Footage and retention

The facility observation network is not operating yet. This page describes how it will handle video when it does, published in advance so it can be held against us rather than written after the fact.

No central archive

PACN will not hold footage. Video stays at the edge with the operator who recorded it, on their equipment, under their control. What PACN holds is the site registry and the event index — where cameras are, what their declared subject is, and that something was recorded at a given time.

That distinction is the whole design. A central archive is a target: it can be subpoenaed, seized, breached, or quietly repurposed by whoever runs it next. An index of what exists, held separately from the material itself, cannot be any of those things. There is nothing in it to take.

What PACN will hold

• The site registry. Facility, declared subject, operator, coverage dates, and the basis for placement. Published before a camera operates, not after.
• The event index. That a recording exists, when, and at which registered site. Not the recording.
• Nothing about bystanders. People pass through frame at any public building. Nothing further happens to them: no indexing, no matching, no record tied to a person.

What plate indexing will and will not cover

Where plates are indexed at a PACN site, the index covers government fleet vehicles only — marked units, municipal vehicles, state plates. Private plates are never indexed. That is the exact inverse of commercial plate recognition, which indexes everyone and exempts nobody.

Faces are never indexed, at any site, for any reason.

Retention

Each operator sets retention for their own footage within a published maximum, and the retention period for every site appears in the registry alongside it. A reader can see how long material at a given site is kept without asking anyone.

PACN cannot extend an operator's retention, cannot request their footage as a matter of routine, and holds no copy that would survive their deletion of it.

Why publish this before building it

Every surveillance system in the record on this site was built first and explained afterward, if at all. Policies were written once the hardware was on the pole and the data was already accumulating, at which point objecting means asking someone to turn off something that already works for them.

Publishing the design first inverts that. If any of the above is wrong, the time to say so is now, while it is still a document. Tell us.