San Mateo Dumps Red Light Camera Program After A Decade Of Continuous Failure

from the if-it-ain't-working,-don't-fix-it dept

Earlier this month, the city of San Mateo, California, decided to end its red light camera program. The official reason given is pure spin -- a transparent attempt by the city to distance itself from its failed program.

According to the city, an evaluation of the program determined that the safety benefits of the program have plateaued as it has also become more challenging to administer.

You see? No one's responsible for this mess. It's just entropy or something. Not, oh I don't know, the fact that the city couldn't run the program competently to begin with. If safety is the stated goal, what the hell's going on here?

The decision comes after the discovery of an error in yellow-light timing at the intersection of Saratoga Drive and Hillsdale Boulevard. The yellow-light timing when driving south on Saratoga Drive was inadvertently set to 3.4 seconds during a construction project. The state-mandated minimum for yellow lights is 3.6 seconds.

Thanks to this, almost 1,000 tickets are being dismissed and refunds are being issued. But this decision to call the whole thing off shouldn't have taken a decade. Dave Price of the Palo Alto Daily Post points out the city has been aware of yellow-light timing issues since 2009.

In January 2009, the Post received a tip that the yellow light was set too short at an intersection monitored by a red-light camera in San Mateo. Drivers were getting caught in the intersection unexpectedly and given tickets.

So a Post reporter set up a video camera that records 30 frames every second and recorded the stoplight cycle. He then checked the recording frame by frame and discovered that, indeed, the yellow light was shorter than federal regulations.

Then we contacted an outside expert to check our work to make sure our conclusions were correct.

They were, and we printed the story.

The response from the city back in 2009 was just as exonerative, but nowhere near as littered with bureaucratese. The city claimed the Daily Post was "irresponsible" and only published the story for the clicks. The city also claimed the Daily Post was wrong. It backed this claim with zero evidence. The city never tested the lights itself.

Six years later, an NBC affiliate performed the same testing at San Mateo intersections. Again, it was determined the city's yellow light timing was below federal guidelines. This time, the city refunded 948 tickets.

The city did nothing to prevent this from happening again. So, naturally, it happened again. And, finally, the city has decided to toss the program, rather than be forced to periodically confront its failure to run a legal red light camera program.

I'm sure the money had something to do with the refusal to kill this program earlier. According to numbers obtained by Price, the city netted at least $266,000 last year from red light cameras. Its partner -- Redflex -- did just about as well, collecting $239,000 in fees. That's two sets of vested interests with quite a bit of power between them.

Behind all the cash-grabbing is the repeatedly disproven claim that unmanned cameras with the power to automatically issue tickets make drivers safer. It doesn't work anywhere else. It didn't work in San Mateo.

Supporters of red-light cameras have argued that they reduce T-bone crashes by people running the light. But studies have shown that over time, the number of rear-end crashes caused by people trying to avoid a photo ticket surpasses the T-bone crashes. In San Mateo, the number of accidents at the red-light camera intersections are higher now than they were when the cameras went in.

Thankfully, the program is dead and seems unlikely to be resurrected. More cities should make their drivers safer by doing the same thing.

Filed Under: california, red light cameras, san mateo

Judge Wants To Know More About FBI's Secret Recordings Of Conversations Near Courthouse Steps

from the privacy-in-public-spaces-revisited dept

Last November, lawyers defending five real estate investors against auction price-rigging allegations discovered the FBI had planted bugs to capture conversations during real estate auctions on the San Mateo (CA) Courthouse steps.

The lawyers questioned whether these surreptitious recordings violated wiretap laws, despite them taking place in a public area. As they noted, investors often huddled away from the steps to discuss bidding strategies in "hushed tones" in order to prevent competitors from overhearing them. According to these lawyers, the "hushed tones" were not unlike the closing of a phone booth door -- a key element in the Supreme Court's 1967 Katz decision, which found an expectation of privacy could be found in public areas, provided the person being targeted by recording devices performed certain actions.

Here, the Government targeted conversations that an informant and an undercover agent with full access to the public place were apparently unable to overhear. The evidence will show that Defendants often took affirmative steps to create a zone of privacy for their communications, such as moving away from others, standing close together, covering their mouths, and speaking in low volumes.

Now, the judge presiding over the case has a few questions of his own. (non-reg/paywall link)

On Thursday at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed over whether the tactic crossed a constitutional line.

Government lawyers, who used the microphones to investigate a federal bid-rigging case, contend that individuals picked up on the recordings were speaking in a public place and thus had no reasonable expectation of privacy. Defense lawyers insist that the surveillance, conducted without judicial approval, amounted to unlawful government eavesdropping and want Breyer to suppress all evidence derived from the devices.

Although Breyer held off on ruling, he expressed at least gut-level discomfort with the notion of government agents listening at the courthouse door.

"Let's say I was out of that courthouse that day, I used the staff entrance and I turned my law clerk," the judge said. "I wouldn't know [about that recording], would I, unless the government turned it over?"

The government must have its own doubts about the legitimacy of the recordings, despite arguing that there's no expectation of privacy in public places. The FBI collected more than 200 hours of recordings during its price-fixing investigation, and the government has stated it won't be trying to enter any of it into evidence. In fact, it would like the whole thing to just go away and has asked Judge Breyer to declare the defense's motion moot.

Judge Breyer hasn't been swayed by the prosecution's offer to sweep its possibly illicit bugs under the rug.

"I have to be satisfied that there's no taint from the recordings on the rest of the evidence in the case," Breyer said. "The answer is, I'm not satisfied."

Hopefully, Breyer will continue to dig into this. The government's assertions about public places and their lack of privacy may be correct, but efforts made by those recorded to keep their conversations from being overheard by others makes it clear members of the public will try to carve out privacy where none is expected from a legal standpoint. This is an issue that needs to be examined further in light of the Katz decision.

On top of that, the FBI's handling of the recordings was lackadaisical at best, and shady at worst.

[FBI agent] Wynar said that most times he manually turned the devices on about a half-hour prior to the auctions and turned them off afterward. He said that he didn't remember any instances of the devices recording attorney-client conversations or the discussions of employees entering and exiting the building.

All well and good, but without a third party examining the recordings, it's a little tough to take someone at their word when they're trying to preserve both a surreptitious recording method and submitted evidence.

The defense team has already poked holes in the agent's selective memory, pointing out a 14-minute recording between two courthouse employees that contained a very personal discussion about money, lingerie and a third party's "lack of intelligence" was captured along with more relevant conversations. The agent stated he "did not remember" listening to this conversation.

And it's not just the incidental recordings. It's also the handling. According to his own testimony, it appears the FBI agent tried to obscure the origin of these recordings.

Later under questioning from Jacobs, Wynar conceded he hadn't written up reports for some recordings and that none of his reports noted that the recordings were "nonconsensual," or made by some means other than planting a microphone on the cooperating witness or undercover agent.

This likely explains why the recordings the FBI thought were important enough to collect are now in the process of being discarded by prosecutors before they can cause any more damage to their case.

Filed Under: fbi, san mateo, secret recordings

Defense Lawyers Claim FBI Illegally Bugged Outside Steps Of County Courthouse

from the my,-what-big-ears-you-have! dept

Is there an expectation of privacy in public spaces? Generally speaking, there isn't. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all. Private conversations in public places are still afforded a limited expectation of privacy by the "Wiretap Act" -- a law prompted by the widespread warrantless use of recording devices, along with the Supreme Court's Katz decision, which found attaching a recording device to the outside of a public phone booth required the use of a warrant.

We may get to see just how far the courts are willing to extend the expectation of privacy in public places, thanks to the discovery of recording devices outside of a US courthouse. (h/t Declan McCullagh)

According to court papers filed Friday, federal agents placed secret recording devices in at least three locations around the entrance to the San Mateo County courthouse in Redwood City without first getting judicial approval.

The courthouse bugs were used in 2009 and 2010 to investigate bid-rigging at public foreclosure auctions. Their existence surfaced in a motion from defense lawyers for a group of five real estate investors accused of colluding to deflate prices at the auctions, which were held on the courthouse steps.

The defense lawyers, led by Latham & Watkins partners Daniel Wall and Ashley Bauer, are asking U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer to suppress more than 200 hours of recorded conversations and all evidence gained from them. They maintain that their clients had a reasonable expectation of privacy when they gathered to speak in hushed voices away from other auction participants.

The bugs were planted by the FBI in hopes of capturing bid-rigging discussions. The lawyers for the five defendants claim the recordings are illegal. Even though they did take place in a public area, the Katz decision and the Wiretap Act require the use of warrants fpr surreptitious recordings. As the Supreme Court saw it back in 1967, the defendant's actions turned a "public" conversation into a private one: namely, closing the door to the phone booth.

The lawyers here are hoping the use of "hushed tones" will be found to be roughly equivalent to shutting a phone booth door.

Here, the Government targeted conversations that an informant and an undercover agent with full access to the public place were apparently unable to overhear. The evidence will show that Defendants often took affirmative steps to create a zone of privacy for their communications, such as moving away from others, standing close together, covering their mouths, and speaking in low volumes.

The FBI's interception of these conversations was performed without warrants. In fact, the interception apparently was performed with hardly any paperwork at all. The approval for the recording devices came solely from FBI and DOJ attorneys and the resulting recordings ran for hours, without minimization or documentation.

Agents activated the listening devices on at least 31 occasions between December 22, 2009 and September 15, 2010. Bauer Decl., Ex. D. Generally, the recording devices were activated more than an hour before the auctions began, and they would run for a period of time after the auctions had concluded. Some of the devices intercepted every communication that occurred in their vicinity over a period of more than five hours. Id. For example, the Government recorded individuals having private conversations on their cellphones in an area away from the auctions.

Although the target was certain bidders at property auctions, the FBI swept up everything simply because leaving the mics on was simpler than restricting recordings only to the suspects in the case. A supporting document submitted by the defense details conversations unrelated to the investigation that were not only recorded by the FBI, but stored indefinitely in unminimized form.

The government has already argued that the warrantless recordings were legal as they were used to compile evidence of fraudulent behavior. It also implied probable cause existed for the deployment of surreptitious recording devices. What it omits from its defense of the FBI's actions is that probable cause normally leads to the generation of warrants, not mini-surveillance dragnets that capture more irrelevant conversations than applicable ones.

If the court finds the FBI's actions lawful, it will serve notice that any public area is no place to hold a private conversation, even if the participants make every effort to ensure their relative privacy. This would be at odds with previous court decisions. As the opening paragraphs of the filing point out, it has been previously noted by a US district court that leaving our own homes does not immediately open us up to unlimited government surveillance.

Wesley v. WISN Division-Hearst Corp., 806 F. Supp. 812, 814 (E.D. Wis. 1992) (“[W]e do not have to assume that as soon as we leave our homes we enter an Orwellian world of ubiquitous hidden microphones.”

Merely being in public is not proxy consent for surreptitious recording. The government is arguing that it is, or at least that the lowered expectation of privacy means the FBI shouldn't have to go outside of its own legal counsel to seek permission to eavesdrop -- not just on suspected criminals, but whoever else happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Filed Under: courthouse, fbi, san mateo, wiretapping

Yet Another Redlight Camera Program Found To Be Illegal

from the down-goes-another-one dept

Jeff Nolan points us to the news that yet another redlight camera program in California has been struck down as illegal, this time in San Mateo (right up the road from where I live). The details are a little technical, but effectively, California law doesn't allow municipalities to do deals with redlight camera vendors, where the vendor gets a percentage of the money brought in by tickets. San Mateo tried to get around this by giving the vendor (Redflex, of course) a cut up to a certain level. However, the judge didn't buy that, and rejected the ticket that was at issue. The lawyer who handled the case is thinking about now turning this into a class action lawsuit against various municipalities doing the same thing -- and potentially against Redflex. (Full disclosure: Just recently -- long after I'd written about how awful these cameras are, my wife got a ticket from one of these redlight cameras... in San Mateo, for the exact same thing as the guy who won this lawsuit: a right turn on red, without a full stop).

Filed Under: california, redlight cameras, san mateo
Companies: redflex