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Public demonstrations are by definition public. They are designed to be highly visible. Who cares if you're caught on camera demonstrating in the public squar

Public demonstrations are by definition public. They are designed to be highly visible. Who cares if you're caught on camera demonstrating in the public square? That's kind of the point: to be seen by as many people as possible.

stefan_ 6y ago
Police surveillance of constitutionally protected activities have a chilling effect that might prevent people from exercising their rights and can therefore be illegal.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Police regularly monitor protests, and frequently use footage from security cameras in investigating and prosecuting crimes. I'm not seeing a problem here on those grounds.
  - kbar13 6y ago
    I see a couple gray areas: 1) when people buy a doorbell cam they may not expect it to be used by the police in unrelated investigation (not a crime actively committed against the owner of the camera) 2) motive for investigation of a crime like theft is clear-cut, investigation of who was at a protest is not as clear (why do we need to identify who participated in a protest? there shouldn't need to be identification unless there's an actual crime committed)
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      1) The article is unclear what is meant by "request", but the impression is that the police are merely asking private citizens for access to video which they are under no obligation to provide. If that is the case, then I see nothing wrong here. 2) Agreed, however it is not unreasonable to expect to be identified when taking part in a public activity. You could just as easily be identified by police who were there, or via someone's phone footage uploaded to youtube. You have no expectation of privacy in public. Further, I see no reason to expect that the LAPD intends to do anything other than investigate criminal actions with this footage [0]. [0] Although the history of the LAPD would suggest they might use it for harassment.
      - bratbag 6y ago
        I disagree. The police should not be asking for blanket surveillance in the first place. It should be on a per-crime basis, with specifics.
        notahacker 6y ago
        The emails suggest this is actually the case: owners were emailed with a specific request linked to a specific incident number and a message from a named detective. They were free to choose whether to share or not and given that I'm sure residents could spot the BLM protest connection I'm sure some were more willing to share than others. Emails (with actual incidents and location details redacted) are apparently here https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redacted.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redact...
      - kbar13 6y ago
        agreed on #1 i think for 2, you've identified why it's a little iffy... yes if you're out in public you should have no expectation of privacy. however the context of where you are matters, and the frame of why the police is trying to identify matters. ideally most people who are participating in a peaceful protest should have no fear of being identified, but that isn't the case rn. in a sense, the surveillance discussion is a proxy for "the police have too much power and not enough oversight"
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        > "the police have too much power and not enough oversight" On this general point we agree.
  - stefan_ 6y ago
    You don't see a problem when a constitutionally protected activity summons a police brigade? What exactly is police doing watching people exercise their rights? I think you can understand that people who have thought about this a lot more than you can realize the problem here.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      Protests are monitored by police because mobs are a very real threat whenever a large group of people assemble for a cause. The mere existence of police surveillance in a public demonstration is not at all unreasonable in my opinion. Case in point, if there was no police presence whatsoever at the Capital protest there's a very real possibility a few senators might be dead right now.
      - Fogest 6y ago
        And let's be fair, it's not uncommon especially at larger protests for their to be conflict that requires police intervention. Just like how police forces will have the bad people that bring down the rest of the force, groups of protestors also face similar problems. Different people in the protest have different perspectives and ideas of what makes a good protest and what is effective. Some people think violence and destruction is needed and often these people have mob-like effect. If one person starts doing it often that spreads through the group and more people are breaking laws. Without some law and order in there things get out of hand pretty quick as we have seen in many protests in America, but also across the world.
    - ggreer 6y ago
      The police weren't using Ring to do any sort of blanket surveillance of protesters. They were investigating crimes. All requests from the LAPD referenced specific case numbers. See page 22 of this pdf[1] for an example. I've transcribed one: --- > Dear Neighbor, > Ring is contacting you on behalf of Detective Alex Giron of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is seeking videos recorded between [redacted], in connection with the investigation of an incident (Incident #[redacted]) near your home. > A message from Detective Giron: > Hello Ring neighbors. We are looking for any video that may help us identify a suspect that [redacted]. Any information would be appreciated. > Sharing your video recordings with the Los Angeles Police Department is entirely optional and will not provide the department with access to your Ring device(s). If you choose to share your Ring video recordings, the Los Angeles Police Department will also receive your email address and street address. Click the button below to review and share select Ring video recordings. > If you do not wish to participate, simply ignore this request and nothing will be shared with the Los Angeles Police Department, including whether or not this request was sent to you. If you do not wish to receive requests like these in the future, click here to opt out. --- The request then gives some contact info for the detective in case the recipient has any questions. I see nothing objectionable about this request. It looks to be entirely opt-in. It protects the privacy of Ring users while also making it convenient for citizens to help the police solve crimes. That the EFF is making a big deal of this only serves to reduce my respect for them. I now worry that they're going down the same path as the ACLU and SPLC. 1. https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redacted.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redact...
- tharne 6y ago
  And yet if the police weren't present, these very same protestors would likely accuse the police of "institutional racism" for failing to protect the protestors.
  - sixothree 6y ago
    You have evidence of this happening in the past?
- threatofrain 6y ago
  This isn't simply police surveillance; this is citizen surveillance using a common technology, and the citizens are voluntarily offering information to the police. They could've just as easily uploaded it to YouTube.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Something can be technically legal but also have a devastating effect on civil liberties. There's a lot more information available here than would be on, for example YouTube. The most salient is that YouTube lacks timestamping. So a video pulled from YT might not be credible evidence because there's no way to prove when the video was recorded. It can also be difficult or impossible to determine where a video was recorded. My contrast, Ring contains all of the metadata necessary for video evidence to be admissible in court. There's all the who/what/when/where information along with chain of custody guarantees.
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      I wasn't focusing on what's technically illegal. I just don't want the conversation mixing up police with citizen surveillance. The admissibility of evidence in court sounds like an issue related to minor details in the implementation of recording technology at the user end. But the final link that is really impactful is when citizens cooperate with police.
nickff 6y ago
The current zeitgeist seems to be that the 'good' protests should be completely unmonitored and unrestricted, and the 'bad' protests should be tightly monitored and heavily sanctioned. The same is of course true for speech.
- ketzo 6y ago
  I think to call that feeling "current" is to be a little ignorant of history; people have always held double standards for their own causes. We're humans, after all.
  - nickff 6y ago
    I never said it was 'novel' or 'recent', though it does seem to be more prolific these days.
- tharne 6y ago
  That reminds me of the way my company and others frequently urge employees to bring their "whole selves to work", meaning of course, bring your whole self to work so long as your whole self espouses views that are confined to an exceedingly narrow window as defined by the NY Times Editorial Page.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    "Speak your truth" and "say the thing" are other fake axioms from these people. I attended a DEI seminar at work where someone "said the thing" as he was encouraged to -- but it was the wrong thing apparently -- he was then humiliated by the organizers for wrongthink for about an hour in front of his coworkers.
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    What are they encouraging with bringing your "whole self", talking politics at the office or wearing t-shirts with slogans, stuff like that?
- tw04 6y ago
  The current zeitgeist seems to be that peaceful protestors should be left alone and treated like the law abiding citizens they are, and that violent protestors should be punished accordingly. Nobody in those Minneapolis neighborhoods (neighborhoods that were predominantly populated with african americans) wanted idiots burning down their local grocery stores or causing violence in their neighborhoods. Just like no sane person wanted a bunch of morons to break into the US Capitol building. If you want to make a claim, own it instead of being coy.
happytoexplain 6y ago
Surely the controversy is that the police requested the doorbell videos of private citizens, and further, the suspicion is that they are looking for anything, rather than investigating a specific crime. That's what the first couple paragraphs say. I have no idea if that's totally normal and legal police behavior, and neither am I commenting on the morality of it - I'm just pointing out that the concern is obviously not "the police are able to observe a public protest", with no other context.
- tharne 6y ago
  People with home surveillance cameras can give the footage to whomever they want, including the police, so long as that footage was obtained lawfully.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    Not if it contains other people's space they can't.
    - tharne 6y ago
      A public protest is, by definition, in public. There isn't what the Supreme Court would call a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
      - tpxl 6y ago
        Yes, however a surveilance camera cannot simply be pointed in the street to record everything.
        leetcrew 6y ago
        isn't that essentially what a ring camera is, assuming your door faces the street? if so, where are all the legal challenges?
        OminousWeapons 6y ago
ketzo 6y ago
That's honestly not a bad point, but it doesn't help me shake the skeeziness I feel about this story. Maybe it's the fact that these are ostensibly home-protection devices, not public surveillance devices? But really, I could see how you could make the argument that that's a very-narrow-bordering-on-pedantic distinction. Maybe it's just general Big Brother heebie jeebies.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  The article isn't clear what is meant by "request" here. If they are merely asking private citizens to give them access to the video, and those citizens have a choice to do so or not, then it's essentially the same as anybody just uploading phone footage to youtube. If it turns out there is coercion in getting these videos then that line of reasoning goes out the window, however.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ketzo 6y ago
    Very true. And maybe that's where my discomfort is coming from; the potential for police obtaining this footage through coercion or even in secret is deeply disturbing to me.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    When a couple of large guys with badges and guns are at your door asking for video, it would take a very self-confident person to say "no." There's certainly adequate plausible deniability of coercion, but it would be a very different feeling than if, for example, a reporter were asking, or an insurance company investigator, etc.
    - ketzo 6y ago
      Or even just the police on the phone vs. the police at your door.
ropeladder 6y ago
"Who cares if someone roofies your drink? Your goal was to hook up with somebody anyway." /s You are drastically oversimplifying the situation here. The goal of a protest is not to be seen, or to be harassed by police. The goal is to effect change, and surveillance is a tool of the powerful that the United States has long had a healthy skepticism for.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  speaking from London here. Clearly news of the invention of CCTV has only recently spread across the pond. It's pretty much a fact of life here that everything you do is being surveilled by multiple lenses. Maybe in the us the distribution of power makes it more likely that such information will be abused? (and btw usa data privacy laws is inferior to european law, stricter privacy laws=less surveillance. (Maybe its to compensate for more CCTV?))
  - smolder 6y ago
    Don't EUs privacy laws stop applying to UK since brexit?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - danShumway 6y ago
    I don't know if this is a good point. It's not that people like me are just discovering that this is how London operates; I knew how London operates, and I don't want to be in that environment. London is incredibly surveilled, constantly. I'm not going to go and complain about it because I'm not living in Europe, and it's not really my place to tell you that you're being over-surveilled. But if you're pointing at London and saying, "don't worry, we already have this" -- bad example, that doesn't make me feel better. I don't want the US to have the surveillance omnipresence that London has, that would be a negative outcome for me. I don't think London's situation should be treated like it's normal. To be blunt, I think your city has a over-surveillance problem, albeit not one that it's my responsibility to solve or draw attention to. GP's analogy is gross and hyperbolic, it's not the one I would use. But there are some concerns I have here. A better analogy would be something like Baltimore's (thankfully ending) drone program, which creeps me the heck out even as I acknowledge that it's not obviously an invasion of a private space. The point of a protest is often to be seen, but not necessarily to be surveilled in that level of detail, and there are concerns that people should have about police departments paying special attention and putting special effort into monitoring those protests.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

stefan_ 6y ago

Police surveillance of constitutionally protected activities have a chilling effect that might prevent people from exercising their rights and can therefore be illegal.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Police regularly monitor protests, and frequently use footage from security cameras in investigating and prosecuting crimes. I'm not seeing a problem here on those grounds.
- kbar13 6y ago
  I see a couple gray areas: 1) when people buy a doorbell cam they may not expect it to be used by the police in unrelated investigation (not a crime actively committed against the owner of the camera) 2) motive for investigation of a crime like theft is clear-cut, investigation of who was at a protest is not as clear (why do we need to identify who participated in a protest? there shouldn't need to be identification unless there's an actual crime committed)
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    1) The article is unclear what is meant by "request", but the impression is that the police are merely asking private citizens for access to video which they are under no obligation to provide. If that is the case, then I see nothing wrong here. 2) Agreed, however it is not unreasonable to expect to be identified when taking part in a public activity. You could just as easily be identified by police who were there, or via someone's phone footage uploaded to youtube. You have no expectation of privacy in public. Further, I see no reason to expect that the LAPD intends to do anything other than investigate criminal actions with this footage [0]. [0] Although the history of the LAPD would suggest they might use it for harassment.
    - bratbag 6y ago
      I disagree. The police should not be asking for blanket surveillance in the first place. It should be on a per-crime basis, with specifics.
      - notahacker 6y ago
        The emails suggest this is actually the case: owners were emailed with a specific request linked to a specific incident number and a message from a named detective. They were free to choose whether to share or not and given that I'm sure residents could spot the BLM protest connection I'm sure some were more willing to share than others. Emails (with actual incidents and location details redacted) are apparently here https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redacted.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redact...
    - kbar13 6y ago
      agreed on #1 i think for 2, you've identified why it's a little iffy... yes if you're out in public you should have no expectation of privacy. however the context of where you are matters, and the frame of why the police is trying to identify matters. ideally most people who are participating in a peaceful protest should have no fear of being identified, but that isn't the case rn. in a sense, the surveillance discussion is a proxy for "the police have too much power and not enough oversight"
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        > "the police have too much power and not enough oversight" On this general point we agree.
- stefan_ 6y ago
  You don't see a problem when a constitutionally protected activity summons a police brigade? What exactly is police doing watching people exercise their rights? I think you can understand that people who have thought about this a lot more than you can realize the problem here.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Protests are monitored by police because mobs are a very real threat whenever a large group of people assemble for a cause. The mere existence of police surveillance in a public demonstration is not at all unreasonable in my opinion. Case in point, if there was no police presence whatsoever at the Capital protest there's a very real possibility a few senators might be dead right now.
    - Fogest 6y ago
      And let's be fair, it's not uncommon especially at larger protests for their to be conflict that requires police intervention. Just like how police forces will have the bad people that bring down the rest of the force, groups of protestors also face similar problems. Different people in the protest have different perspectives and ideas of what makes a good protest and what is effective. Some people think violence and destruction is needed and often these people have mob-like effect. If one person starts doing it often that spreads through the group and more people are breaking laws. Without some law and order in there things get out of hand pretty quick as we have seen in many protests in America, but also across the world.
  - ggreer 6y ago
    The police weren't using Ring to do any sort of blanket surveillance of protesters. They were investigating crimes. All requests from the LAPD referenced specific case numbers. See page 22 of this pdf[1] for an example. I've transcribed one: --- > Dear Neighbor, > Ring is contacting you on behalf of Detective Alex Giron of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is seeking videos recorded between [redacted], in connection with the investigation of an incident (Incident #[redacted]) near your home. > A message from Detective Giron: > Hello Ring neighbors. We are looking for any video that may help us identify a suspect that [redacted]. Any information would be appreciated. > Sharing your video recordings with the Los Angeles Police Department is entirely optional and will not provide the department with access to your Ring device(s). If you choose to share your Ring video recordings, the Los Angeles Police Department will also receive your email address and street address. Click the button below to review and share select Ring video recordings. > If you do not wish to participate, simply ignore this request and nothing will be shared with the Los Angeles Police Department, including whether or not this request was sent to you. If you do not wish to receive requests like these in the future, click here to opt out. --- The request then gives some contact info for the detective in case the recipient has any questions. I see nothing objectionable about this request. It looks to be entirely opt-in. It protects the privacy of Ring users while also making it convenient for citizens to help the police solve crimes. That the EFF is making a big deal of this only serves to reduce my respect for them. I now worry that they're going down the same path as the ACLU and SPLC. 1. https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redacted.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/2021/02/11/nr20-5328_emails_redact...
tharne 6y ago
And yet if the police weren't present, these very same protestors would likely accuse the police of "institutional racism" for failing to protect the protestors.
- sixothree 6y ago
  You have evidence of this happening in the past?
threatofrain 6y ago
This isn't simply police surveillance; this is citizen surveillance using a common technology, and the citizens are voluntarily offering information to the police. They could've just as easily uploaded it to YouTube.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Something can be technically legal but also have a devastating effect on civil liberties. There's a lot more information available here than would be on, for example YouTube. The most salient is that YouTube lacks timestamping. So a video pulled from YT might not be credible evidence because there's no way to prove when the video was recorded. It can also be difficult or impossible to determine where a video was recorded. My contrast, Ring contains all of the metadata necessary for video evidence to be admissible in court. There's all the who/what/when/where information along with chain of custody guarantees.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    I wasn't focusing on what's technically illegal. I just don't want the conversation mixing up police with citizen surveillance. The admissibility of evidence in court sounds like an issue related to minor details in the implementation of recording technology at the user end. But the final link that is really impactful is when citizens cooperate with police.

nickff 6y ago

The current zeitgeist seems to be that the 'good' protests should be completely unmonitored and unrestricted, and the 'bad' protests should be tightly monitored and heavily sanctioned. The same is of course true for speech.

ketzo 6y ago
I think to call that feeling "current" is to be a little ignorant of history; people have always held double standards for their own causes. We're humans, after all.
- nickff 6y ago
  I never said it was 'novel' or 'recent', though it does seem to be more prolific these days.
tharne 6y ago
That reminds me of the way my company and others frequently urge employees to bring their "whole selves to work", meaning of course, bring your whole self to work so long as your whole self espouses views that are confined to an exceedingly narrow window as defined by the NY Times Editorial Page.
- nostromo 6y ago
  "Speak your truth" and "say the thing" are other fake axioms from these people. I attended a DEI seminar at work where someone "said the thing" as he was encouraged to -- but it was the wrong thing apparently -- he was then humiliated by the organizers for wrongthink for about an hour in front of his coworkers.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  What are they encouraging with bringing your "whole self", talking politics at the office or wearing t-shirts with slogans, stuff like that?
tw04 6y ago
The current zeitgeist seems to be that peaceful protestors should be left alone and treated like the law abiding citizens they are, and that violent protestors should be punished accordingly. Nobody in those Minneapolis neighborhoods (neighborhoods that were predominantly populated with african americans) wanted idiots burning down their local grocery stores or causing violence in their neighborhoods. Just like no sane person wanted a bunch of morons to break into the US Capitol building. If you want to make a claim, own it instead of being coy.

happytoexplain 6y ago

Surely the controversy is that the police requested the doorbell videos of private citizens, and further, the suspicion is that they are looking for anything, rather than investigating a specific crime. That's what the first couple paragraphs say. I have no idea if that's totally normal and legal police behavior, and neither am I commenting on the morality of it - I'm just pointing out that the concern is obviously not "the police are able to observe a public protest", with no other context.

tharne 6y ago
People with home surveillance cameras can give the footage to whomever they want, including the police, so long as that footage was obtained lawfully.
- tpxl 6y ago
  Not if it contains other people's space they can't.
  - tharne 6y ago
    A public protest is, by definition, in public. There isn't what the Supreme Court would call a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
    - tpxl 6y ago
      Yes, however a surveilance camera cannot simply be pointed in the street to record everything.
      - leetcrew 6y ago
        isn't that essentially what a ring camera is, assuming your door faces the street? if so, where are all the legal challenges?
      - OminousWeapons 6y ago

ketzo 6y ago

That's honestly not a bad point, but it doesn't help me shake the skeeziness I feel about this story. Maybe it's the fact that these are ostensibly home-protection devices, not public surveillance devices? But really, I could see how you could make the argument that that's a very-narrow-bordering-on-pedantic distinction. Maybe it's just general Big Brother heebie jeebies.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
The article isn't clear what is meant by "request" here. If they are merely asking private citizens to give them access to the video, and those citizens have a choice to do so or not, then it's essentially the same as anybody just uploading phone footage to youtube. If it turns out there is coercion in getting these videos then that line of reasoning goes out the window, however.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ketzo 6y ago
  Very true. And maybe that's where my discomfort is coming from; the potential for police obtaining this footage through coercion or even in secret is deeply disturbing to me.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  When a couple of large guys with badges and guns are at your door asking for video, it would take a very self-confident person to say "no." There's certainly adequate plausible deniability of coercion, but it would be a very different feeling than if, for example, a reporter were asking, or an insurance company investigator, etc.
  - ketzo 6y ago
    Or even just the police on the phone vs. the police at your door.

ropeladder 6y ago

"Who cares if someone roofies your drink? Your goal was to hook up with somebody anyway." /s You are drastically oversimplifying the situation here. The goal of a protest is not to be seen, or to be harassed by police. The goal is to effect change, and surveillance is a tool of the powerful that the United States has long had a healthy skepticism for.

marshmallow_12 6y ago
speaking from London here. Clearly news of the invention of CCTV has only recently spread across the pond. It's pretty much a fact of life here that everything you do is being surveilled by multiple lenses. Maybe in the us the distribution of power makes it more likely that such information will be abused? (and btw usa data privacy laws is inferior to european law, stricter privacy laws=less surveillance. (Maybe its to compensate for more CCTV?))
- smolder 6y ago
  Don't EUs privacy laws stop applying to UK since brexit?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- danShumway 6y ago
  I don't know if this is a good point. It's not that people like me are just discovering that this is how London operates; I knew how London operates, and I don't want to be in that environment. London is incredibly surveilled, constantly. I'm not going to go and complain about it because I'm not living in Europe, and it's not really my place to tell you that you're being over-surveilled. But if you're pointing at London and saying, "don't worry, we already have this" -- bad example, that doesn't make me feel better. I don't want the US to have the surveillance omnipresence that London has, that would be a negative outcome for me. I don't think London's situation should be treated like it's normal. To be blunt, I think your city has a over-surveillance problem, albeit not one that it's my responsibility to solve or draw attention to. GP's analogy is gross and hyperbolic, it's not the one I would use. But there are some concerns I have here. A better analogy would be something like Baltimore's (thankfully ending) drone program, which creeps me the heck out even as I acknowledge that it's not obviously an invasion of a private space. The point of a protest is often to be seen, but not necessarily to be surveilled in that level of detail, and there are concerns that people should have about police departments paying special attention and putting special effort into monitoring those protests.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]