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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Public demonstrations are by definition public. They are designed to be highly visible.

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.

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Surely the controversy is that the police requested the doorbell videos of private citizens, and further, the suspicion is that they are looking for anything, rather than investigating a specific crime. That's what the first couple paragraphs say.

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.

People with home surveillance cameras can give the footage to whomever they want, including the police, so long as that footage was obtained lawfully.

Not if it contains other people's space they can't.

A public protest is, by definition, in public. There isn't what the Supreme Court would call a "reasonable expectation of privacy".

Yes, however a surveilance camera cannot simply be pointed in the street to record everything.

isn't that essentially what a ring camera is, assuming your door faces the street? if so, where are all the legal challenges?

Ring cameras don't have continuous recording, they will only record on motion events. To my knowledge, there is also no way to set up alerting and capture preferences separately (ie if the camera detects motion and starts recording, you are getting alerted unless you turn off alerts for the camera entirely). If someone set their camera to record a public street they would literally get DOSed with alerts, so this is not what people do.

Also, to my knowledge there are very few restrictions on recording people in public.

Of course it can: https://www.weatherbug.com/traffic-cam/

I feel like replies in this subthread that asserts: "a person has no expectation of privacy in public space therefore recording a person in that space is unsurprising, expected even", is flippant and pat. The existence of the camera changes the space and the behavior of the subject. If you would imagine your Ring camera faces a Planned Parenthood entrance, or a homeless shelter. You've recorded a woman entering PP. Several people come and go at the homeless shelter. There's no other context for these images. I would not argue that these are not public spaces, but the people making entries and exits here are in probably in a part of their life needing the most protection of privacy. The camera's existence now provides a record, one that may live on without the subjects' knowledge. That record + ML + facial recognition + $future_tech will sketch a different future for these people, vs. one without the recording. Surely you can see that?

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.

I don't see how you can have an expectation of privacy when moving through the street and entering / exiting buildings. How is this morally different than if a busybody lived across the street from PP and make a habit of keeping an eye on the door so (she?) could gossip about her observations at book club. This behavior is most certainly rude, but legal. It seems strange to argue this is immoral but hold the underlying crimes being recorded as immoral. The anti-reporting stance seems to be a veiled argument that the entire law is illegitimate.

> I don't see how you can have an expectation of privacy when moving through the street and entering / exiting buildings.

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...

I'm not litigating to redline pockets of public space. The first principle I'm arguing from is that our pasts should be palimpsests which should be allowed to recede with time further into the past. Imagine a terrible argument you had with someone. Time passes, the wrong and hurt has attenuated, you have changed or he has changed and you've both forgotten a bit. You could be friends again if you wanted.

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.

The replies here are neither flippant nor pat. The phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy" comes directly from a supreme court ruling on the topic of privacy in public spaces. Whether or not you think people should be entitled to privacy in a public space, currently the law in the United States provides no such protection.

The pat and flippant part is: well the USSC ruled thus, so thus, and thus shut up you, it's decided.

> Yes, however a surveilance camera cannot simply be pointed in the street to record everything.

Yes it can.

You could make a better argument if, instead of saying "you cannot do this" when it is both physically and legally possible to do so, you said why you think U.S. law should disallow continuous recording in public spaces. @devchix below has not been downvoted because they make such a case.

I'm unsure why you're being downvoted, it's illegal to film other people's space in Germany, so it seems certainly possible to me that this is the case in parts of America as well.

It's being downvoted because the US, with some very narrow exceptions, does not recognize a right to not be filmed in public (or filmed in private if the filming location is from public property). As gross as it is, if you leave your front curtains open, I am (legally) allowed to film through your windows from the sidewalk.

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.

> (or filmed in private if the filming location is from public property).

> 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; ...

I'm not sure that citation reads as strongly to me.

"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.)

The legal term is "reasonable expectation of privacy" (per the supreme court) and sadly it is not a boolean, it is an 'it depends' answer.

> 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.

The laws around recordings can vary widely from one jurisdiction to the next.

I would be more than happy to send my footage to the cops. Ideally for those "mostly peaceful" protests, we can catch the people who are the reason why it is not a "completely peaceful" protest.

Theres a reason protestors where mask. We have a history of those on the left being gunned down by those in authority.

Your childish act like you want to help falls on deaf ears. We know your type.

That's honestly not a bad point, but it doesn't help me shake the skeeziness I feel about this story.

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.

The article isn't clear what is meant by "request" here. If they are merely asking private citizens to give them access to the video, and those citizens have a choice to do so or not, then it's essentially the same as anybody just uploading phone footage to youtube.

If it turns out there is coercion in getting these videos then that line of reasoning goes out the window, however.

Very true. And maybe that's where my discomfort is coming from; the potential for police obtaining this footage through coercion or even in secret is deeply disturbing to me.

When a couple of large guys with badges and guns are at your door asking for video, it would take a very self-confident person to say "no." There's certainly adequate plausible deniability of coercion, but it would be a very different feeling than if, for example, a reporter were asking, or an insurance company investigator, etc.

Or even just the police on the phone vs. the police at your door.

Any time someone identifies as a cop, people will do what you tell them to.

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.

From what I can gather looking at the emails shared in another thread, Ring was the go-between for the police and explicitly stated that sharing was optional. It also gives the detective's name and an incident number.

I'm really not sure how the process could be made less intimidating or more transparent than that.

I think the Big Brother heebie jeebies are justified. Amazon gives Police officers a script and coaching[1] to use to try to endorse their surveillance products and to maximize participation in the "Ring as Big Brother feature".

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)

> people want to be seen as cooperative.

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.

This is a good point and raises a good point: There's a big difference between cooperating to provide footage of a crime vs providing a surveillance tool.

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.

The current zeitgeist seems to be that the 'good' protests should be completely unmonitored and unrestricted, and the 'bad' protests should be tightly monitored and heavily sanctioned. The same is of course true for speech.

I think to call that feeling "current" is to be a little ignorant of history; people have always held double standards for their own causes. We're humans, after all.

I never said it was 'novel' or 'recent', though it does seem to be more prolific these days.

The current zeitgeist seems to be that peaceful protestors should be left alone and treated like the law abiding citizens they are, and that violent protestors should be punished accordingly.

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.

The question is how you know they're peaceful in advance. Do you just trust them? Often, many of the protesters don't know what's going to happen either. (Some do, and use the crowd as cover.)

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.

This isn't an "in advance" though. From TFA:

> 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.

Sure, but that's not really relevant to the conversation.

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?

You're not capturing all of the hypocrites (on both sides) who only care when the bad thing is done by the other team.

I think this sort of false equality being constructed between peaceful protests against abuse of power and a seditionist insurrection against certifying election results is quite abhorrent, and your comment is certainly trying to normalize that equivalency by my reading.

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.

The equivalency is not being drawn between the people who stormed the capitol and the people who were peacefully holding Black Lives Matter signs last summer. The equivalency is being drawn between the people who stormed the capitol and the people who smashed in the door to a federal courthouse and threw fireworks inside. [0]

[0]: https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/07/federal-courthouse-...

Which is being defended and condoned by who? That is clearly a criminal act and should be punished.

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.

This:

> 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.

> What I am saying is let's not pretend that either one was a group of exclusively peaceful protestors

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.

All of these protests, the BLM ones over the summer and the one on January 6th in DC were "mostly peaceful" by any definition of mostly and peaceful. Only the BLM protests got the "mostly peaceful" treatment from the media.

The protests in 2020 were the largest protest movements in US history:

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, 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.

Why make such a weak strawman? If you have a point to make, do it with information and not ridiculous analogies

What is the strawman? Using statistics in this way is meaningless. Hell, I'd bet by area the capitol hill riots were mostly peaceful. The capitol complex is a large place and I'm certain 51% could be defined as peaceful under a similar definition that burning neighborhoods were this summer.

> The current zeitgeist seems to be that peaceful protestors should be left alone and treated like the law abiding citizens they are

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-...

That reminds me of the way my company and others frequently urge employees to bring their "whole selves to work", meaning of course, bring your whole self to work so long as your whole self espouses views that are confined to an exceedingly narrow window as defined by the NY Times Editorial Page.

"Speak your truth" and "say the thing" are other fake axioms from these people.

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.

What are they encouraging with bringing your "whole self", talking politics at the office or wearing t-shirts with slogans, stuff like that?

And "good" protests are the ones you agree with.

Police surveillance of constitutionally protected activities have a chilling effect that might prevent people from exercising their rights and can therefore be illegal.

Police regularly monitor protests, and frequently use footage from security cameras in investigating and prosecuting crimes. I'm not seeing a problem here on those grounds.

I see a couple gray areas:

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)

1) The article is unclear what is meant by "request", but the impression is that the police are merely asking private citizens for access to video which they are under no obligation to provide. If that is the case, then I see nothing wrong here.

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.

agreed on #1

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"

> "the police have too much power and not enough oversight"

On this general point we agree.

I disagree. The police should not be asking for blanket surveillance in the first place.

It should be on a per-crime basis, with specifics.

The emails suggest this is actually the case: owners were emailed with a specific request linked to a specific incident number and a message from a named detective. They were free to choose whether to share or not and given that I'm sure residents could spot the BLM protest connection I'm sure some were more willing to share than others.

Emails (with actual incidents and location details redacted) are apparently here https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redact...

You don't see a problem when a constitutionally protected activity summons a police brigade? What exactly is police doing watching people exercise their rights?

I think you can understand that people who have thought about this a lot more than you can realize the problem here.

Protests are monitored by police because mobs are a very real threat whenever a large group of people assemble for a cause. The mere existence of police surveillance in a public demonstration is not at all unreasonable in my opinion.

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.

And let's be fair, it's not uncommon especially at larger protests for their to be conflict that requires police intervention. Just like how police forces will have the bad people that bring down the rest of the force, groups of protestors also face similar problems. Different people in the protest have different perspectives and ideas of what makes a good protest and what is effective. Some people think violence and destruction is needed and often these people have mob-like effect. If one person starts doing it often that spreads through the group and more people are breaking laws. Without some law and order in there things get out of hand pretty quick as we have seen in many protests in America, but also across the world.

The police weren't using Ring to do any sort of blanket surveillance of protesters. They were investigating crimes. All requests from the LAPD referenced specific case numbers. See page 22 of this pdf[1] for an example. I've transcribed one:

---

> 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...

And yet if the police weren't present, these very same protestors would likely accuse the police of "institutional racism" for failing to protect the protestors.

You have evidence of this happening in the past?

This isn't simply police surveillance; this is citizen surveillance using a common technology, and the citizens are voluntarily offering information to the police. They could've just as easily uploaded it to YouTube.

Something can be technically legal but also have a devastating effect on civil liberties.

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.

I wasn't focusing on what's technically illegal. I just don't want the conversation mixing up police with citizen surveillance.

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.

"Who cares if someone roofies your drink? Your goal was to hook up with somebody anyway." /s

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.

speaking from London here. Clearly news of the invention of CCTV has only recently spread across the pond. It's pretty much a fact of life here that everything you do is being surveilled by multiple lenses. Maybe in the us the distribution of power makes it more likely that such information will be abused? (and btw usa data privacy laws is inferior to european law, stricter privacy laws=less surveillance. (Maybe its to compensate for more CCTV?))

Don't EUs privacy laws stop applying to UK since brexit?

I don't know if this is a good point. It's not that people like me are just discovering that this is how London operates; I knew how London operates, and I don't want to be in that environment. London is incredibly surveilled, constantly.

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.

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