the prison system here in the state and they're in this morning to talk to us about conditions in washington state prisons and impacts on prisoner families military and julie thank you both for coming in spend time with us  so let's start out if you would tell us a little bit more about the washington citizens for a deal see ombudsman and how you both got involved in this issue ok so we started this group on face k we actually were networking with a lot of families that were having problems navigating the system at the department of corrections and were actually interested in establishing establishing and program in the state of washington for the department of corrections through the governor's office so it's independent of the d s c and what we do is we work with families and other agencies to get them involved in lobbying but the legislators to  you know make phone call's have meetings with them and just kind of discuss what's going on with their interaction with the department of corrections and the need for an ombudsman in fact melanie and i met at a hearing for one of the earlier buzz pieces of legislation and melody did mention that a lot of what drives families to looking for a solution in their relationship with the department of corrections was just navigating the system who do you call what's this about and there's not a lot of internal assistance for a family member who's just looking for help in a general capacity for myself i knew exactly how to navigate the system i read the policies i would go to my legislator but what happens to many families when you do advocate for your loved one in prison is you get a lot of pushback in retaliation and so things like losing your visit it's unfair accusations a lot of families were frustrated and i actually went to the hearing because i was beside myself my family member does self harm he's mentally ill and in the psychiatric residential treatment program in the prison system so he's pretty mentally ill and he was doing some pretty serious self harm and no one would help me and the facility would not address my very legitimate concerns and so i went to olympia and that's when my trouble started at the facility so for many of the families we really need an because it puts a blanket of protection over us so when we go to them and say this is going on we're advocating and we're getting pushback it's obvious that stuff is not appropriate and not per policy and having an i would really put that layer of protection on families and even that advocate and even the folks that go to their legislators looking for help we find that a of legislators don't really know a lot about the department of corrections and they haven't been very helpful they want to help but i just don't think they're familiar with the system and how it works and basically how to push back or their constituents yeah i think they're willing but yeah there's a great learning curve it's a complicated bureaucracy with a lot of insular attitudes and so it really takes somebody that's really willing to learn the system understand the system and then work with the system  and slowly it's a learning process we have certain legislators that do a great job for their constituents but you know it's catch as catch can yeah but still actually came about in two thousand and seven senator casta my around the bill and i believe maybe another year and then during the recession there was absolutely no money so it kind of laid in wait for a while and then in two thousand and thirteen senator carroll ran the bill and two thousand and fourteen in this last year senator mcauliffe ran the bill and represent i must go so ran a companion bill in the house for i believe the first time so it's an idea that's definitely gaining momentum and we find that more and more every year the more we network and the more people we talk to it's it's getting bigger and you know we had great bipartisan support i mean the thirty ninth out monroe and senator  families and the prisoners and the correctional officers he's really cares about the whole system and i know oban and we had a great republican and democratic support in the senate and the house so it's an issue people want to get smart on crime not right on crime and right on crime so i was like to kind of chad a little bit because prison is such a big piece to chew off and if you unless you have somebody on the inside it's really kind of hard to get your head around it and i like to start by saying you know i'm united a citizen and when i started to go to prison and sit in that visiting room i kind of looked around like you've got to be kidding me you know that this is really going on in my name with my tax dollars and families then become a student citizens who have a front row seat to what's going on and so i just try to bring the family experience or a citizens experience to the big table whether that's the family council or this interview or the legislature because people are curious and they want to know so what i had to get my head around is that prison you know kind of is is us we have laws to disallow behaviors that is not that are not acceptable in a civilized society so they pass a law you break it you're consequences many times you go to prison so according to the r a c w there were code washington going your punishment should generally be limited to the denial of liberty so to say that another way going to prison is your punishment you don't go to prison to be punished further and i think that's exactly what happened it's a laundry list of punishments and you have to ask yourself how much punishment is enough where do you draw the line between punishing and actually rehabilitating people who are going to come back at into our society  o i understand that somewhat it intrigued you first was the conversation about the present buddha and how the families are feeling compelled to supplement and having seen what's really going on in and knowing what what they're eating are not eating suddenly with this awareness you have this you know inherent sense of right and wrong that says wall would you allow someone you love to live in this condition and there have been was a lot of work that went into how they ate the prisoners cooked the food they ran the kitchens overseen obviously by correctional officers and then correctional industries of washington which i can't even begin to explain all that julie do that somewhere down the road took over the food and what happened they did it as a way for to save costs and the food that they produce is very start carb cheap oriented and the portions got really small as well and so what happened for the longest time we weren't allowed to buy food and send it in but they  developed a program with one subsidiary called union access where we could buy things through them that were sent to the prison it was kind of be careful what you wish for we ended up getting the quarterly packages so we could supplement their food but it i noticed looking through the catalog and i shared with you that a lot of the food is dollar store junk it at pretty high prices julie and i actually took a field trip into the dollar store which is like a mile from my house and then walked over to safeway as well and kind of went through and realized how what poor quality the food is for the prices that we're paying and basically families are starting to feel like cash cows i mean everything that we do costs money and there are species associated with it we put money on our phones there's an if you use your debit card there's eight dollars fee you can a money order where there is no fee but if you want immediate access and you use your credit card or debit card it's eight dollars the list is kind of link they they have a j pay system which is their e mail system so basically it's overseen what's coming and going on it but that costs money to buy the stamps so basically it's just mail electronic mail system and then the property and that's pretty much what the prison shoes look like so if you can afford to buy your own shoes i'm sure they're not very good for your feet and they're they're very strange looking they look like they came straight off a waffle iron so you buy shoes you buy you know the units were so hot you could buy a fan so i mean the money just continues to add up and if your loved one is across the state you're paying for gas you're playing for a hotel i'd like to julie explain the commissariat that's complicated so you have to envision when somebody goes to prison they get nothing they get the clothes on their back they don't get a hot pot they don't get a fan they don't give them a toothbrush they don't bribe them they get like little fish kit like a little hotel kit when i get there so inmates and or their families buy everything nothing is free and if you're indigent so there is a concept that if you are an indigent prisoner that  you can have up to ten dollars on your books and they consider you poor and they will let you charge on the company's store your razor in your tooth brush in your comb but that is not something they give you the y then charge it in put it on to what they call institutional debt ok so i'd like to describe a dollar coming in so i'm going to send todd is that monroe in and he's indigent and so the first ten dollars are not subject to any of these deductions so let's say i'd send ten he gets ten let's say i'm going to send todd one hundred dollars now it goes through a every dollar coming in from a family member goes through a series of deductions before it even hits their account so the first thing that happens five percent is taken out for the crime victims fund to fund organizations ten percent is taken out and put i a non interest bearing checking account for the inmate upon release well and good twenty percent is taken out for cost of incarceration now i was like ok room and board and whatever and then i realize reading the paperwork that that twenty percent actually goes straight to correctional industries and once it gets involved in their world it will never be returned nor any profits that they generate to the general fund to the d o c to the state of washington ok so that's thirty five percent out of every dollar that anybody sends in and now if you've got any legal fines and obligations like say he had a western district court he had a two hundred sixty dollar something or other that's twenty percent institutional that that's another fifteen percent so when i first met todd his deduction rate was ninety five percent so i'd send in one hundred dollars and he'd get five well actually you get ten because there was a limit right so i brought that down to fifty five percent by paying off some of his institutional debt and some of his legal fines so now you're talking about a family member myself wanting to buy food for him and my dollars not even worth a dollar at one time my dollar was worth a nickel now my dollar is worth forty five's and every like i said ever inmate except the lifers has at least a thirty five percent deduction rate and that goes on the wages they earn as well so you know and more than that they the store or the commissary used to be once a week so you could send in ten dollars a week they could buy razors coffee you know personal hygiene items  over the counter medicines well when c i took over the store they limited it to almost maybe twice a month so now as far as being able to spend money you're only allowed to spend ten dollars  twice a month now to buy all of those things otherwise you have to send in more and then you get stuck in that deduction process and i don't know how this came about but basically all of these things are placed on the backs of families and we are paying the crime victims were paying you know so all of this money that's being deducted from families interestingly enough i got some very nice records from the public disclosure unit at the o c asking you know how much money do inmates make any year in total and how much money do families send in for two thousand and eleven twelve and thirteen families sent in about six million dollars a year so ten percent of that is going into an interest non interest bearing at least for us you know savings account so somebody is making interest off six cents you know that that and twenty percent goes to correctional industries so that means a million dollars a year comes out of the families of pockets and goes straight into c i and that's before we turn around and buy all of the rest of the stuff from them as well that have profit margin so i'm really big on follow the money and  what i've seen is actually interesting because we were at the family council meeting and not a lot of people knew that that twenty percent that they call cost of incarceration went to correctional industries and the headline morris was there and i just sort of tossed it out there said so is it correct that that twenty percent cost of incarceration goes to cia and the look on his face was like how did you know that and then the financial guy from olympia looked at the woman next to her and said know that you're in finance and olympian you don't even know where this money's going and i think that's when i think that's when they kind of knew that families were going to be very proactive and being very responsible citizens and just calling a spade a spade and saying we can see what's happening we're going to look you in the eye and say we know we know you know and now you know you know that all that goes ahead and you know to be honest with you a lot of times when you get high enough and olympian you bring something to their attention like go like we do that you know so a lot of it is awareness you don't have to get ugly you don't have to be unreasonable and stomp your feet and that's why we encourage a lot of family members to get to know their legislators the legislators have actually told us a couple years ago that they don't hear from a lot of constituents that have a loved one in prison or ex prisoners or well they'd hear from advocacy groups quite a bit but so you know i think it's really important for people out there that want to be involved just you know go sit down have a cup of coffee with their legislator and tell about their experiences they don't know a lot of them well that's kind of where i stepped on melody's very stupid to clean had been working on this bill and i have a background in being politically involved in supporting candidates and it was surprising to me how many families of prisoners just didn't even know they could talk to their representative or were completely  novice at how to engage with the people that we elect and pay taxes towards and so it was really like a rock star they were all good we call them and i usually well you know i deal in despair because when people have bumped up against the wall and lost visits and they have nowhere to go and something you know medical care is being denied or their visits are gone you know they come to our family support meeting we meet in monroe on the second saturday of the month at the monroe library from ten to noon before visits and so if anybody's out there and you just want to be around other people who have loved ones in prison it's ok have a cup of coffee if you want help navigating the system or we've got a legislative bill we'd like you to help us with it's really a great place for people who share a common experience to come together and it's really hard a lot of family members won't tell the people they work with the people they go to church with their neighbors that my sons in prison they have a false sense of shame i you know that's not it's whatever your loved one has done is not your burden to carry obviously we do to a certain extent but you know they don't need to feel that shame it's not something that they they they they need to find their voice and realize and they're doing well because melody you know she has a great piece of legislation and you know will put out the call to families that we've helped i mean when you're when someone's in despair and you actually help them they  empowered for their own situation and then they can see the true power of of helping each other and and that's what the bill has done more people have shown up at these hearings and we find each other and they want to get involved they come in with their particular issue but even mediately can see that by helping each other with their individual issues we can come to there for the greater good and really the bill is a greater good it's a greater good for the families it's a greater good for the department of corrections because they really need oversight and there's a lot of good people in the department of corrections that are afraid to step up and say this is wrong it shouldn't happen because i got very excited yeah like who signs their check so if there's somebody out side coming in and saying this needs to be fixed they know it they're not going to say it so it's good for the corrections it's good for the citizens i think it'll save us a lot of money on tort claims and legal action which now are the payouts are pretty high outside oversight is never a bad thing it adds transparency and accountability to basically an institution that we set up and we fund and we have a responsibility to make sure that that's done humanely and honestly so that's why i'm so their budget for one ombudsman and a full time staffers one hundred twenty five thousand dollars a year so here in washington i don't know how it happens and i haven't been able to get a clear answer but every time we say ok we want to  ombudsman in the full time staffer and we're going to do it for two hundred fifty thousand a year here in washington next thing you know we've got a fiscal note of you know one point some odd million dollars and basically it just continues to kill it because resources are pretty scarce right now  and you know mccleary and everything else so it can be done cheaply it can be done it can be huge i mean we have other offices here in washington we have d s h as has a huge  we have one for education we have one for disability long term care so yes the fiscal note does tend to kill it but it can be done much cheaper than than that keep showing up and them this year we thought we would take that money issue off the table and so part of the monies that we spend for the phone in the vending machine booze itself there is a slight set aside and it goes back into what's called the offender betterment fund which is used to like buy t v s for the day room it's our money that they set aside to spend on offender programs and so we wanted to take the money off the table and see what was really going on so last year we said you know what forget it we'll pay for it out of our own offender but betterment fund and it was interesting because then the objections stopped being about well we can't afford it and became more like well you know why would we have it attached to the governor's office so we were able to flush out some more challenges that we would have to address and people who actually supported it before that all of a sudden when it it was actually had the potential to happen all the sudden weren't supportive of it so  about the flushing out and that's good because if somebody is not supporting this legislation because they have a legitimate concern we just need to address that concern or adopt the legislation to make it amenable to them and so i don't think the money it's an easy reason to say we can't because of the money but when the money is not an issue you get down to what exactly we're asking for and what exactly they're willing to provide and i think those conversations are happening that so that  betterment fund they said that money is designated for this if you take it away then we won't have this program or be able to pay for that so i'm sure that it would be the same argument for correctional industries were making a lot of money off families but if we have to pay for this out of this division of the o c then you know what's going to suffer to talk just five minutes now talk more about correctional industries itself it sounds like it's a for profit business that was set up by a washing kind of ok so you've all heard of like people go to prison and they're making license plates for the state right so correctional industries is actually the department of corrections it's a division of them but it's sort of been set aside and run on its own and there are different kinds of jobs you can get from correctional industries called classes so class one is when prison labor is used for profit companies like leased out to to run their call service lines and that's not true a t m that kind yeah but you know what having inmates work for for profit businesses that's no longer legal for the most part in washington state because it's unfairly competing with washington state businesses and that there was lots of lawsuits and so they really don't do that class to employment is the more formal correctional industries like the print shop the upholstery shop these are actual jobs supervised by correctional officers but managed and run by correctional industries and those men make around a dollar an hour maybe and then you have also lots of deduction was all those deductions i described so then you have class three jobs which are cleaning around the unit working in the kitchen just basically the nuts and bolts running of the prison it would the place would come to a grinding halt if inmates did not do their class three jobs and they make forty two cents an hour and that's capped at fifty five dollars a month and then you get all the deductions right so inmates will go where you buy and then the money that you make you end up giving back to cia in the form of the company store  so these different job categories have their different incomes and their different taps on that and again you're working you get your forty two cents an hour capped at fifty five a month but twenty percent of that goes to cost of incarceration so that's like a twenty percent kick back to your employer right off the bat and so you can see the money looks like it's going out but if you follow the trial it keeps going back to this division that dead of a mystery it's a mystery and and daniel would say once a dollar comes to us we never return it it's just kept by correctional industries and reinvested into programs in new equipment in forklifts and f directors or whatever and i think the seattle times did a great job exposing some of the not so efficient and wasteful and often times on ethical activities that they're involved with as far as employment so we just today want to raise awareness have some folks kind of get a glimpse into our reality as family members are reality as having front row seats to the prison system and hopefully asking anybody who's intrigued  at yahoo and you did mention you've got legislation that's a bill that we're working on at right now disability rights of washington has been a big supporter of the bill and let especially last year and they actually do some work king county has an ombudsman does a lot of work with the jail there's a lot of people out there who support this i mean we're we're pretty small compared to some of the larger groups out there some of the faith based groups really support it it just you know it all depends what they're working on as to how much effort they put into lobbying for it and you mentioned earlier that you have monthly meetings to tortious we know the prison support network meets in monroe at the public library the second saturday of every month from ten until noon and everybody gets out in times to get up to visit so it's very convenient for families and you know the meeting is whatever the people who show up needed to be you know if it's just to have coffee and chat or if it's melody coming and giving us a good you know talk about new legislation and how we  help we all work together we are a family of a community that support each other in all of our endeavors and we really just want to make make things better time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning licola ten and david robinson of the continent david robinson are both with a seattle privacy coalition thank you both for coming it's been a time of the smarter thanks thanks for having us on again we're happy to come in here and give you an occasional update and there's always some crazy news going on there is and in fact the reason i dragged your in at this this morning so  a little bit about the c e o privacy coalition ok we were founded in two thousand and thirteen in during the controversy over the port security cameras so called that popped up along beach and  the waterfront downtown seattle and and elsewhere as a result of that a lot of activists got together from all political stripes and were trying to get information from the city as to you know who these cameras belong to what they were there for where the money for them and come from why there had been no public announcements or debate or anything else and so that's that's the circumstances under which we got together we're now we're now official we have our own nonprofit of those cameras going up was a public outcry the city council passed an ordinance one two for one for two which was supposed to block any such incidents from happening again  that any new surveillance equipment was required under that ordinance to be approved beforehand by the city council and the mayor's office and sure enough the cameras and the  network that was associated with them has never been operated it's never been turned on properly and so if all of that has been sitting in limbo now for two and a half years the problem with that ordinance though is that other several other surveillance measures have gone into place since then and the thing's not really been enforced it's not been implemented on the bright side there is a process underway in the city to create a tool kit that all city departments will use any time they do work with technology that has a privacy impact that's grinding its way slowly through through city hall and we're hoping to see that released within a month or so but until then the unfortunate fact is that we have a law on the books that really has had one success which is to keep those cameras that were put up secretly  that kept them from working but there are many other things like the police facial recognition systems the license plate reading various kinds of things that seriously impact privacy of individuals who are certainly not criminals  and these are things that really concern us so this week the tail end of this week there was multiple media reports about a t f cameras that had been spotted in the city and in fact the person that had spotted those was usually you discovered both of them can you talk about that sure so those cameras or the first camera that i saw both of them look very similar  they have the same enclosure it's this sort of white oxy enclosure for the camera with a dome on the bottom for the actual camera to look through but the the equipment is housed in this white box enclosure made by a company called dot works z at the end and so they have this distinctive look to them and i had gone along the waterfront photographing the other cameras to make sure that we knew where all of them were and where all of them were pointing there's one of the one of the cameras was across from the aquarium which i found ridiculous it has no view of the water but it's supposed to be there for port security and so  existing or the previously existing cameras so when i saw this one up on the pole there was this flash of recognition or i looked out and i thought wait a minute is this another seattle police camera that's been put in and i i first noticed it while i was on march there was in solidarity with the people who were killed in charleston the charleston nine and we had gone starting from the first a m e church on  capitol hill and marched along twenty third under the view of one of the cameras that i didn't see at the time but then we turned onto jackson off the twenty third right by the starbucks between dot and up on a seattle city light pole there was this camera and i looked out in the you know i thought that might it might be another seattle police camera and so i photographed it with my phone and then also took a picture of the seattle city light pole tag with the number on it doesn't mating you know this poll is a property of the city and i tweeted those out to the seattle police and mike wagers who i had just seen at the start of the march so i knew he was there and had had his phone on him and i didn't receive a reply and a week later i replied my own tweet trying to get more attention to it and it did that for a few weeks and after about a month i did get a reply from sayle police saying this is not our equipment and then another reply shortly thereafter from seattle city light saying well this isn't ours either and we're going to look into it and that's that's when things got really interesting because there's a camera on the pole that  city light doesn't know about then why is it there so i went back this last friday so not yesterday but the week before we prior and brought all brought along a pocket telescope and gave the camera close inspection and there's a phone number on the side of it and it turns out that phone number points to a top be reverse who has a linked in profile if you googled this  his phone number and seattle but that would come up and he lists him self as or had listed himself as the surveillance expert for the of alcohol tobacco and firearms and this is sort of a public secret i think i'm not sure that anyone else had noticed that phone number on the side of the camera and made that connection and then announce that but i figured that would be the right thing to do because i had i hadn't heard about this sort of program there was a mention in the seattle times that there was a press conference rather that happened a week after that march where i noticed this camera that discussed a collaboration between the a t f and the seattle police in examining the ballistics the shell casings from  shells found at crime scenes try and identify the guns that had been used in those crimes and some success there where they had traced a gun that had been used in multiple crimes over the past few years and apprehended some one and  e some some success there but that was an opportunity where the mayor and the chief of police and other members of the community who are calling for these cameras there at that press conference i think it was on the fourteenth or thereabouts that if they had known about these cameras they could have then said well actually we are putting these cameras up in in the community but instead they just said that they were open to the possibility of having cameras and so this is a problem either way whether they knew about it and didn't say anything or whether they didn't know about it and seattle city light is acting in service of the a t f without following up their chain of accountability to the mayor and to city council letting them know that surveillance equipment is being installed in the city contrary to our privacy initiative and in fact contrary to the  recognition of well we had recently had the city council and the mayor declare that all seattle citizens have a right to privacy as recognized by the united nations  charter for human rights and so particularly when i saw this camera on the seventh i was thinking about the surveillance of people in the black lives matter movement  and that came out recently in the intercept where through some free even information act requests it was found that the department of homeland security a different federal agency was closely monitoring people who were active in social media and active in these movements even when they were not suspected of doing anything illegal at all that their locations were being tracked their postings  online were being tracked and that's a clear echo of the counterintelligence program against people in the previous civil rights movement there of martin luther king jr so that's that's what i was thinking about when i first saw the camera and the a t f would fall under the umbrella of department of homeland security though no no  in charge of procuring surveillance cameras or any other equipment so you eventually eventually the media started picking this up and having well you had actually first attempted to contact the phone number did you gain any knowledge from what happened there or is that something you want to talk about yeah so it was an interesting conversation  as my first response when i saw this number was i thought naively perhaps well i'll just give this a call and ask why the scammers here and i called and asked who i was speaking to and they declined to identify themselves and they asked who i was and i said that i was a citizen of the city of seattle and concerned about that neighborhood and it is where one of my sons goes to school and so they declined to state what the camera was therefore i asked them about it and said you know this is attached to city light pole and that i would figure out a ventu who it belonged to and i hadn't actually done the search on the phone number adopt one that was actually pointed out to me by a stranger reporter shortly thereafter that maybe i should have done that first but anyway i i asked them why this camera was here and eventually they they came around to say that perhaps it was due to the shootings and crime in that neighborhood which presumably this is this is part and brian bennett an officer from the a t f or an agent from a t f later sent in an e mail that that is exactly why the cameras is supposed to be there as part of  a gang activity between the a t f the king county sheriff's department and the king county department of corrections so it doesn't necessarily involve the seattle police and i suppose it's possible that they didn't know anything about it but then still because it was installed by seattle city light there is that that chain of of accountability but yeah so after ending that conversation i seven did a news interview in a news piece on it and then king five news aired something yesterday about it so it still seems hazy as to city lights role in all this depending on which article you read the it seems less hazy than it was the i think it was the in the seattle times article the spokesman for seattle city light acknowledged that the cameras have been put up there  with with the knowledge of seattle say like this is after they first said they didn't know anything about and they would check well after checking it turns out of course they did know about it and in fact the spokesperson said we support law enforcement and we will continue to do so and put further equipment of this sort up as needed so because we in the public know this these things and pursued it and  actually did some digging what it looks like the stonewalling that seattle city light initially tried on us failed also the police department it's unlikely that if they're part of this  gang task force that they're not aware that there's surveillance going on down there so they've now essentially admitted that they're involved in this even if they have clean hands by not having actually climbed up the pole and installed it but so that's all pretty typical deals or you know at that level with that with with police agencies from the federal government which and completely bypassing any city process and maybe even bypassing the seattle police department i don't want to look at let them off the hook on this so i mean so seattle city light is now setting law enforcement cooperation policies and setting privacy policies in seattle i don't really think that's possible if it isn't there then  that's a serious failure of the city government the city bureaucracy to be managed properly so i would like to see the mayor's office explaining what is going on here and what the relationship is between the political leadership and the and and the bureaucracy in city hall and what's happening on the streets and what they're at what their relations are with the federal government in this and as a general matter the issue here isn't really whether it's good or not that the a t f is trying to fight crime by putting cameras up because have that debate you know and i hope we would debated on the basis of actual evidence whether cameras like that help in the general reduction of crime whether they have a specific investigative reason for putting them up and so on but the real problem here is that there's no proce there's no public debate we have laws in place we have well a law in place in seattle that should have been looked to when these cameras were put up and i understand that you know the federal government doesn't really need to pay attention to that sort of thing but there's also something seriously wrong when you have sort of free agents happening at the level of the local electric utility deciding what's going to happen in the polls or the the exclusive domain of c l city lines so he corrects they each have a serial number on them seattle city light nobody else can touch those hol so if you or i were to try and put something up on a pole you'd probably think that you're probably really trespassing particularly if we wired it into their electrical system and now would be theft of electricity yeah  so which of course they've admitted that they let them do it so but we couldn't do that so and so far we just know that there are two it is possible there's more it could be more the a refusing to confirm or deny based on the fact that there were two hot spots noted in that seattle times article about the joint task force again task force i'm going to take a look down at the other hot spot which is down in the southern end of rainier valley and this weekend if i get down there and if i can find some more i'd bet you better than even money that will find something down there and see in the privacy collision on your web site cell privacy dot org has a nice map we have a nifty map that which which i maintain and so the the two central district cameras are now on there and i keep that up that started as a map of all the mesh knows the radio communication system that was connected to these cameras all the original cameras they're all they're all up there it's like twenty cameras that were part of that seattle police department effort  two and a half years ago and about i don't know eighty mesh knows a lot of them so yep so that's all on there take a look at the privacy the work site if you want to see where where the camera nearest you is and particularly if you see something interesting up on a pole or in your neighborhood please contact us we have contact information on our on our website which i'm trying to find you have to know what our e mail address is off the top of your general e mail address is contact at seattle privacy dot org ok you can reach is that way if you have a tip if you see a camera that you can't figure out let us know cameras on private buildings generally we assume those are privately and we don't track those right now that would be such a huge project but we're we are interested in cameras that are going up with public money and we want to make sure that there's a public debate about  whether they should be there or not because each one of those cameras compromises personal privacy in the name of some goal which may or may not be you know served by them but they should be discussed they shouldn't be and certain and if you have like an active investigation going on maybe that doesn't need to be publicized but it certainly needs to be properly managed through the city and it should be in accordance with the laws of the city next week to follow up on all of this we need to find out if we can get some comment that we actually would we would very much like to sit down with the mayor the mayor staff and have a general discussion about these matters because so far we really haven't done that but b he'd be looking into it and bruce harrell is that chair of the public safety technology and civil rights committee city and he has been very very active in a leadership role in the privacy  for for putting forward the original ordinance under which all this is operating so another piece of information that the a t f has stated is that the cameras are not are not doing live feeds or just dumping the information to a hard drive right that was the term that they gave was this is an incident based surveillance system so presumably if there's an incident then they'll  either go up and if the if the harddrive is there inside of the camera or they'll pull it out and look over the information stored or if it is connecting over a network then they would pour through  video recordings and this is this is another point is that so it's sort of two sided there there have been calls by members of the community and aspiring politicians to have more surveillance for the sake of deterrence and a deterrent surveillance system will only work if people know about it and so that conflicts with the objective of having a covert surveillance system that can monitor people where they're unaware that they're being recorded and the other are those who say but anyway this this incident driven system may not be actively monitored it may just be dumped into a hard drive in the same way that the port surveillance system that was put in previously with federal money that from the department of homeland security wasn't going to be something that was actively monitored it would just wait until there was a terrorist speeding and elliott bay on their sodhi act boats and then be turned on to protect the city that was  that was that was the the reason behind having this port security system to protect our our maritime domain one thing we're interested in is what's going to happen to the task force cameras a t f cameras when the investigation is over we'd like to see them come down and we'd like to see or else see a debate about whether they should stay up and so that's one thing that will be expecting to engage in with them with the authorities in the city government later we want to make sure that cameras don't just sort of get glued permanently to the public space and have no debate about that we don't want to end up like london my daughter my daughter lives in london right now and everything i've ever heard about the level of surveillance camera saturation over there is true and one of my personal reasons for being interested in these issues is because i also was i was a fellowship recipient thirty years ago in east germany i was a fulbright or there and i lived in east berlin the first time i saw a public surveillance cameras the long sort of boxy tube type ones pointed out over a public square was in east germany thirty years ago and now all i have to do is look around seattle and they're everywhere that keeps me pretty focused on  dangers of and there are there are rules around the department of transportation cameras the seattle department transportation has cameras that are specifically for the purpose of monitoring traffic and they have them nearly every intersection there's also a license plate recording system that is specifically for the purpose of timing how long it takes to get from one part of the city to the other so that a stock is able to figure out where there is traffic jams and look at trends and all of that those cameras are not to be used for law enforcement even like finding stolen vehicles or amber alerts or any of that there's a prohibition on those cameras use for law enforcement purposes so if you go out and you suddenly start seeing all of these cameras at every at every intersection know that many of them are merely there for monitoring traffic and that there was a debate about this when those went up about the potential risk of setting up the surveillance system throughout throughout the city and that's why the seattle cameras have a limited resolution when you're looking at them online it's you can't pick out people's faces or the license plate system doesn't expose any of that information it's just looking at the timings from one plate going to another another camera  read in other municipalities they have some systems that also photograph the drivers and passengers now yes so just under two minutes left to leave you had said before we about the effort of seattle gangs to come together and find or broker a peace because they they recognize that there is also this problem with with violence perpetuated the united hood smoove man wants to send us an email that's contact privacy dot org let us know what you think about the cameras so we're just about out of time again how can people find out more about the seattle privacy r right well with that we're unfortunate the time i want to thank you both for coming and spending time with us this morning