacy in particular, that expectation persists.

Now, my feeling is based on the trajectory of the cases and the fact that they have actually often followed on previous Washington State cases that they will eventually get to the point of saying, look, because technology enabled surveillance is so much more pervasive, right, you don't have to follow me around with an officer in a vehicle or even stick anymore, you know, an actual GPS tracker to my car.

you can use license plate readers, to the point that being made here, to track thousands of vehicles, right?

And that may change the game.

So I'm more than happy, and I think this is an offer as well from the working group to sit down and speak about that.

But coming back to, you know, I think the issue at hand in front of the council, One point I'd like to reiterate is, in this instance at least, I think what the working group is proposing is very much in line with agency practice.

You know, I think that I haven't heard that the agency is wanting to use or disseminate this information or data in ways that we would be uncomfortable with.

We just want to make sure that that makes it into policy and the suggestion of moving forward with this condensed clear version that's a place for the public, the agency, and us to be able to go to figure out what part of this is law is a good way to do that.

I will say that there are other SIRs we have reviewed where we just don't agree with the agency practice, that we actually think, you know, the agency practice in using a given tool is too broad, and I think that's a substantive policy debate for the council to have, hopefully informed both by the SIR and by...

But what would be an example of that?

Possibly, so the other license plate readers, right, so the- Police versions.

The two police versions- I'm sorry, I was talking about specifically in these two SIRs.

Oh no, I'm saying in these two SIRs, largely we agree with agency practice when we get to the SPD.

two flavors of license plate readers.

I think we, you know, you'll see that we would like a much shorter data retention period of 48 hours than is currently the practice.

I read that in one of the write-ups, and actually, fair debate.

I read everything I can on expectation of privacy, by the way.

I don't want to slow play you on that, because the area, particularly in private practice with the social media networks, it just fascinates me.

So I'm not as aloof as I may seem.

Greg, did you want to say something?

Yeah, just paging through the ordinance, it is entirely possible that a condensed version could still be called a SIR, and you wouldn't have to change the ordinance.

So that's something I'd want to work with law on.

We also point this out.

ACLU and One America have, in the letter that was sent to the council this weekend, you know, we make the point that there are ways potentially to do this without the amendment.

And President Harrell, I wonder if we might get to that second timeline point.

Yes, we can.

And Council Member Mosqueda is going to make a point, and then we're going to go to the second point.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Are you sure?

Thank you.

Okay.

Second point.

So the second point is really about, you know, what is termed the cadence of delivery of these different SIRs to both the working group and to the council.

One, if at the outset, you know, again, recognize that there is a tremendous amount of work being done by the city to keep up with, you know, this massive amount of information.

I think it's, again, extremely useful because it is a documentation of the discussion around this and current practices.

The working group, you know, also has our challenges because, of course, you know, we were behind the ball, behind the eight ball.

You know, we actually were appointed a few months late.

And so, you know, since the time that we've been on the job, I think, you know, we've done a tremendous amount of work.

But the challenge of the way the timeline is currently structured is that, Two things.

One is some of the most concerning technologies from a civil liberties perspective come to us at the very end.

That is a concern for us and, you know, I think if part of the original intent of the ordinance was to get rules around the most concerning technologies sooner, then that should really be reversed and some of those technologies should be bumped up.

The other piece is just the groupings and I see from the PowerPoint that the grouping has changed.

But as I currently understand it, there are 12 technologies proposed to be delivered to the working group three days before the deadline, so 2-28 or maybe 2-25.

And that is a challenge for us as well because we want to make sure that we have the ability as the working group to give each of these technologies the full review it deserves.

You know, even reading one of these SIRs takes a lot of work and, you know, a lot of it falls to Jen Lee in my office who has tirelessly poured through the details of these.

But we want to make sure that we have the ability to meaningfully review technologies, which is really the reason for our request.

And, you know, this was also reflected in the ACLU One America letter, which is to space them out, to prioritize the technologies that matter the most from a civil liberties perspective.

And if it's possible to do them at a cadence where it gets us a smaller number but more steadily, Rather than waiting towards the end of the process, that will give us a more meaningful opportunity to review.

You know, when we get 12 at once, we feel it's going to be extremely difficult for us to meet the, I mean impossible for us to meet the six-week turnaround to eight-week turnaround.

That's required in the ordinance.

So all of which is to say, you know, I think there's room for discussion here And we hope we can have that discussion.

The other thing I'll say as well is that you know and now with my ACLU hat on because again, but the working group is hasn't had an opportunity to have a meeting on this to come to consensus.

But in terms of the public comment and the public meetings, one idea would simply be, you know, if you had a specific time and place per month where the public is aware, right, this is the time and place when surveillance, the surveillance ordinance technology of the month, whatever it is, is going to be discussed.

That may get more people there because, of course, they will have it on their calendars.

They will be able to.

It's more predictable than having meetings that jump around from time and place.

And also, I think, more manageable when you're just doing one at a time.

Now, we don't want to substitute, you know, our, Expertise for the expertise of the folks in the city that are doing that but that is a suggestion, you know from us in Around a way that might be that might make these meetings a little bit more accessible and get more public comment as well So I'll stop there.

Okay, I hear you.

I don't think there's even a remote and you're not alleging this at all that there's a sinister motive in how we are either grouping or which technologies we've chosen I think we the council sort of sent maybe mixed messages on this because we sort of wanted to get the process going and get our some principles in place and and once the process then we really tackle more maybe more the controversial ones so we perhaps the council is could take some ownership here but I want to give the department a chance to respond to the two concerns sort of one, but two concerns that both the groupings and the pace or the timing of the technologies, the difficult ones, front-loaded perhaps, give you a chance to respond.

I'm going to let Ginger respond to the harder questions.

The first, the one thing that you talked about which is having a more published calendar so that public knows when are we going to talk about surveillance technologies, I think definitely you know, with the working group we can do a better job in lining up the various public outreach for the rest of the year.

So that's something that I'll commit to, to work with the working group as well.

Thank you.

I would love to be able to do that.

This has been difficult only because we've had starts and stops in completing these documents.

So if we can get to an agreed to grouping, I would love it, because then we can publish and schedule public meetings in advance.

We've also been asked to work with Department of Neighborhoods for them to do some of this work.

It's not all our decision.

We work with the departments to determine what's appropriate in terms of the conversations.

And now we're moving on to primarily police technologies pretty soon.

It'll be up to police to help figure out are there other community meetings, standing meetings that are more appropriate.

But we can figure out the details of all that.

In terms of getting a monthly SIR or changing the groupings, it takes six to seven months to complete these.

There's just no way to get around that.

Between, you know, a month of public engagement, eight weeks for you guys to review, creating the SIR itself, I couldn't bring you something in June if I wanted to, which I do.

But I couldn't bring you something in June, July, maybe even not August.

We're looking right now at completing group three.

We're working on that right now.

Some of the technologies that exist in Group 4 are, they were grouped together because they're really invasive.

Those are the investigative police technologies that are going to take time to get all the information required.

So, I've been there.

So, it's, we just don't have, and we've been talking to you about cadence since you guys first formed.

We really can only deliver these things if we know when we're trying to deliver them.

We can't cherry pick.

We had groups one and two ready for you because of the late timing and getting working group going, so we were able to kind of do a little cherry picking.

We have two out of group two that we're ready to deliver to you right now.

We sort of wanted to ship them last week, but we wanted to have the conversation before we landed them on you.

But we just don't have a lot of flexibility that way.

We'll do what we can, but it is a long road to get these completed.

Nothing's coming in June.

I just couldn't if I even had 20 people helping me.

Yeah, and I want to acknowledge the work of the city and accommodating the working group and making sure that we you were sending us things that we had the capacity to respond to.

So we really appreciate that.

I think one thing that would be helpful in terms of the potential reprioritizing is just understanding how much of the challenge is from creating the SIRs themselves versus how much of it is around the public outreach.

Yeah, I understand.

So creating the SIRs takes several weeks.

They're iterative.

They're collaborative.

They're, hey guys, that wasn't English.

Hey, that didn't give me a policy that was not coherent.

That's not a good enough answer.

Those kinds of things we work with departments on.

They were fabulous.

I'm not casting aspersions.

So there's that creation part.

And until that's done, we can't hold public comment because we don't have anything to publish to say this is the draft of all the information about this technology.

So that's sequential.

So we can't do anything about when we can do public engagement.

We could hand some stuff off to you in that draft form, but it doesn't have the public comment, which I think is an important part of determining is there a civil liberty concern that is widely recognized by members of the public.

I think that's important.

So some of this is sequential and it doesn't matter how many people we put on it, it's just going to take time to do it.

Just another sort of practical aspect to changing timelines is because Ginger and her team are solely dependent on the departments to bring back to us their knowledge, their subject matter expertise.

And because the calendar has been published in terms of the sequencing, we'll have to go and check with the departments to understand what their capabilities are as well to make those SMEs available to us so that we can then do the work that we need to do on our end.

And so it's a bit of a question for the clients of IT that we have to work with as well.

Yeah, I completely understand.

You know, I think the question on how close some of these SIRs are would really help, right?

the re, if there's a reordering possible that really brings down the numbers, so we're not talking about completing a group of 12 SIRs, you know, to a particular date, but you're really talking about focusing on one at a time to, you know, and I understand it's iterative, but the SIRs as well, right, my assumption is that in the two, nearly two years since the ordinance has passed that these, Agencies have known that an SIR would be needed, right, for each of these technologies since they were on the list.

And so my hope is that, you know, we're not literally saying finish this SIR, then start working on the next, but that they're actually all 29 have been in process, they are in process, and if we go to one a month, So, you know, the hope is that that lessens the pressure to get these large groups of SROs done.

Unfortunately, it is a, okay, we're done with group two, let's start on group three.

That's usually when public comment is starting on the first group, but we have a limited number of people that are available to be SMEs at public engagement to rewrite and write the CSRS.

Group three has started, and these are all police technologies at this point.

Group four is not, and they've done some work on them, but they're farther along on the group three part.

We have about one and a half people in police to write on these right now, so more people really doesn't help because we have to find the information, and it takes some digging.

I was hoping that you had worked out and negotiated a schedule when I left, but I see you have not.

Well done, sir.

Last two more minutes.

OK.

So I hear you loudly and clearly.

I don't think your demands are unreasonable.

And I also hear the departments under Gendron Saad's leadership coordinating this, the challenges you have.

This is a lot of work, important work and a lot of work.

Maybe there's a middle ground.

And what I'm going to ask you offline is to tell me just, I think we could cherry pick a little bit on occasion.

So maybe tell me some of the really challenging ones that you think maybe devote some earlier attention to as well.

And on that particular point, Chair Harrell, I included the One America and ACLU letter includes a timeline that has in yellow highlights.

And I can kind of show you this.

It looks like this, except this is black and white.

But the highlighted technologies on that list are the ones that we think should be elevated.

And we've actually suggested an order for them.

Now, again, I want to be very clear The working group has not had a chance to formally vote on that ordering, but certainly informally.

So I'm going to respectfully hand it back to you then.

And because I don't want to, I know there might be some diversity opinion on the working group.

I don't know.

I'm a little confused with.

You're with CTAB, and then Joe is from CTAB as well in the working group.

He's on both.

And CTAB has sort of a privacy subgroup of you, and you chair that one, I believe.

I do not, but my colleague who does cannot be here today.

OK, very good.

Thanks for filling in.

I appreciate you.

So anyway, what I'm going to say is, I'm not suggesting, I don't have, again, a lot of interest in rearranging the whole schedule, but there could be some negotiation work.

Because I don't want to, again, we're not trying to get out of the hard work of some of the difficult ones as well.

So maybe you could give me a few that I can negotiate with and see if we can rearrange the schedule.

We're going to just talk more publicly but offline on some of the scheduling issues.

As we enter into the budget year, I hope to hear from you all about how this may impact you because this, and that's where I have to advocate for.

We have two strong advocates on this committee, actually four or five that are vested in this issue.

I know Council Member Herbold and Council Member Bryan are all over these issues.

that if there's budget implications, we need to know so we can make sure we make the adjustments.

Ginger?

Absolutely.

There is one thing I want to put on the table.

There is a deadline of March of 2020 to complete all this work.

I think we're all sort of recognizing that that is something we probably want to address at some point.

Can we get this all done by then?

That's for us to deliver to you all.

That's not for you to make decisions, but we got to complete this work by then.

So a lot of the concern we have about changing schedules, It comes down to we just don't see how we're going to get this done in that time frame.

So, just putting it out there is a concern.

And to just add information to that as well, the ordinance also contemplates an extension, a possible six-month extension, which Greg, I'm sure, can address.

You know, which is, you know, which doesn't necessarily address the prioritization, but it does hopefully allow some wiggle room for time to make sure the agencies can do what they need to do and that we can do what we need to do.

It's very clear, right, if we get, you know, 12 technologies on the 28th of February, that at least from our standpoint, you know, we're theoretically required to look at all of those in a two-month period, an eight-week period, and that's just not feasible for us.

So, you know, I think we have some conversation to have to try to figure out how that's going to work.

If it makes you feel slightly better, two of those will reduce.

It'll be the two fire cameras are going to come, are two of those, which is more just as finalizing, I think, with fire the policy zone.

There won't be two 300-page documents coming your way in addition.

And while I'm not accusing any departments of doing this, I just think even that kind of information, if we could share with the working group, just what our thoughts are, what our plans are, such that they are continually reassured that, again, we're not trying to set them up to fail.

We want them to do their jobs, and they're doing it very well.

And I think you fully understand the resource issue as well.

And again, I want to thank SDOT for being our first guinea pig, so to speak, on getting through this.

Now, on these two, I haven't, as far as next steps, I have to sort of think offline and talk to my colleagues about the approval process on this.

I did say publicly we weren't going to vote on this, and so I'll work with central staff I heard everyone's concerns and I think we're really not far apart at all.

So let me work through and come up with some ideas on how we can still get there.

Again, these are technologies that are already in place and so I sort of want to do it right as well.

Council Member Musqueda.

Thank you, Mr. President and Mr. Chair.

I think that what you've outlined in terms of the process really helps us get away from the sort of trust us mentality.

Trust us, we're working on it.

Trust us, we heard you.

Trust us, our current practice is X.

And trust us that the changes that we need are in this $150, our $150 page.

It's more than $150.

It's very valuable.

$150, yeah.

Valuable, but that it's more than what's in the 150-page document.

So I appreciate that because I think that sends a clearer message both internally to our departments and to us as policymakers and the public that we are doing more than just saying just trust us.

And with the summary document that you're talking about creating jointly, and again, I want to underscore appreciation for that summary document with recommendations and policies and protocols.

I think that gives us also something to look at when we're approving.

I hear what you're saying that we're not going to potentially be able to go through, you know, X number of votes on each one, but I think if each policy document, I'm sorry, if each SIR had a summary document in hand that was that short summary memo, we as policymakers can quickly look through that, so can the public, so can advocates and those who work at the city, to fully understand what it is that we're voting on.

It would be very challenging to vote yay or nay on a document like what the SIR is currently, and so when we create that summary document, I think it will help I think it would also really help to underscore the urgency in which we're undertaking the implementation of the ordinance.

As you all come up with your priorities and the groupings to look at those issues that are the most concerning, that do raise the most questions around civil liberties, that give us the most heartburn when we think about technologies, to put those at the forefront, I think that could help us really understand how we're advancing these conversations with urgency.

So I look forward to that future conversation and then with those summary documents in hand and a revised timeline, I think we're well on track to meet the intent of the ordinance.

Very good.

I fully agree.

That's great.

Just sort of in closing too, I do want to say that and I don't want to because I actually have a conflict of time so I'd be somewhere else.

We didn't get to the issue of whether we have actual contracts in with third parties, but I'm very aware of the issue, and I'm glad you flagged it.

And I also wanted to give you some positive feedback, the working group, some positive feedback that I think they've really done their job well.

There are a few SRRs I think that they gave feedback on, and the department said, okay, maybe I could have put a few more hours behind this product.

And so I think that that part is working.

I do sort of want to end this work, quite candidly, sort of get to the point where we just disagree.

I mean, sometimes it's hard to even tell where the disagreement points are, and whether it should be 48 hours or 90 days, and let's put that issue on the table.

We just have to make some tough decisions, and we'll figure that out.

doing the work that gets us even to a point of disagreement and try to avoid that, of course.

And that's the challenge here when we're all up here in a sort of ethereal land.

Okay, so we'll work on a schedule.

I'll talk to both of you offline.

Thank you so much, both of you, for being here.

And Esther, I thank you again for all your work.

Okay, we good?

Okay, everyone have a great rest of the day.

With that, we'll stand adjourned.

You.