I am a self-hosted partisan, so I obviously avoid Ring. But this article feels disingenuous in implying that there is something uniquely nefarious about Ring here, aside from perhaps the relative ease by which the authorities are able to request video. The police also can and do ask those who run self-hosted surveillance systems for video of events; I know because I've been asked before for video from mine.
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.
Owners have to op into "Neighborhood Watch" for their neighborhoods but they are opting into package thieves, not protest monitoring. And it's all or nothing, not a per video request.
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.”
> 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.
> My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property
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
Transferring things like roads into private property for no reason at all seems dubious and certainly circumvents the spirit of what I'm going after.
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
It's most certainly behavioral. I can look at the George Floyd case and say, "Here's an instance where whipping out your camera phone is beneficial" but the vast majority of cases are people just trying to embarrass each other via the metaphorical internet army. 4chan, when I was a kid, had a saying that went "not your personal army" that was organic from what I could tell and for precisely this purpose. I don't think you'll get that level of awareness out of post-2007 internet denizens.
> I don't think it should be legal to film anyone without their consent ... My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property.
Yeap, I definitely understood the argument, and it's quite valid. What I took issue with was the dismissive tone that it takes rather than adding to or building onto the discourse.
I think the point it adds to the discourse, regardless of tone, is that your suggestion of outlawaing public recordings is very much at odds with the past twenty years or more of experience, where we've seen that public recordings of the misdeeds of those in power are often the only way that such abuses are recognized as happening. Outlawing the things that make that possible is one of the easiest ways to make sure that such behavior never gets punished, as evidenced by how many times we've seen that police "forget" to turn their body cameras on, or "lose" the footage.
Not only that, in Seattle - Amazon's home city - package theft is seen as a significant problem. So, I would imagine that deterring package theft is a real concern and a real quality of life issue for many Amazon ICs.
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.
Or, don’t “deliver” a package by just leaving it out in the open on the person’s property somewhere. It’s always seemed bizarre to me that this counts as delivery in the USA. We should normalize bigger and more secure mailboxes or require an actual person to be available to receive a package.
Indeed, in Europe it is normal that people be home to receive the package. There are alternatives, but leaving it in front of the door is not one of them.
What about people without doormen or stay-at-home spouses? If you're single and go to work daily, having to be home is the biggest headache pre-pandemic.
At my old job, I used to get stuff delivered to my office. It was a big office building and we had a logistics department with a loading bay out the back. A lot of other people at my office used to do the same thing. Until work announced that they were getting sick of handling personal deliveries, and from now on only work-related deliveries would be allowed. (I think they didn't mind in the beginning handling the occasional personal delivery, but then it escalated in volume to the point that they had to put a stop to it.)
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.
Are there any Amazon lockers in your area? I usually drop by the University which has a staffed Amazon store since it's a distribution center and packages get there a day early usually. There's a series of lockers at a near by 7-11.
I had 2700 dollars of computer equipment stolen from my porch (behind a gate). I used the camera footage to get the police to write a report that NewEgg needed to refund me.
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.
> My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property.
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.
Probably started that way, because it's a real problem. But then some enterprising DA understood the potential, and some BizDev ppl heard that lovely Kah Ching ringing in their ears.
The rest is history.
That's certainly a possible explanation based on speculation and you'd probably have fanfare on a technology forum for warning against it. The problem is that nobody has determined that has happened (unless I'm missing something) and it was asserted as fact anyway.
> My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property.
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.
> 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.
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.
So the request here is that Amazon makes it more possible to be more specific about what use you allow for the cameras and give users flexibility to not be all-or-nothing.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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; ...
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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]
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
"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?))
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.
>LAPD should tell the public how many hours of surveillance footage it gathered around these protests, and why.
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?
Chaos is only a problem when the right causes it. The chaos under discussion was born of justifiable anger and should be supported by morally conscious citizens. /s
While you're being downvoted, you're also not wrong. I have seen lots of people across reddit in large subreddits who are highly upvoted saying exactly this and not in a sarcastic manner. You also see it throughout Twitter.
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.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against.
I mean that's a bit of a silly comparison is it not? You're comparing a capital being stormed to a protest through a neighbourhood that I am referring to.
That protest wasn't a protest? Let me know where the goalposts end up.
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?
Again you're using a strawman. Please stop replying to me. You are now comparing a riot where people got killed to a protest. Again, this is not what I am talking about nor is it what the OP's article is talking about. They are talking about a regular protest, not one where someone got killed or the capital was taken over.
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 removal of the statue of General Lee was the stated goal of the murderous Unite the Right protest.
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
The stats that you didn't read already made this argument for you:
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
...but--my confirmation bias! How embarrassing, I can understand why you had to dodge the question.
I thought that after 1/6, the consensus shifted to be that "burning down buildings, looting, destroying property, throwing rocks and other projectiles, and stealing" are again _not_ acceptable forms of protest?
He didn't say the protests were wrong. He talked about policemen doing their jobs and tracking down the crime. I would think that peaceful protesters would support this, as the criminals ended up tarring all protesters with the same brush and de-legitimizing the point the protests were trying to make.
And no, I don't think that someone who is mad about crime is the reason that the protests happened. As I recall, it was because a policeman murdered a black, not because someone said that criminals should be found and arrested. An original objective was to ensure that Chauvin et al. faced justice for their crimes, so punishing those who commit other crimes seems consistent with the principles behind the protests.
It is ridiculous to characterize criminals as "the people standing up to the murders". Cwhiz clearly stated that his problem was with the crinimals, not the protesters. You have gone past an uncharitable reading to responding to points he simply did not make.
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.
After reading this article and the comments here on HN, I wonder if anyone else has thought about the presence of Smarthome devices that are compatible with [HomeKit Secure Video], how the police agencies would have pursued video from those cameras, and if they would have made the additional effort to request that video in the first place?
I hate to see this. There are so many legitimate causes for the EFF to fight for and they choose this? The police trying to identify people who turned a legitimate protest into riots filled with looting and criminal mischief? It seems to me the police are just trying to identify the bad actors, nothing more. I support the EFF but this effort is misguided and the article is disingenuous.
The government getting around regulations of state surveillance by using private equipment owned by individuals but likely without their knowledge in partnership with large corporations to monitor the public sounds like exactly the kind of thing I want the EFF to use my donations to fight so that it does not become more pervasive. The fact that today it was used for something you do not object today is just temporary. The EFF looks down the path to what this means for the future and fights to prevent that.
> It seems to me the police are just trying to identify bad actors
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.
Society is better off when police show probable cause before getting data of private citizens. In the article, EFF highlights two cases where police made unspecific requests for data of large swaths of people. Such requests have a chilling effect on our society.
I think this is exactly what EFF should be doing. It's why I support them.
Do you think the existence of a chilling effect is good reason not to do something? Policing literally anything in any way causes a chilling effect. The mere existence of a chilling effect is not an argument against doing something.
Ring should not help contribute to the surveillance economy. Once a surveillance mechanism is in place it will be abused. There is no exception to this.
It's terrible that the police are getting access to a bunch of cameras pointed at the street, but not very notable that they're using the tools we're giving them to do the job we're telling them to do.
> EFF and ACLU of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the City and County of San Francisco on behalf of three protesters, asking the court to require the city to follow its Surveillance Technology Ordinance and prohibit the SFPD from acquiring, borrowing, or using non-city networks of surveillance cameras absent prior approval from the city’s Board of Supervisors.
It seems like they're actually ignoring laws which are supposed to put checks and balances on their ability to acquire surveillance data.
Why is this a problem? If customers are sharing footage either voluntarily or in response to a legal request driven by a court order, then I don't think anything wrong is happening. Filming public spaces is totally legal. And those acting illegally outside the bounds of what is allowed under the right to assembly should be brought to justice. There's nothing wrong with that. It's unclear to me why the EFF is even picking this fight.
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.