Things I've wondered about the Skytrain

BLOG POST posted on November 12, 2011 by infil00p

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Recently, I sent a series of four FOI requests to Translink asking about four different areas. The areas are as follows:

• All information regarding the Compass Pass, namely the Privacy Assessment.
• All information about CCTV upgrades on the Expo, Millenium and Canada Lines
• All information about CCTV retention on the Expo, Millenium and Canada Lines
• Information about the Telecommunications Equipment that allows you to use your cellphone on the Canada Line, and whether it can be turned off like it was in San Francisco.

I got back two links, one of which that does not work, to information about the vendor of the Compass Pass, which you can find online here. The Privacy Assessment for the new Compass Pass isn't done yet, and I will have to submit a new request for it. However, I did get information on the other three, and in one case I got information back in Full Colour!

In short, the video on the old Expo and Millenium Lines are only kept for 7 days, while the video on the Canada Line is kept for 30 days. This is due to the fact that the Transit Police requested this for the Canada Line, and it was not the standard policies. Also, it appears that Transit Police can watch any camera on the system in real time, which does mean that when you are on the system, the Skypigs could always be watching you.

Finally, as far as my OpBART related question, I only had a single e-mail come back about this. The equipment on the Canada Line is owned and operated by Telus, who rents it to Rogers and Bell so they can also have service on the Canada Line. Furthermore, the only way this can get shut down in an emergency is by the RCMP, not the VPD or the Transit Police. This is a technicality, and I'm sure that the VPD and Transit Police could easily call the RCMP to do it for them, but it makes sense since this is telecommunications and that is a federal jurisdiction. Of course, the fact that the Transit Police AND the RCMP have to agree to cut it off does add an additional step that the BART police in SF didn't have to go through.

Anyway, here are the three documents. I'm going to keep an eye on the Compass Pass, since the new RFID gates could be used to track someone all throughout the system and we all know that once the police get new tools, such as these databases, they will be abused.

• translink_cameras.pdf - SHA1SUM: e56fdfdd17ef29fbe2e4ab5015edfbdea08ef3e3 - 12 MB
• translink_retention.pdf - SHA1SUM: 39f5c8842bbad94bd49c46460de3e76346fb0333 - 22 MB
• translink_op_bart.pdf - SHA1SUM: f051d67266413686e4f081fd8f7fb73ef2a45fc4 - 871 KB