Court Judge Rules Flock Safety camera data is not exempt from PRA [WA State] (www.goskagit.com)

A Skagit County judge rejected motions from the cities of Sedro‑Woolley and Stanwood seeking a declaratory judgment that images and data captured by Flock Safety automated-license-plate-reader cameras are not public records under Washington’s Public Records Act. The cameras — used by local police and many U.S. agencies — record passing cars and use AI to extract make, model, color and license-plate data (Flock says it retains data for 30 days). The dispute followed public-records requests for specific time windows; the cities argued the data isn’t routinely available to officers until queried during investigations and should be exempt as sensitive intelligence, while the requester’s lawyer cited precedent holding third‑party documents shared with government are subject to disclosure. For the AI/ML community, the ruling underscores a pivotal transparency and governance issue: algorithmically generated surveillance outputs held by private vendors but used by government may be subject to public-access rules. That raises technical and operational implications for model provenance, retention policies, access controls, and privacy-preserving design (e.g., differential retention, query logging, redaction). The case also highlights risks from cross-agency searches (a UW study found Border Patrol accessed Flock data from multiple Washington agencies), adding pressure for clearer norms on third‑party custodianship, auditability of AI queries, and legal frameworks that balance investigatory utility with civil‑liberties protections.