Surveillance (Against The) State: Doorbell Cam Owners Are Tipping People Off About ICE Raids
The cops certainly had fun partnering with Ring, the surveillance camera company now owned by Amazon. Ring handed out free cameras to cops, who handed out these cameras to citizens with the implicit expectation that they’d have warrantless access to camera footage whenever they wanted it.
It didn’t quite work out that way. Lots of cop shops sold their souls to Ring, only to have Ring limit their access after the company received months of negative press over its incestuous relationship with law enforcement.
Surveillance cameras are cheap and ubiquitous. Law enforcement agencies may have thought they were expanding their surveillance networks for free, but failed to realize a camera on every house means every house has a camera. And that sort of ubiquity doesn’t always work out in law enforcement’s favor, as the FBI pointed out a half-decade ago:
The document describes a 2017 incident in which FBI agents approached a New Orleans home to serve a search warrant and were caught on video. “Through the Wi-Fi doorbell system, the subject of the warrant remotely viewed the activity at his residence from another location and contacted his neighbor and landlord regarding the FBI’s presence there,” it states.
That’s the rub. Cameras installed for the purpose of protecting property from porch thieves and other miscreants are fully capable of capturing law enforcement officers in the act.
The latest spin involves ICE, because nearly everything does these days. Ring owners are utilizing Ring’s tie-in app — one that has a well-deserved reputation for enhancing bigotry — to give people in the area a head’s up on incoming raids, as Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes:
Neighbors, an app for Ring doorbell users, is typically used by people looking for lost pets or missing packages. But last week, horrified by ICE raids in and around Los Angeles, residents started using the Amazon app to alert their communities to immigration agents carrying out searches and arrests.
[…]
While social media sites and Nextdoor have been used to highlight ICE activity across the U.S. in recent days, Neighbors has been especially popular, with dozens of posts reviewed by Forbes over the last week.
Welcome to the surveillance state, surveillance statists. Here’s how it feels to be on the other side of dozens of unblinking eyes. Your movements no longer go unnoticed. And when they are noticed, there are plenty of apps capable of spreading news of your actions instantly.
Even if ICE decides it’s not going to raid people’s houses (which it might, because the likelihood of a mass arrest is much lower there), it can’t escape cameras owned and operated by members of the public. People are looking out for each other now that the government can’t be trusted to obey laws or respect rights.
Some posts had information on ICE agents near stores like Dollar Tree, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Target. Two alerted communities to ICE operation near elementary schools.
If ICE doesn’t like this extra attention, it just needs to limit itself to chasing down actual felons or people suspected of committing serious crimes. But of course it won’t do that — not with an entire administration pushing it to arrest and deport as many foreigners as possible, even if that means arresting the occasional US citizen and/or dumping migrants into foreign concentration camps for the “crime” of being undocumented.
The pushback is only going to increase. And nearly every person in the US is equipped with a camera, whether it’s guarding their front door or held in their hand as they confront this marauding gang of masked officers in unmarked vehicles who invade businesses and homes for the sole purpose of destroying lives.