The Los Angeles Police Department sought to use camera video from Amazon’s Ring devices to conduct surveillance on Black Lives Matter protests in mid-2020.
It is raising concerns from civil liberties advocates about privacy, police searches, and freedom of association. Others see it as the use of 21st-century technology in the standard investigative procedure.
The LAPD sent requests to Amazon Ring users seeking footage of protests against police violence, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group that published an email of the request for Ring footage. The EFF filed a public records request with the LAPD after complaints about police tactics during the protests last May and June, the group said in a blog post.
“Outdoor surveillance cameras like Ring have the potential to provide the police with video footage covering every inch of an entire neighborhood,” wrote Matthew Guariglia, an EFF policy analyst. “People are less likely to exercise their right to political speech, protest, and assembly if they know that police can get video of these actions with just an email to people with Ring cameras.”
The LAPD refused to disclose to EFF what crime it was investigating or how many hours of footage it requested, the group said. The LAPD also didn’t immediately respond to similar questions from the Washington Examiner.
Amazon’s Ring brand sells video doorbells, security cameras, and floodlights. The email obtained by the EFF asked a Ring owner to submit copies of videos in an area where people were injured and where property was “looted, damaged and destroyed.” The email sent from Ring on behalf of the LAPD informed the device owner that participation was “entirely optional.”
Ring, in a statement, noted that Ring owners’ identities are anonymous to law enforcement agencies. To submit a request through Ring, a law enforcement agency must have an active criminal investigation. Police cannot request video for general searches, Ring said.
Ring’s policy prohibits video requests for legal activities, such as protests, the company added. The request highlighted by the EFF met Ring guidelines because it included a case number and was focused on identifying people responsible for theft, property damage, and physical injuries.
Nevertheless, some civil liberties advocates see problems with law enforcement surveillance using privately owned video cameras.
Police requests for privately owned video surveillance raise concerns about reasonable searches required in the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and the freedom to associate guaranteed in the First Amendment, said Darrell Goode, president of the Santa Monica-Venice chapter of the NAACP.
“The request raises concerns of abuse and retribution by LAPD and other agencies,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The fact that they are targeting black voices validates this concern.”
The possibilities for abuse are “Orwellian,” added Dustyn Coontz, a criminal defense lawyer from Lansing, Michigan. Past Fourth Amendment court rulings have suggested that when a person passes his or her personal information to a third party, there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy when a government agency such as a police department gets that information from the third party.
“If the police are asking citizens to turn in their videos and they’re doing it, or if the police are asking Ring to give them a live feed of what’s going on at a particular house and Ring does it, then it is legitimate as the law currently stands,” he said.
Situations like this show that the law needs to change, he added.
“If the guarantees against unreasonable search mean anything, they mean that we should not be living in a surveillance state, even if that surveillance is ultimately being conducted by the gadgets we blow our paychecks on,” Coontz said. “It’s one thing to trust Google with my whereabouts. I know they just want to make money off of me, and I’m fine with that. It’s another to trust governments. They often have other motives.”
Others suggested the privacy and other concerns are overblown.
Protesters and others in public do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when a Ring camera can observe them at someone’s house, said Ben Springer, a software engineer and a former police officer.
With Ring owners’ cooperation with the police being voluntary, the situation is “nearly indistinguishable from the police doing a door-to-door canvass of a neighborhood and a resident offering up an eyewitness statement,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The difference here is the camera equates to the stereotypical nosy neighbor who is always looking out the window.”
