New Report Shows Cops Used Ring Cameras to Monitor Black Lives Matter Protests
eff.org
eff.org
So, yes, it's very easy to request video from Ring users. But they still do need to ask. The only way I am going to be genuinely upset about this is if they are able to get video without asking the individual owners.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...
By tapping into “a perceived need for more self-surveillance and by playing on consumer fears about crime and security,” he added, Ring has found “a clever workaround for the development of a wholly new surveillance network, without the kind of scrutiny that would happen if it was coming from the police or government.”
Seems reasonable.
Just some hasty research:
https://www.crresearch.com/blog/2019-package-theft-statistic...
https://www.security.org/resources/stolen-packages-survey/
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/10/package-theft-how-amazon...
> With one single package potentially containing hundreds of dollars worth of goods, package thieves, or “porch pirates,” see an Amazon box as a ripe opportunity to steal. More than one-third (36%) have been a victim of package theft. Of those, 44% have had a package stolen at least twice. Most package theft victims (83%) said they contacted the seller or Amazon immediately after finding out their package had been stolen, while only 13% called the police right away. Overall, very few (11%) said the porch pirate was caught, but thankfully, 73% of package theft victims said they eventually received a refund.
This seems to substantiate that package theft is at the very least a common problem for the people they polled. Whether Ring engineered a national surveillance network on purpose sounds like something that needs to be proven. Just talking about outcomes without examining what (legitimate) problem they're trying to solve does not help inform the public.
The way I end up reading the situation is that some people want to aid the police to find package thieves but they don't want to aid police in finding people suspected of crimes during protests.
Personally, I'll take this debate a step further: I don't think it should be legal to film anyone without their consent because that practice will always be abused by bad actors. Whether you're antagonizing people by recording them in public or you're surveiling a protest. My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property. You could also encourage users to relocate their cameras to positions that only capture the front door vicinity.
I would argue a key root solution here is to for police to prioritize addressing property crime, rather than for private citizens to attempt to address the civic policing concerns on their own - which is what these cameras are doing, at their core.
Leave it on the porch; if one gets stolen every few years, that's still wildly more convenient than rescheduling most deliveries.
Depends on your neighborhood. Some neighborhoods have a 1 in 2 chance. The footage showed that the culprit tailed the USPS delivery person on foot and waited about 15 minutes.
Nowadays (even pre-pandemic) I work from home full-time so there is usually someone here. But actually I used to get stuff delivered to the office even when my wife was at home full-time. There is always the chance she would go out, whereas there was someone down in logistics 8am-6pm.
Derek Chauvin would appreciate that.
That said, the tone of your comment is entirely unconstructive.
The video relevant to Chauvin was recorded by a bystander.
If a technology is developed allowing me to extract video from my hippocampus, will you require me to walk around my life with my eyes closed?
Well that depends highly on what's considered a crime in a protest, who determines that, and whether or not the person in question agrees with the protest.
I have no problem at all catching porch pirates. I have big, big ethical concerns with surveillance footage being used to track public organizers who haven't committed any crimes.
I think these sticky situations are always going to be a problem as long as the Police insist on operating in opposition to the people they claim to want to protect. Police do not feel like they are part of my community, they feel like an upper class of citizen who are permitted to, well, police the community by any means necessary up to and including violence, with basically no oversight.
That's not someone to look to for help. That's someone to fear.
Which would mean no more dashcams. Dashcams are very useful in assigning blame in accidents and helping to determine their causes (not only in cases of human negligence, but even accidents due to mechanical failures/design flaws/etc)
And dashcams do pick up pedestrians on the sidewalk, etc.
No more Google Streetview either, which a lot of people (myself included) find very useful – it lets me familiarise myself with how a place looks before I visit it
If I take my children to the park to play, would I be allowed to take a video of their play to send to my wife? What if a stranger is visible in the distance in the background of the video?
It would do nothing about the immense quantity of CCTV footage of privately owned public places such as shopping malls. And it might even encourage moving public property into private ownership – if the local government aren't allowed to perform CCTV surveillance of a street, but if it were privately owned its private owner could, then transferring public streets into private ownership might be promoted as enhancing public safety/security. Transfers of public streets into private ownership have already happened – in 1999, the Salt Lake City government sold a portion of Main Street to the LDS Church, which has since used its ownership of that section of street to remove protestors from it [0]. But your proposed law might make such moves more popular
[0] http://www.thisweekinmormons.com/2017/02/remember-controvers...
My main concerns are the US becoming a surveillance state (probably first and foremost - not to say we haven't already arrived or are well on our way) and secondarily the way average citizens are allowed to violate each other's privacy. Some can argue that when you are in public you assume zero privacy, but in a world where a local incident that be dealt with at a local level occurs, is recorded, and then goes viral multinationally or where bad actors want to be lazy we start to face issues where this simple understanding of privacy breaks down and has intersections like this one.
Maybe if we could (somehow) create some kind of cultural norm against that?
Maybe the real solution to the problem you raise is cultural rather than legal?
Maybe sometimes journalists and editors need to stop and say "no, we're not running this story, we are going to ignore it, some random nobody doing some offensive thing in some small town that nobody has ever heard of – that isn't news"
A lot of these social media viral things get greatly amplified by the traditional media. Indeed, sometimes the two seem to act in a mutually reinforcing loop – traditional media coverage produces more social media which in turn encourages more coverage from the traditional media
Given the documented failure rate of eyewitnesses to be accurate (worse than AI face recognition), we should also ban relaying something you've seen. That way we can make a just society.
That's a terrible idea. That would make video taping police brutality illegal. Or what if you watched a bank robbery take place and wanted to record the getaway vehicle? Under your ideal law, any hero who catches the criminal would also be a criminal.
This is not explained in ToS?
Show me someone who reads (and fully internalizes) the ToS for their purchases, and I'll show you a liar!
Who cares if you're caught on camera demonstrating in the public square? That's kind of the point: to be seen by as many people as possible.
Nobody in those Minneapolis neighborhoods (neighborhoods that were predominantly populated with african americans) wanted idiots burning down their local grocery stores or causing violence in their neighborhoods. Just like no sane person wanted a bunch of morons to break into the US Capitol building.
If you want to make a claim, own it instead of being coy.
It seems like some preparation for security at large events is necessary? But then the security is a target. Sometimes they try to keep a low profile to avoid this.
> EFF shows that the LAPD asked for video related to “the recent protests"
Given that the protest was against the LAPD's power, more or less, you can imagine that this looks much more retaliatory than it does investigatory.
The ring doorbell footage isn't used for intelligence in advance of an event. It's used for dragnet surveillance after an event has taken place.
My question about such after the fact surveillance: Is there a specific crime that they are investigating, or are they doing an investigation seeking a crime?
Why would I say this? I don't think "the bad thing" of insurrection and lying about election results has been done by both sides, and so I perceive your comment that says "but both sides" to be reductionist, in a biased fashion. Surely, one can condemn an insurrection against democracy without needing to condemn peaceful protests against abuse of power and extrajudicial murder which were coopted by violent antagonists and opportunists.
[0]: https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/07/federal-courthouse-...
The insurrection on the other hand has a hearty crew of deniers / supporters / it didn’t happen but if it did it wasn’t violent. Again, this is still a false equivalency being constructed.
> a hearty crew of deniers / supporters / it didn’t happen but if it did it wasn’t violent
is exactly what we all saw for months regarding Portland's protests.
I've seen it online and I've heard it in person. Exactly that way of talking about it: it didn't happen, but if it did, it would have been justified and/or nonviolent.
I'm not defending the capitol riot, nor am I condemning the BLM protestors as a whole. What I am saying is let's not pretend that either one was a group of exclusively peaceful protestors.
If we accept that there were violent crimes committed, then it follows police can and should be investigating the protests, because there were real crimes and real violence. We can debate whether they should be using Ring camera footage to do it, but some here are treating the mere fact that there's an investigation as an assault on free speech and free assembly. A more likely explanation is that they're investigating the assaults, robberies, and vandalism.
But how is that even relevant? These two events are not comparable and should not be spoken about in the same breath except for to say that the comparison is abhorrent.
The protests were a months-long event that was legitimately protesting abuse of power, regardless of who coopted the frequent, massive, public demonstration to do public damage.
The insurrection at the Capitol wasn't about anything other than disrupting the certification of the election. There can be no doubt about that. This is why well prepared and informed attackers were present and integrated with the crowd, which only existed for one day at one place that only one thing was happening at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United...
From a purely statistical standpoint, they were overwhelmingly peaceful.
From a purely statistical standpoint, WWII was overwhelmingly peaceful and Covid is only a serious risk to the compromised and elderly.
Even CNN, with it's masterful use of euphemistic language could only manage describe the protests last summer as "mostly peaceful" whist standing in front of a burning building.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/513902-cnn-ridiculed-for-...
I attended a DEI seminar at work where someone "said the thing" as he was encouraged to -- but it was the wrong thing apparently -- he was then humiliated by the organizers for wrongthink for about an hour in front of his coworkers.
I have no idea if that's totally normal and legal police behavior, and neither am I commenting on the morality of it - I'm just pointing out that the concern is obviously not "the police are able to observe a public protest", with no other context.
Also, to my knowledge there are very few restrictions on recording people in public.
I don't know what the answer should be. It's all going that way it seems. Cams recordings go to the cloud, it's harder and more expensive to install a system with only local storage. Ease of use is funneling society into an exploitable place.
Bruce Schneier in one of his posts a long time ago exhorted his readers to resist ID'ing people in images. I wonder how he feels now, after the Jan6 incident. Bellingcat and crowd-sourced Twitter are ID'ing rioters. I'm not making the comparison of PP/homeless shelter visitors with the rioters, to be clear.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3689049.stm
> Miss Campbell had objected to the publication of pictures of her leaving drug addiction treatment in early 2001.
> Lord Hope, who voted in favour of Miss Campbell, said on Thursday: "Despite the weight that must be given to the right to freedom of expression that the press needs if it is to play its role effectively, I would hold that there was here an infringement of Miss Campbell's right to privacy that cannot be justified."
(This is about fees, but contains links and references to the previous cases) https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/eu/cases/ECHR...
Now imagine that fight preserved in text. You both can read it again and remember exactly what terrible things have been said. Now imagine you have a visual and audio recording of the fight, and you can feel the wounds anew. There exists this constant inescapable reminder.
You make the comparison to the busybody, I think that comparison is wrong because of the scale. At one time lending books, musics, was not anything publishers would concern themselves about, because one could only loan a copy to one person at a time. Digital copies changed the act of distribution. The recording camera preserves the image more permanently than the busybody ever could, and the vector of distribution is incomparable.
I think the limits of our memories makes us human. Of all the criticisms launched at Zuckerberg, I think the most unfair one is that in his twenties, he said something like, "They trust me, the idiots!" He's a significant figure unlike you or me, but imagine saying or doing something monumentally stupid in your twenties and having it follow you the rest of your life and that's the first thing someone knows about you.
Yes it can.
Since this is an article about a US movement, US police, a US company and US laws, it is fair to downvote contextually wrong information.
> if you leave your front curtains open, I am (legally) allowed to film through your windows from the sidewalk
Well that's obviously situational - filming private property that isn't yours from a public space isn't legal if that's your intent. There's a difference between filming an intersection and happening to capture what happens through a window and pointing a camera across the street at the neighbor's window with the intent to record them. I won't look up every state's laws, but for Georgia:
> It shall be unlawful for: (2) Any person, through the use of any device, without the consent of all persons observed, to observe, photograph, or record the activities of another which occur in any private place and out of public view; ...
"and out of public view" being the key element that suggests if you record from a public place, that the recording is probably legal. If I can see something from a public place, it seems like it's not "out of public view". (I'm not arguing it's right and proper to do so, of course.)
> filming private property that isn't yours from a public space isn't legal if that's your intent.
This is exactly what the "Streissand effect" case was about. Its the legal reasoning behind how the paparazzi operate (How else would we have pictures of what Taylor Swift did at her private 4th of July party?). It is absolutely protected speech to film/photograph private property from a publicly accessible location (if it is a privately owned public location that you are filming FROM, like a mall, then you must stop when asked. You are not required to destroy the material however).
Edit: This is all in reference to US law.
Your childish act like you want to help falls on deaf ears. We know your type.
Maybe it's the fact that these are ostensibly home-protection devices, not public surveillance devices? But really, I could see how you could make the argument that that's a very-narrow-bordering-on-pedantic distinction.
Maybe it's just general Big Brother heebie jeebies.
If it turns out there is coercion in getting these videos then that line of reasoning goes out the window, however.
Here is just one extreme example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_phone_call_scam
People will do stuff without thinking because someone with authority asked them to.
I'm really not sure how the process could be made less intimidating or more transparent than that.
Requesting video for law enforcement is automated to the point that all a police officer has to do (even without any judicial over-site!) is to drag and drop a square over a map on their computer and press a button. This sends the email identifying themselves as with the police and requested video data. Yes, this is voluntary for the person to grant access to that video but research[2] has shown that the VAST number of Americans will submit to a "consent search" simply because the Law Officer is in a position of power and people want to be seen as cooperative.
That is also just 1 way that police can get the footage, they can also easily go to Amazon themselves and get it without notifying the user.
[1]https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kga3/amazon-is-coaching-co...
[2]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/so-called-consent-sear... and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3369844
(edit: update reference number)
Or they are implicitly threatened. What will happen if refused? Will a warrant be obtained for the footage? Is non-consent considered obstruction? Will a local LO come by to try and convince me to consent.
Most people don't know their rights and it not unusual for cops to blatantly disregard civil liberties anyway.
I'd be more than happy to provide my camera's footage of a timeframe when a crime was committed. But, providing real time access to my camera before any crime is committed? That is exactly the big brother scenario I don't want my kids to grow up in.
1) when people buy a doorbell cam they may not expect it to be used by the police in unrelated investigation (not a crime actively committed against the owner of the camera)
2) motive for investigation of a crime like theft is clear-cut, investigation of who was at a protest is not as clear (why do we need to identify who participated in a protest? there shouldn't need to be identification unless there's an actual crime committed)
2) Agreed, however it is not unreasonable to expect to be identified when taking part in a public activity. You could just as easily be identified by police who were there, or via someone's phone footage uploaded to youtube. You have no expectation of privacy in public. Further, I see no reason to expect that the LAPD intends to do anything other than investigate criminal actions with this footage [0].
[0] Although the history of the LAPD would suggest they might use it for harassment.
i think for 2, you've identified why it's a little iffy... yes if you're out in public you should have no expectation of privacy. however the context of where you are matters, and the frame of why the police is trying to identify matters. ideally most people who are participating in a peaceful protest should have no fear of being identified, but that isn't the case rn. in a sense, the surveillance discussion is a proxy for "the police have too much power and not enough oversight"
On this general point we agree.
It should be on a per-crime basis, with specifics.
Emails (with actual incidents and location details redacted) are apparently here https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redact...
I think you can understand that people who have thought about this a lot more than you can realize the problem here.
Case in point, if there was no police presence whatsoever at the Capital protest there's a very real possibility a few senators might be dead right now.
---
> Dear Neighbor,
> Ring is contacting you on behalf of Detective Alex Giron of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is seeking videos recorded between [redacted], in connection with the investigation of an incident (Incident #[redacted]) near your home.
> A message from Detective Giron:
> Hello Ring neighbors. We are looking for any video that may help us identify a suspect that [redacted]. Any information would be appreciated.
> Sharing your video recordings with the Los Angeles Police Department is entirely optional and will not provide the department with access to your Ring device(s). If you choose to share your Ring video recordings, the Los Angeles Police Department will also receive your email address and street address. Click the button below to review and share select Ring video recordings.
> If you do not wish to participate, simply ignore this request and nothing will be shared with the Los Angeles Police Department, including whether or not this request was sent to you. If you do not wish to receive requests like these in the future, click here to opt out.
---
The request then gives some contact info for the detective in case the recipient has any questions.
I see nothing objectionable about this request. It looks to be entirely opt-in. It protects the privacy of Ring users while also making it convenient for citizens to help the police solve crimes. That the EFF is making a big deal of this only serves to reduce my respect for them. I now worry that they're going down the same path as the ACLU and SPLC.
1. https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redact...
There's a lot more information available here than would be on, for example YouTube. The most salient is that YouTube lacks timestamping. So a video pulled from YT might not be credible evidence because there's no way to prove when the video was recorded. It can also be difficult or impossible to determine where a video was recorded.
My contrast, Ring contains all of the metadata necessary for video evidence to be admissible in court. There's all the who/what/when/where information along with chain of custody guarantees.
The admissibility of evidence in court sounds like an issue related to minor details in the implementation of recording technology at the user end. But the final link that is really impactful is when citizens cooperate with police.
You are drastically oversimplifying the situation here. The goal of a protest is not to be seen, or to be harassed by police. The goal is to effect change, and surveillance is a tool of the powerful that the United States has long had a healthy skepticism for.
I'm not going to go and complain about it because I'm not living in Europe, and it's not really my place to tell you that you're being over-surveilled. But if you're pointing at London and saying, "don't worry, we already have this" -- bad example, that doesn't make me feel better. I don't want the US to have the surveillance omnipresence that London has, that would be a negative outcome for me. I don't think London's situation should be treated like it's normal. To be blunt, I think your city has a over-surveillance problem, albeit not one that it's my responsibility to solve or draw attention to.
GP's analogy is gross and hyperbolic, it's not the one I would use. But there are some concerns I have here. A better analogy would be something like Baltimore's (thankfully ending) drone program, which creeps me the heck out even as I acknowledge that it's not obviously an invasion of a private space. The point of a protest is often to be seen, but not necessarily to be surveilled in that level of detail, and there are concerns that people should have about police departments paying special attention and putting special effort into monitoring those protests.
Gee I wonder why. Maybe to find all the people who were burning down buildings, looting, destroying property, throwing rocks and other projectiles, and stealing?
There are many people who actively think it is okay for these protests to be violent and destructive because of what they are fighting for. But then these same people will ostracized people on the right who have wild protests.
It's like either violence and destruction is wrong when you're fighting for what you believe in, or it is right. People do often feels like breaking the law is okay when it is for their movement, but when it is for a movement they don't personally agree with it suddenly is not okay.
But this is exactly why protests, especially larger scale ones need to be monitored.
We have seen protests in many areas in America where destructive mobs start to descend on neighbourhoods at night to "protest". They will use things that make nose such as horns and cowbells and go through these neighbourhoods at night and cause a lot of conflict with the people in the neighborhoods.
I can completely understand why police are getting this footage, because oftentimes a lot of petty crimes gets reported along the path a "protest" took place.
You can find plenty of examples of these protests through neighbourhoods where someone has a Trump sign or American flag. Often those properties got some kind of vandalism or at the very least a mob chanting outside their house.
While it may seem controversial what the police are doing, it seems completely reasonable to request camera footage from people as some of the people in the protest committed crimes at some point during the day and that footage could be used to help identify them.
Protesting is one thing, but someone committing a crime should still face the consequences regardless of what they are fighting for.
Unfortunately if the police were requesting footage from protests that happened from Trump supporters I doubt we would see any news articles about it.
This was literally the entire point of the protests. Way to miss the point.
Police (and the FBI) requested footage of the Trump supporters' protest at the Capitol that left one police officer dead.
There were LOTS of news articles about it.
Please don't use strawman arguments like that.
What about the murderous right-wing protest in Charlottesville? Police and FBI also requested video, and it was widely reported. Does that count?
Other examples include the anti-abortion protests, protests defending Confederate statues, and White supremacy protests if you're really that out of the loop.
Left-wing protestors are 10X as likely to be arrested than the right. That inequality upsets you too, right?
Also you decided to focus on a single line of my post and your argument is a strawman. If you're going to engage in a discussion at least be genuine about it rather than letting your political bias derail a good conversation we could have had.
> Left-wing protestors are 10X as likely to be arrested than the right. That inequality upsets you too, right?
And don't use stupid stats like this. This does not upset me because you are inferring causation from statistical data that supports your bias. I could draw a different conclusion and say that the left are 10x as violent and thus arrested 10x as much. However I am not going to infer the cause of such stats as I don't know that is the reason, nor do you.
You should try and be a bit more open minded and not let your bias affect your ability to look at statistics online. Just because a stat says something, doesn't mean it immediately supports your cause. It may just mean further research is needed to determine what is the actual cause.
PROTESTing the outcome of the 2020–21 U.S. election was the stated goal of the murderous Capitol protest.
The self-proclaimed protests that prove you wrong are suddenly not protests anymore? Once you learn what a strawman is, google "moving the goalposts."
I provided two examples where murderous right-wing protests were monitored and recorded by police, completely contradicting the idea that "I doubt we would see any news articles about it."
You've provided zero examples to support that blind speculation.
don't use stupid stats like this
Explanations that rest solely on the conservative politics and culture of the police...neglect the ways political systems, identities and organizations shape interactions between police and protesters
I sympathize with police wanting to identify bad actors within protests, as they really can terrorize an entire neighborhood and often undermine whatever just cause was being fought for.
I also think the road to the surveillance state will always be paved with ‘good reasons.’
I think criminals need to be held accountable.
I think endless footage of protestors could be used to at some point retaliate against people who are peacefully protesting. This has already happened to people who peacefully attended Trump Rallies, I see no reason why it couldn’t just as easily be used to discriminate against BLM organizers if that movement ever falls out of favor.
So I am conflicted.
Mostly I am still sad we’ve had so much violence in our protests over the 8 months or so.
[HomeKit Secure Video]: https://www.the-ambient.com/guides/apple-homekit-secure-vide...
My concern is that the expanded subpoena powers of the police allow for excessive amounts of parallel construction. Say (hypothetically - this obviously isn't what is happening here) a cop wants hit someone with as many traffic violations as possible because of a personal grudge. If they found an unrelated crime near an area where the person typically drives, they could then subpoena all the Ring videos from that area and use them to go after the person they were originally interested in.
The problem is that when you grant police power in one case, they get to keep that power and use it whenever they want.
I think this is exactly what EFF should be doing. It's why I support them.
Or do you think that a chilling effect is OK as long as some non-police agree to each search?
Please explain.
Yes, because I value personal liberties.
It seems like they're actually ignoring laws which are supposed to put checks and balances on their ability to acquire surveillance data.