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Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

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 Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your camera.

https://t.co/l1fwo09t0i

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That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

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It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM protesters:

https://t.co/gt8vAOSyK3

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And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM protests.

https://t.co/cZdmJvBHfB

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Ring has a terrible track record, kicking off its marketing by sending out deceptive news-bulletins to convince people that they lived in high-crime areas and needed its products:

https://t.co/sBSiM9DA9r

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They lied about their facial recognition program:

https://t.co/NcIPSpw4CQ

A program that included a plan to make "watch lists" of people who'd be tracked from camera to camera:

https://t.co/QQzWl8ifYB

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Far from keeping its customers safe, Ring exposed them to real harm, leaking their home addresses:

https://t.co/2CDUBV8QtW

Allowing third parties to hack their cameras, spy on them, and scream abuse at them:

https://t.co/qJVELyk80D

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Not just hackers, either! Multiple Ring employees got caught spying on Ring owners and their families, including their children:

https://t.co/VqkMv7hWVe

9/
As Maass and Guariglia point out, Ring made some improvements to user privacy over the past year, adding end-to-end encryption. But at the same time, Ring has cemented its relationship with American police forces, leading to far more police requests for Ring owners' footage.

10/
These "requests" start to feel a lot more like coercion, and, as with other coercive law-enforcement requests, "like police 'asking' to search your phone during a traffic stop," they should be bound by strict limits.

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EFF proposes four rules for coercive electronic searches:

I. Requests must be specific, targeting a particular time and place where there is reasonable suspicion that crime has happened (rather than general requests)

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II. Police must collect and publish statistics about their consent searches of electronic devices, to deter and detect racial profiling

III. Police and reviewing courts must narrowly construe the scope of a person’s consent to search their device.

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IV. Before an officer attempts to acquire footage from a person’s Ring camera, the officer must notify the person of their legal right to refuse.

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The public-private surveillance partnership between Ring and the cops epitomizes the paradox of the American privacy debate.

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When I talk to military, intelligence and government audiences about surveillance, they say, "Look, Uncle Sam already knows everything about me, but those scumbags in Silicon Valley would sell their mothers for a nickel."

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And when I talk to tech audiences, they say, "Google just wants to show me better ads, big deal. But cops and spooks? They're the thickwitted sociopaths who were too stupid to get a job at a tech company. No WAY I want them spying on me."

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But the reason companies like Ring are allowed to conduct such indiscriminate surveillance (a one mile walk in DC puts you under the gaze of 13 Ring cameras!) is that governments are wholly dependent on requisitioning their footage.

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Rather than warning people about the dangers of Ring cameras - or agitating for ordinances banning them - cops served as street-teams marketing Ring's products. Private surveillance depends on government complicity, and spying governments depend on private surveillance.

eof/
ETA: The cameras the SFPD accessed were from Avigilon, not Ring

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The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

1/


The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

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But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

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When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

1/


These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

2/

These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

3/

The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

4/

PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

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Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

https://t.co/OyiM1vUS8Y

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Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

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The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

https://t.co/7Ob6AdmkDz

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This weekend, I'll be participating in Boskone 58, Boston's annual sf convention, where I'm doing panels and a reading.

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Dependency Confusion: A completely wild supply-chain hack.

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Adam Curtis on criti-hype: Big Tech as an epiphenomenon of sociopathic mediocrity, not supergenius.

https://t.co/MYmHOosTk3

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