Earlier this week, Council member Alex Pedersen introduced a resolution requesting the city’s IT department to take a look at what it would take to ensure all Seattle residents have access to broadband-speed Internet access.
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Surveillance technology ordinance collapsing under its own bureaucratic weight
In July of 2017, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring the Council to approve city departments’ use of technologies that could be used for surveillance purposes. It also required all of the technologies current in use that meet that definition to be reviewed and approved. Last year the Council amended the ordinance to set up a Community Surveillance Working Group (CSWG) to review and assess the technologies before they come up for the Council’s approval. This morning, two technologies came up for approval by the Council’s Governance, Equity and Technology Committee, and it quickly became clear that despite the …
Continue readingCTO appointment advances out of committee
On Thursday the Council voted out of committee the confirmation of Saad Bashir as the city’s new CTO and head of the Seattle IT department. His confirmation comes up for final vote on March 18th.
Continue readingKnow your city: Internet access
A new report published by the City of Seattle shows that home internet access has become nearly universal, though some disparities remain.
Continue readingDurkan makes a trio of appointments
Yesterday, Mayor Durkan announced three department head appointments: two permanent, and one interim.
Continue readingThings I didn’t write about this week
A lot more happened this week that I didn’t get around to writing about. And on Monday the Mayor will release her proposed 2019-2020 budget. So before everything else fades into obscurity, here’s some quick takes on all the other stuff.
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SPD still wrestling with overtime spending – and the Seattle IT department
This morning the City Council revisited a recurring pain point: the Seattle Police Department’s inability to stay within budget on its overtime expenses. The issues with how the Seattle Police Department manages overtime for its officers go back for years, if not decades, but they came under particular scrutiny starting in October 2014 when then-Chief Kathleen O’Toole requested an audit of the department’s overtime practices. It took the City Auditor 18 months to issue the audit report; in the intervening time the City Budget Office and the City Council became acutely aware of the budget pain inflicted when SPD’s overtime …
Continue readingSurveillance technology ordinance headed to adoption on Monday
After several months of work, this morning the Council moved forward an update to the city’s ordinance regulating use of surveillance technology by SPD and other city departments. What started out as a fairly simple task, extending the current rules beyond hardware to include software and web services, turned out to be a nearly intractable set of complex issues. In the end the ordinance’s sponsor, Council member Gonzalez, settled for addressing just a subset of the issues in what she referred to this morning as “phase one.”
Continue readingCouncil continues discussion of surveillance technologies
The City of Seattle’s parking enforcement division uses automated license plate readers to identify cars (and drivers) with multiple parking tickets so they can boot or impound the vehicles as necessary. SPD uses that same data to identify stolen cars, as well as those wanted in relation to specific criminal activities. Back in 2012, New York City took it further: they used cameras on street light poles to track people coming and going from mosques — an act that most people think stepped over the line of acceptable surveillance. How the City of Seattle acquires and uses surveillance technology — …
Continue readingHarrell pushing for expanding public Wi-Fi in Seattle
Wednesday afternoon in his Education, Equity and Governance Committee, Council President Bruce Harrell pushed the Seattle IT department to go farther and faster in investigating public Wi-Fi as an alternative to municipal broadband in key areas of the city.
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