Ring camera system is linking
to Flock surveillance network
Amazon is teaming up with Flock Safety to further expand mass spying in America, ArsTechnica reports.
Law enforcement agencies will soon have easier access to footage captured by Amazon’s Ring smart cameras.
In a partnership announced this week, Amazon will allow approximately 5,000 local law enforcement agencies to request access to Ring camera footage via surveillance platforms from Flock Safety.
Ring’s cooperation with law enforcement and the reported use of Flock technologies by federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has resurfaced privacy concerns that have followed the devices for years.Read ArsTechnica’s story here:
Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat known for his concerns over mass spyring, has sent a letter [PDF] to Flock chief Garrett Langley saying the public has been surveilled via Flock car tag readers (which also scan vehicles with AI), feeding the data to Homeland Security Investigations, ICE, the Secret Service and the Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service.
“I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them,” Wyden wrote.
ArsTechnica added,
In August, Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote that “Flock is building a dangerous, nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure.”
Stanley pointed to ICE using Flock’s network of cameras, as well as Flock’s efforts to build a people lookup tool with data brokers.
Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars via email that Flock is a “mass surveillance tool” that “has increasingly been used to spy on both immigrants and people exercising their First Amendment-protected rights.”
Flock has earned this reputation among privacy advocates through its own cameras, not Ring’s.+++++
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