Originally Posted by Solarmoon
This is very usefull information. But one thing is unclear: did you get the copy of the surveillance tape as part of discovery for your civil rights and other claims, or did you get it as an "unrelated" FOIA suit?
If it was the latter, it would be interesting to see if folks could just request copies of the surveillance tapes as a matter of course the way that others keep track of documents, etc.... As these are government tapes, there would presumably be no copyright restrictions and I'm sure that folks could really use these as raw material for political art, etc...
The civil rights suit has yet to commence. We want to get an adjudication in our favor on the merits of the criminal charges so that we can go after the prosecutor for malicious prosectution.
We always request these matters via FOIA under the state's open records act. We also sent a federal FOIA to the TSA/DHS for the tape, but their contention is that it is not in thier possession or control.
We had much resistance to securing the tape. The airport authority balked an said it was "sensitive security information." If you read the regulations about SSI, then in the event that you send a FOIA to the state agency controlling the information, they have to forward the request and the material to TSA/DHS for a determination that the information is SSI. No such request was ever made (we FOIA TSA/DHS for a copy of the airport authority's request for determination and there was no record of one made). All of this came out in the FOIA suit and we got the tape.
I take down the date and time each time I go thru security and secure a copy of the videotape as a matter of course. I do this mainly to test the system, but if everyone that had an altercation with the TSA did this, the airport authorities would soon tire of the expense and pressure TSA/DHS to change their ways.