That’s Seattle Channel video (click here if you can’t see it above) from last Thursday’s West Seattle meeting about some of the city surveillance technologies that are currently under review. If you missed it, you can attend one of the three meetings still ahead and/or comment online through next Monday. What the video doesn’t show you, since it only covers the meeting-opening presentations, is what we can tell you since we were there to cover it: The small-group discussion wasn’t much of a discussion. The sizable city-staff contingent was prepared to break attendees into multiple small groups, but there were only enough for one, and all but one of that handful of attendees said they were there in hopes of hearing/seeing what the general public had to say. But before we get to that – the overall toplines, including what we learned from the presentations (including one thing we weren’t aware of):

Opening the meeting at American Legion Post 160 in The Triangle, Megan Erb of the city IT department explained the ways you can comment – from an “old school” postal-mail letter, to attending a meeting like this one, to online.

Mark Bandy and Jason Cambridge from SDOT led off. Bandy said SDOT’s tech will be more helpful than ever once the Alaskan Way Viaduct closes and we enter the so-called “period of maximum constraint” next year.

They explained traffic cameras and license-plate readers. The latter are used on 15 streets in the city to gauge travel times. For the former, 225 cameras now comprise the system, which was launched in 2000, and primarily accessible to the public via the Travelers’ Map. Policies for their use include privacy masking, “to prevent viewing occupants in nearby buildings,” as well as training staff not to zoom in on individual people or plates.

Sometimes video is recorded for SDOT traffic studies – not enforcement. Those recordings are “permanently deleted within 10 days” and isn’t shared outside SDOT.

The plate readers include cameras and processors. They “capture 5% to 10% of license plates as they move into view.” They say the plate #’s are “immediately deleted once travel time is calculated.” WSDOT is involved with this and SDOT never gets individual numbers, Cambridge said.

Questions: “Do you still follow phones from point to point?” asked an attendee. Cambridge said there is a different technology that will be “run through the same process” to vet – it’s being used now but it’s not part of this round of the vetting process.

“Have you ever been subpoenaed by law enforcement for this data?” asked another attendee, noting that the slide deck said they had “never” shared the data. SDOT staffers said not to their knowledge but even if it had been, “there’s nothing to share” because it is deleted immediately; this was affirmed by the Traffic Operations Center manager. The same attendee wondered about the training keeping people from zooming in on people and plates. She said employees are trained, monitored, and reminded, and also noted that the live streams are visible to all and this is another form of accountability.

Next question: Once you have a point-to-point travel time calculated via some individual car,

Cambridge: “What we get back is the route name, the time, an average of trips within a certain period, and the matches used to generate that travel time.”

Is this information aggregated elsewhere? No, travel times are just gauged through plates.

The SFD rep talked about the “digital and hazmat cameras” SFD uses. The department has 100,000+ incidents a year. 50+ are hazmat. The hazmat camera is a system, “essentially an iPad … with FaceTime” used “to explore incident scenes for potentially hazardous materials, spills, or contamination.” The stream goes back to the hazmat unit, where the incident commander is working.

As for “digital cameras,” that just refers to regular cameras that certain apparatus have. Might be used to provide photos of trauma-patient injuries (this was something we had never heard before), photos of fire scenes for investigations, photos of situations in which SFD equipment is involved in a collision. These images are not kept, either, once “the information is conveyed,” the SFD rep said.

They gathered everyone into one group rather than multiple small groups since the turnout was smaller than anticipated, as Erb described it. One of the participants was a professor who said he specializes in privacy. Another said she was here to observe what concerns were expressed. And yet another person said she was there to listen too, to observe how best to communicate.

The only person not there to observe described hiimself as a human-rights activist who voiced a suspicion that people don’t understand privacy well enough – they say they are concerned but they “go on Facebook” where they are at risk (and ignore the considerable privacy threats there). He suggested that the city could be even simpler and clearer in its communication.

Bandy said he was trying to be transparent. The activist said “there’s usage, and then there’s after-usage.”

Moving on to the SFD discussion, the rep said what he does much of the day is handle public records. And since their camera images are not kept, there’s nothing for record-requesters to get.

Do you keep records of other data, like chemical sensors at incident scenes? he was asked. Reply: Yes.

Do you use drones? No, he said, although they recently got an ROV which can be used for underwater searching; they might be interested in drone usage “in the future.” He also noted something we’ve pointed out time and again – “Fire Department is almost a misnomer – 80, 90 percent of what we do is medical.”

All vehicles in SFD are equipped with automatic locators. And he noted that the locations of vehicles aren’t private since Real-Time 911 publishes locations of where vehicles have been assigned. It also was observed that cross-referencing some technologies (for example, RT 911 and the King County Parcel Viewer) could result in something of concern – though the city reps were quick to decline to join in any criticism of someone else’s technology.

Again, the first round of meetings continues this week and next (see the right-sidebar list here), and you can comment online through next Monday by going here.