Amazon Is Coaching Cops on How to Obtain Surveillance Footage Without a Warrant
Amazon Is Coaching Cops on How to Obtain Surveillance Footage
Without a Warrant
Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, is teaching
police how to convince residents to share camera footage with them.
By Caroline Haskins Aug 5 2019, 10:08am
When police partner with Ring, Amazon’s
home surveillance camera company, they get access to the “Law Enforcement
Neighborhood Portal,” an interactive map that allows officers to request
footage directly from camera owners. Police don’t need a warrant to request
this footage, but they do need
permission from camera owners.
Emails
and documents obtained by Motherboard reveal that people aren’t always willing
to provide police with their Ring camera footage. However, Ring works with law
enforcement and gives them advice on how to persuade people to give them
footage.
Emails
obtained from police department in Maywood, NJ—and emails from the police
department of Bloomfield, NJ, which
were also posted by Wired—show that Ring coaches police on how to
obtain footage. The company provides cops with templates for requesting
footage, which they do not need a court warrant to do. Ring suggests cops post
often on Neighbors, Ring’s free “neighborhood watch” app, where Ring camera
owners have the option of sharing their camera footage.
"I
have noticed you have been posting alerts and receiving feedback from the
community,” a Ring representative told Bloomfield police. “You are doing a
great job interacting with them and that will be critical in increasing the
opt-in rate.”
“The more
users you have, the more useful the information you can collect,” the
representative added.
“Seems
like you wasted no time sending out your video Request out to Ring Users which
is awesome!!” a Ring “Partner Success Associate” told Maywood police.
As reported by GovTech
on Friday, police can request Ring camera footage directly from
Amazon, even if a Ring customer denies to provide police with the footage. It's
a workaround that allows police to essentially "subpoena" anything
captured on Ring cameras.
"Ring
will not release customer information in response to government demands without
a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us," a Ring
spokesperson told Motherboard in an email. "Ring objects to over-broad or
otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course. We are working with the
Fresno County Sheriff’s Office to ensure this is understood."
Chris
Gilliard, a professor of English at Macomb Community College who studies
digital redlining and discriminatory practices enabled by data mining, said in
a phone call that Amazon is essentially coaching police on 1) how to do their
jobs, and 2) how to promote Ring products.
“Not
coincidentally, those things overlapped quite a bit,” Gilliard said. “That’s
really disturbing.”
Ring, in
essence, recommends that police create a feedback loop in which they depend on
Ring. According to Ring, police should:
1.
Post on their department's Twitter and
Facebook pages to encourage Neighbors downloads.
2.
Use
Neighbors downloads as “credits” to get free Ring cameras.
3.
Increase the amount of
video surveillance in their communities.
4.
Use the Law Enforcement Neighborhoods
Portal to request surveillance footage.
Motherboard previously reported that at
least 200 law enforcement
agencies have partnered with Ring. Gizmodo reported that
the number of partnerships is at least 225.
"Ring
offers Neighbors app trainings and best practices for posting and engaging with
app users for all law enforcement agencies utilizing the portal tool," A
Ring spokesperson told Motherboard in an email. "We also provide templates
and educational materials for police departments to utilize at their discretion
to help them keep their communities informed about their efforts on Neighbors.
Ring requests to look at press releases and any messaging prior to distribution
to ensure our company and our products and services are accurately
represented."
A Ring
representative emailed three Bloomfield police officers on May 1 asking whether
they needed help using the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal.
“Keep up
the great job commenting and posting!” the representative said.
On May
31, the Bloomfield Detective Bureau Commander asked how the police department
can encourage more people to submit Ring camera footage.
“I have
been requesting videos but have not been getting any responses,” the detective
wrote. “The only video that we have received is from a person that we directly
spoke to and asked him to send it to us. [Is] there anything that we can blast
out to encourage Ring owners to share the videos when requested?”
The Ring
representative said that the cities with the best “opt in rate” for sharing
Ring footage with police are active on social media.
“The
agencies with the best opt in rate are the ones that are actively sharing on
social media, having community outreach speak at meetings and spread via word
of mouth,” the representative said.
A Ring
Partner Success Associate told an officer from the Maywood Police Department
something similar in April, according to emails obtained by Motherboard. The
Ring employee advised them to pair all video requests through the Law
Enforcement Neighborhood Portal with a public post on the Neighbors app.
A
Neighbors post, the Ring employee said, will contextualize video requests and
reach people who may not have Ring cameras, but have information relevant to
law enforcement.
The Ring
Partner Success Associate also provided Maywood Police with a sample Neighbors
post.
However,
posting on social media isn’t just a way for law enforcement to get information
for investigations. According to Ring, it’s also a way for police to drive
Neighbors downloads in their communities. A Ring “Best Practices” guide
obtained by Motherboard from the Addison, IL police department explicitly says
as much on a page titled “Driving Neighbors App Downloads.”
“Grow
your audience to create a bigger impact when posting Portal Alerts,” the
document says. “Social Media is the most effective way to drive Neighbors App
downloads.”
Although
Neighbors is a free app, its posts are dominated by video footage captured by
Ring cameras. The app is a de facto advertisement for Ring security cameras: it
shows users what and who they should be scared of, and it suggests that Ring
cameras are the solution to this fear. Neighbors has hired “news editors” to pull 911 call data into
the app for real-time, unconfirmed crime alerts, as reported by
Gizmodo. As Motherboard reported earlier this year, the app also has a major problem with
racial profiling.
Fight for the Future recently
called for cities around the country to stop partnering with Ring. The digital
rights activist group claims that Ring is creating a dragnet surveillance
program in the private sphere, without proper regulatory oversight.
“Some of
the advice he gave I think are things that community activists would
recommend—that police need to build relationships in communities to be more
effective,” Gilliard told Motherboard. “The idea that it should be mediated
through Amazon and through social media—it brings with it all the problems that
we know with social media.”
“It’s
blurring of the line between consumer and citizen,” Gilliard added. “That’s not
in the best interest of citizens, because it means that you will only get your
rights as much as you use a particular service.”
All of
the documents that informed this article are now public and viewable
on Document Cloud.
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