What a pleasant surprise this ruling is. The DC area (of which Fairfax county is part) is probably one of the most government tracking heavy regions of the US. This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently. I would never have predicted this ruling.<p>>Nine states have passed laws limiting how long the police can maintain the data, ranging from three minutes (New Hampshire)<p>Now that I could have predicted. If any state is going to proactively curb law enforcement's capability to build a dragnet it's gonna be NH.
I work in this space, building the tools to help LEAs seach their databases. I also have conflicting feelings about how this could be used. We built in access control down to the specific camera, auditing of every user action, requiring the reason you are performing an action, and mandating the user associate an open case in the same access group as the camera you are querying in order to view the data.<p>Its pretty locked down to help prevent abuse. I'm not saying abuse is impossible but LEOs or more likely, their administrators, but it is difficult to do it and get away.<p>I've heard from the higher ups, that abuse used to be rampant in other systems, but since switching to our software, only a handful of people have been found to abuse it.
We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements.<p>It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tracking a suspect, get a warrant and the court will supply the data.<p>The same should apply to all passive data gathering systems like body cams.