Ring, Flock Safety Join Forces To Expand Law Enforcement Surveillance Networks

from the giving-the-authoritarians-exactly-what-they-want dept

I’m not saying this unholy matrimony wouldn’t have occurred under any other regime, but it’s definitely the sort of thing that plays well with the Oval Office while it’s housing Donald Trump.

Both Flock Safety and Ring have weathered plenty of negative press, largely because they were doing the sort of thing they’re going back to doing now: turning private cameras into extensions of government surveillance networks.

Flock Safety began by pitching its products to some of the most secure people in the nation: wealthy white homeowners. Flock Safety became just another way for gated communities and HOAs to keep a tab on residents while also casting a skeptical eye towards anyone (or any vehicles) those running the cameras didn’t immediately recognize.

Then it invited cops to play with its equipment and install some of their own. It went from keeping black people out of white neighborhoods to becoming a tool to be wielded by cops as they searched for a woman who had terminated a pregnancy — not because cops cared about her well-being, but at the behest of her apparently abusive boyfriend. Law enforcement investigators and officials claimed the nationwide searches for the person seeking an abortion was all about finding her safely. Even after internal documents revealed it was actually about finding her in hopes of pressing charges for violating Texas’s abortion ban, Flock Safety has continued to criticize journalists for reporting on this apparent abuse of its camera network.

Ring democratized front door surveillance, for better or worse. It gave people a cheap option for keeping crime off their literal doorstep. But it also invited cops along for the ride, giving them free cameras to hand out to citizens with the implied suggestion a free camera would result in warrantless access to footage any time the cops felt like looking at it.

Ring finally rolled back its carte blanche cop access and demanded a bit more paperwork from law enforcement before allowing it to raid its cloud storage. Flock Safety — in response to congressional criticism — made vague statements about limiting abuse of camera access by law enforcement. Of course, those words were meaningless, as Senator Ron Wyden recently pointed out in a letter to Flock Safety CEO Garret Langley:

In August, 9 News in Denver revealed that Flock granted U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) access to its systems, enabling the agency to search data collected by Flock’s cameras, including using the National Lookup Tool. Officials from Flock subsequently confirmed to my office in September that the company provided access to CBP, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Secret Service, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service as part of a pilot earlier this year. Flock told my office that during the pilot, which has now ended, CBP and HSI conducted approximately 200 and 175 searches respectively. Flock also confirmed that itmisled its state and local law enforcement customers, telling my office that “due to internal miscommunication, customers were inaccurately informed that Flock did not have any relationship with DHS, while pilot programs with sub-agencies of DHS were briefly active.”

The abortion investigation described above is also mentioned in the letter, which closes with Ron Wyden telling the company that no one should trust what Flock Safety says because when it’s not misleading people, it’s both incapable and unwilling to place meaningful restrictions on law enforcement access to its nationwide network of cameras:

The privacy protection that Flock promised to Oregonians — that Flock software will automatically examine the reason provided by law enforcement officers for terms indicating an abortion- or immigration-related search — is meaningless when law enforcement officials provide generic reasons like “investigation” or “crime.” Likewise, Flock’s filters are meaningless if no reason for a search is provided in the first place. While the search reasons collected by Flock, obtained by press and activists through open records requests, have occasionally revealed searches for immigration and abortion enforcement, these are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Presumably, most officers using Flock to hunt down immigrants and women who have received abortions are not going to type that in as the reason for their search. And, regardless, given that Flock has washed its hands of any obligation to audit its customers, Flock customers have no reason to trust a search reason provided by another agency.

I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable, and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them.

And that is all an extremely lengthy preamble to this unwelcome bit of news, reported here by Scharon Harding of Ars Technica:

Law enforcement agencies will soon have easier access to footage captured by Amazon’s Ring smart cameras. In a partnership announced this week, Amazon will allow approximately 5,000 local law enforcement agencies to request access to Ring camera footage via surveillance platforms from Flock Safety.

[…]

According to Flock’s announcement, its Ring partnership allows local law enforcement members to use Flock software “to send a direct post in the Ring Neighbors app with details about the investigation and request voluntary assistance.” Requests must include “specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated,” and users can look at the requests anonymously, Flock said.

[…]

Flock said its local law enforcement users will gain access to Ring Community Requests in “the coming months.”

We absolutely didn’t need these two major players in the private surveillance market to team up and offer expanded access to US law enforcement — especially when so much of US law enforcement is focused on the “criminal” acts listed in Wyden’s letter: abortions and immigration.

According to Ars Technica’s reporting, Ring is the most active participant in this new surveillance dragnet. First, Ring rolled back its promise to limit law enforcement access to Ring footage by partnering with Axon, a heavy-hitter in the US body camera marketplace. Then it decided to court one of the rivals in its own marketplace, which means both companies can still pretend to hold unique ideals while ensuring the bastard child of this coupling will render those ideals irrelevant.

Flock says that its cameras don’t use facial recognition, which has been criticized for racial biases. But local law enforcement agencies using Flock will soon have access to footage from Ring cameras with facial recognition.

Both companies will be able to blame each other the next time abusive access is revealed. And Ring’s network will presumably gain features it doesn’t have currently via its meshing with Flock, like license plate recognition and an algorithm that can be applied to Ring footage that allows cops to do things it can’t with Ring alone, like search for suspects using nothing but vehicle or clothing descriptions.

And this assurance is especially meaningless, given what’s already known about both of these companies:

Amazon and Flock say their collaboration will only involve voluntary customers and local enforcement agencies. 

When both companies store recordings in their own clouds, “voluntary” is beside the point. Law enforcement can just approach either company directly with warrants or subpoenas and get what has been denied to them by these companies’ customers. And restraining searches to “local law enforcement” agencies is impossible if neither company is interested in limiting searches to local areas and/or taking steps to prevent local agencies from performing searches on behalf of federal officers.

Even if both companies take heat for doing this, they’ll still do it. After all, they’ve got an entire administration standing behind them that’s willing to call anyone who questions or criticizes this unofficial merger a friend of criminals, if not an actual enemy of the nation.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, always on surveillance, law enforcement, surveillance, surveillance abuse

Companies: amazon, flock safety, ring