An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees -- including charging tens of thousands or even millions -- to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching "about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system" would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour. Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed "ludicrous" and designed to stifle his public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including a Houston news station called KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records, the Tribune reported. The high price tags may be hiding data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras, including decisions to get rid of cameras. Further reading: Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in Florida

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A U.S. banking group just sued the government agency that issues America's federal bank charters, reports CoinDesk, "accusing it of exceeding its legal powers in granting national trust-bank status to crypto firms." The agency's move "creates a gaping hole in financial regulation," according to the lawsuit by The Independent Community Bankers of America, one of America's largest banking advocacy organizations. It argues the move will "perversely allow entities engaged in highly risky cryptocurrency and digital assets activities to enter the banking system under lightly regulated national charters" which actually preempt many state regulations, including consumer protection laws. But the move would also "place community banks at a severe competitive disadvantage," the lawsuit argues, "by allowing the national trust banks to offer many of the same services as community banks without complying with the same costly banking laws and regulations that apply to the community banks." This competitive advantage could "siphon deposits out of community banks and into deposit alternatives like cryptocurrency," which they describe as "highly volatile, prone to market crashes, cybercrime, and fraud" and lacking protections like deposit insurance. They also warn that America's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency "has not managed an uninsured bank receivership in nearly one hundred years. But failures of risky uninsured national trust banks could spread instability throughout the nation's financial system, including by spreading contagion risks to other traditional banks like community banks." CoinDesk reports: [The Independent Community Bankers of America] also played a significant role in pushing back against the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act that failed to advance in the U.S. Senate last month — in part due to the bankers' objections that its stablecoin provisions didn't protect them against direct competition with the deposit accounts that are core to their businesses. Now, the group is targeting the trust charters crypto firms are pursuing as an entry point into the U.S. banking and payments system. "Congress did not create the national trust charter as a side door into the banking system for crypto firms seeking the credibility of a federal bank charter," ICBA President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey said in a statement..

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The state of New Mexico asked a judge on Thursday to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data on Facebook in a case that came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Attorneys for New Mexico made the request at a hearing in a lawsuit brought following revelations that the British political consulting firm, which worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without their consent. The jury returned its verdict on September 25. Judge Francis Mathew, who oversaw the trial in Santa Fe, will decide how much Meta must pay in financial penalties. [...] State law allows the judge to decide how much to fine Meta per violation, up to $5,000. At the hearing on Thursday, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process. But the judge should order a significant payment that will impact the company, McGinn said. "This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price," McGinn said. She said $35 billion to $40 billion, which represents about 20% of the possible penalties that could be awarded under state law from the verdict, would impact the stock price while complying with Meta's right to due process under the Constitution. At the hearing on Thursday, Matt Nicholson, a lawyer for Meta, called the state's request an "astronomical penalty that would obviously violate a host of constitutional provisions." In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion. The jury may have said it found Meta's statements misleading, but the evidence shows that Meta does not sell user data and New Mexico did not prove that any consumer had actually been misled, the company said in court filings. The judge said he expected to issue a ruling later this month.

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