Amazon's helping police build a surveillance network...

If you're walking in Bloomfield, New Jersey, there's a good chance you're being recorded. But it's not a corporate office or warehouse security camera capturing the footage -- it's likely a Ring doorbell made by Amazon.

While residential neighborhoods aren't usually lined with security cameras, the smart doorbell's popularity has essentially created private surveillance networks powered by Amazon and promoted by police departments.

Police departments across the country, from major cities like Houston to towns with fewer than 30,000 people, have offered free or discounted Ring doorbells to citizens, sometimes using taxpayer funds to pay for Amazon's products. While Ring owners are supposed to have a choice on providing police footage, in some giveaways, police require recipients to turn over footage when requested.

cnet.com

Now that is creepy.

We are willingly creating self-surveillance networks. And in some cases the police are using our own money to increase surveillance on us. I mean that is nothing new, our money is always being used against us, but how bluntly dirty is this? To use taxpayer money to subsidize private cameras and then require cooperation. Likely sub poena.

Very long article with lots of juicy data.

Enjoy.

Throw in that the NSA no doubt has 100% full access to that video, and bam!

We're enslaving ourselves.

a reply to: Duderino

How about spending an evening dressed in fancy dress delivering junk mail and tape over every single doorbell with a camera that you encounter.

The "DUDE" would do it just for fun with Donnie in tow because the Dude understands freedom.

originally posted by: lordcomac
Throw in that the NSA no doubt has 100% full access to that video, and bam!

We're enslaving ourselves.

Yes....if you CHOOSE to.

a reply to: Duderino

Duuuhhh...... so is facebook, twitter, instagram, and probably this place honestly.

We are too far gone to complain about this. This surveillance is already all over the place 24/7. This may make it worse.

Even on highways, you're tracked easily by the tolls you pay every few miles.

Cell phone towers and Uber profiles track you 24/7.

Cameras on street lights are all over…

We're already in a virtual police state

a reply to: Duderino

Next day shipping tho

a reply to: Duderino

New Jersey is a God damn police state. I can't wait to move out of this state!

Surveillance is pervasive in the U.S. and it's worse in other countries. You could take extreme measures to try and avoid it, you may even succeed and escape if you plan it well enough. But you'd be alone living a survival lifestyle and on the run for the rest of your life.

Regardless of what you could or should do about increasing surveillance, I'd like to know who is doing the watching and why they are doing it. Those groups and individuals need to be watched and scrutinized to the same degree. We need to be able to watch the watchers. There needs to be a a public file on their activities using the same surveillance systems with all the same data they have available to them. Otherwise an underground resistance movement should have such a file and use it to subvert the watchers.

Once, at a local annual boating party here where there is a huge police presence (every agency possible), I wore a VHS/UHF walkie-talkie to scan the local emergency, police and park service frequencies. It was in plain sight and I wore an ear piece, it looked like I was plain clothes down in with the party goers. I few people asked me about it and I told them I wasn't a cop but was listening to them. I said, "Their watching us right? So who's watching them?" The cops never looked twice at me or questioned me, even when I was standing by them.