The greatest threat posed to democracy in any free nation is that of ubiquitous government surveillance. Many countries today are struggling to find the proper balance between useful facial recognition and connected-camera technologies and those that threaten our privacy. We’re here to make it easy: Public-facing facial recognition or connected home-security camera systems that offer access to law enforcement are dangerous and should be banned outright.
The problem with Ring
These devices are positioned as security cameras. The past few years have seen a sharp increase in occurrences of package theft. Ring says its cameras can help law enforcement track down and apprehend these thieves. They’re also asked to consent to allowing the police to request footage from their cameras in the event a crime is committed in the neighborhood and said footage could aid police in apprehending the criminal.
Here’s some key facts that consumers in the US should know before installing a Ring camera
This means the police are required to police themselves: there are no actual laws or physical security precautions in place to prevent them from misusing their specific access.
What’s the danger?
Who cares if cops and some random programmer in the Ukraine can see footage of us mowing our lawns and carrying groceries? The argument here usually goes something like this: “Any reasonable person in modern society already knows they’re being filmed all the time. If the police can use Ring footage to catch murderers and child abductors, I’m willing to risk being seen scratching my butt while I pick up my newspaper.” Privacy means that if the rules ever change, and someone tries to make your lifestyle illegal, you won’t regret wearing the wrong hat when you went to check the mail, or kissing your spouse goodbye in your driveway in view of a camera the police can access. It means hackers can’t go from home to home looking for cameras that show a view of your children playing outside in order to find the best abduction angle. Privacy means police can’t bypass the search warrant process by just looking through all the available Ring camera footage in a given neighborhood for “black suspects” or “tall men” that look suspicious so they can start rounding people up and bringing them in for questioning. But we have no privacy if our neighbors are using Ring cameras. And that brings us to facial recognition technology.
The problem with facial recogntion
Once again, this sounds innocuous at first – it’s like having an AI watching out for people we already know are bad. But, Ring isn’t a guard dog there to protect our packages. It’s a surveillance conduit that just happens to have some uses for those hosting it. Read: Chicago police: Facial recognition adds “jet fuel” for criminal investigations These systems aren’t designed to identify criminals in real-time, they’re designed to build up a surveillance library that can be pored over at a later time. That’s the very definition of a surveillance state.
The second amendment can’t protect us from Ring and facial recognition
Imagine if every firearm in the US could be weaponized against its owners and their neighbors by the US government. Instead of protecting ourselves from tyranny, we’d be enabling it. Now imagine giving the government the ability to type a name into a database and figure out which civilian-owned gun was closest to any given person in real-time: that’s what giving them facial recognition is like. We install these systems and let cops access them because we think we’re protecting our families, in reality we’re ensuring that our right to form a militia and bear arms is meaningless. In 2020, it’s easily arguable that our right to privacy in the US is more important to our freedom than those granted under the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Yet police throughout the US continue to adopt faulty facial recognition technology simply because it leads to arrests. So do permanent military checkpoints, stop and frisk, racial profiling, and ordered state religion, and none of those are compatible with a free society either. Simply put: the companies profiting off these technologies aren’t going to protect us from the government. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Libertarian, or none of the above. Because the only people in our democracy who truly have nothing to hide are those who’ll trust the US government implicitly no matter who wins the next election.
