New Report Shows Cops Used Ring Cameras to Monitor Black Lives Matter Protests

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/new-eff-report-shows-cops-used-ring-cameras-monitor-black-lives-matter-protests

by DiabloD3 • 5 years ago

172 139 5 years ago

nostromo2• 5 years ago

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.

nickff2• 5 years ago

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.

ketzo4• 5 years ago

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.

tw04• 5 years ago

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.

tharne5• 5 years ago

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.

worker767424• 5 years ago

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

happytoexplain• 5 years ago

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.

tharne5• 5 years ago

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

test6554• 5 years ago

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.

ketzo4• 5 years ago

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.

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 5 years ago

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.

fitblipper2• 5 years ago

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)

stefan_2• 5 years ago

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

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 5 years ago

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.

tharne5• 5 years ago

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.

threatofrain2• 5 years ago

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.

ropeladder• 5 years ago

"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.

marshmallow_12• 5 years ago

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?))

cwhiz• 5 years ago

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?

bitwize• 5 years ago

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

Fogest4• 5 years ago

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.

bhauer• 5 years ago

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.

conception• 5 years ago

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.

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.”

d1zzy• 5 years ago

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.

Seems reasonable.

kodah6• 5 years ago

When someone says, "perceived" I usually receive that as, "someone thinks they need this but they don't"

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.

goatcode2• 5 years ago

they are opting into package thieves, not protest monitoring

This is not explained in ToS?

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

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.

option• 5 years ago

nothing wrong if police asks user’s permission to view the video.

7174n6• 5 years ago

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.

basilgohar• 5 years ago

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.

elil172• 5 years ago

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.

mleonhard3• 5 years ago

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.

darawk3• 5 years ago

No, society is better off when police don't have the right to take data without consent unless they have probable cause. They have consent here.

dkdk8283• 5 years ago

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.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

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.

elil172• 5 years ago

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.

whiddershins• 5 years ago

I hate the panopticon.

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.

dave_aiello• 5 years ago

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?

[HomeKit Secure Video]: https://www.the-ambient.com/guides/apple-homekit-secure-vide...

thraway12• 5 years ago

Is there a Discord that routinely discusses issues like this?

known• 5 years ago

And in India, Disha Ravi, 21, is facing sedition charges, accused of sharing a Google Doc about the farmers protest with Greta Thunberg

https://archive.is/B1L8i

New Report Shows Cops Used Ring Cameras to Monitor Black Lives Matter Protests

Related Stories