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Comment by plorg | Hacker News Reader

My local county is currently in a dispute with the local bar association because they want to upgrade the courthouse security cameras and the sheriff wants to add audio capabilities. This includes to parts of the building just outside the courtroom that counsel will frequently use for brief asides with their clients (due to lack of other private rooms). The county seems to favor adding the microphones and pinky swearing they won't use them and that public records requests won't be used to listen in on privileged communication, but it's obvious how difficult that would be to trust. They keep putting off a decision because they don't want to piss off the lawyers.

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Even if what they hear is inadmissible in court, parallel construction is a real thing and they will find a way to work backwards.

It is basically an unfair advantage, even if inadmissible in court. The state can find more facts even in illegal ways; and this assuming the government is fair rather than criminal. I have a hard time trusting governments who mistrust the public.

There should be no safety reason to require audio. The only reason for audio is later use for prosecution.

It's not just that they don't want to piss off the lawyers. If they don't provide a private location, then they may be forced to take continuances and recesses so those conversations can happen elsewhere as a condition of not infringing on the constitutional right to effective counsel.

Might be quicker to detect disturbances using audio too rather than video only, think of ShotSpotter. Sounds made up though and probably either a way to spy or chill speech.

But ShotSpotter doesn't actually work (almost every alert is a false positive). So what value would this add?

No totally, I can't imagine it either, I was just trying to give it a charitable assumption.

What's the security reason they need this? How many times has a security camera failed to do its job because it didn't have audio? What crimes do they thing they are going to solve? Are people breaking into the courthouse wearing masks but screaming their own names?

I think one problem is, almost all security cameras are sold with audio these days. If the cameras have a mic, telling people "Oh, we turned the mic off in each camera" or "We don't record the audio" isn't very helpful.

Just cut the cable for the microphone?

It's often on the board as a MEMS microphone.

But yes I've done this with all my ring cameras, they were still the old type. One of them was a bitch to open up though (the indoor one IIRC)

There’s another problem with this because a camera with a mic cable cut would look from the outside exactly like a camera with mic cable intact, and maintenance is a thing, so eventually it’s bound to be replaced by a camera with a working mic either by mistake or “by mistake” on purpose. There’s a trust issue here since people who would be affected by the presence of a mic won’t be able to easily visually verify that it’s disabled.

Drill through it!

Don't most of those dome/bubble cameras come without mics?

I saw them advertised "With microphone" or something recently, which led me to assume that was a 'feature' of this model...but you know advertising

Surely as a compromise the police dept can put cameras with audio livestreaming from every room in police dept ?

Or a compromise where defendants also have the same access to the camera feeds and pinky swear not to use the audio.

Still asymmetric as the police have the resources to comb the feeds and individuals do not

I am confident a gofundme would provide enough tokens for this work.

True, but irrelevant because nobody’s listening. All parties with access have pinky swears not to listen.

I assume the sheriff would be totally fine with putting up signs in that area saying "audio and video recording in progress" then right? That would somewhat address the issue, and should be entirely uncontroversial to both sides.

There is an asymmetric impact to the defense. In our adversarial legal system, we must not disadvantage one of the sides unilaterally.

There are times when I want to argue that the solution is to make the question one of truth rather than guilt or innocence, but any solution runs up against human nature, my first experience of which was when playing sports and being told by my team mates that I should state that the ball fell on the side of the line which was advantageous to the team, rather than where it actually fell.

Never willingly played a team sport again.

That doesn't sound like a good compromise at all. First practically speaking, you can't just leave the court building to discuss with your client if they're in chains, and it's super inconvenient based on the layout of many courts. Second, this becomes the excuse for adding audio and video surveillance everywhere, with the excuse that you know about it, so it's okay. Third, considering audio can pick up things like jokes, irrational things said in anger, or just one's mumblings to oneself, it very quickly becomes the excuse to haul in anyone you don't like by misconstruing their words. The fact that it was brought by law enforcement tells you they are looking to use it against people.

> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

-- Structured to Cardinal Richelieu

* s/Structured/Attributed/ , not sure how that swipe-typo happened.

The whole point of contention is that one of the spaces is, effectively, the only convenient places to have a quick, heretofore private, conversation. No one is confused over where the things are.

There should be rooms assigned for these private conversations.

But I imagine even these rooms are cammed, and lip reading is a thing

It seems likely that if there were spaces that could (both physically and politically) be assigned for this, they already would have been.

Sure, it would be great if we could have nice things like that, but all too often we need to work with the infrastructure we have.

It's so fundamentally terrifying that someone would consider that "totally fine".

Prosecutors will take breaks in their offices within the same building while the defense has to leave the building in order to have a private conversation, that sounds totally fair and reasonable.

Well there are times when attorneys are part of a criminal organisation and are used as a communication link to the outside world.

Nobody considered that when the laws were written but we live in a world of billion dollar drug cartels.

Yeah, "we promise not to use it" is about the weakest possible control in a situation like that

Are you in Iowa, by chance? A neighboring county where I live wants to do this exact thing. Last I read they had voted to go forward with it.

CCTV with audio is a line that should not be crossed, but as there tech is there, they just can't resist

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-judg...

There's no leadership to curtail asinine behavior. Instead of forces of nature to strengthen the status quo of freedom, we get lowly politicians. Judges end up having to do all the work.

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