Warning, this is not a drill. The official police surveillance center located in Jackson, Mississippi plans to conduct a 45-day pilot program to automatically live stream the Amazon Ring cameras of different participating residents. Ever since the ring first made its presence known in the private security market, there was warning by Eff.org of its very own potential to be able to undermine the very civil liberties of both its users as well as its community.
Concern has long existed for a while amongst residents
There has especially been concern about the Ring's 1000+ partnership with different local police departments, which all facilitate in the bulk footage requests they get directly from the users without any oversight or even having to acquire a simple warrant.
According to an article by Eff.org, while people purchase these Ring cameras to put on their own front door in an attempt to keep their packages safe, the police can use them to build a very comprehensive CCTV camera network. The camera network allegedly works by blanketing the whole neighborhood.
Surveillance could help police save money on buying actual equipment
The particular service serves two different police purposes. It is said that the first would be to allow the police department to be able to save up on buying surveillance equipment and just put the burden onto the different consumers by convincing them to individually purchase the cameras to keep their property safe. The second stated reason would be to evade the natural reaction of both fear and distrust that a lot of people would have when they learn that police were actually setting up dozens of cameras around their block with one for every single house.
The program has been confirmed to have started as the police from Jackson, Mississippi, have already reportedly started a pilot program. This program would allow certain Ring owners to directly patch their own camera streams from the front of their own doors directly towards the police's own Real Time Crime Center.
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Jackson, Mississippi previously tried to stop facial recognition technology in the past
The footage coming from citizens' doors includes the owner both coming and going from their houses, the neighbors taking out the trash, the dog walkers, as well as the delivery people doing their jobs on the neighborhood's streets. Over in Jackson, this footage can now easily be live streamed directly from about a dozen monitors all scrutinized by the police around the clock, according to the report by Eff.org.
Even with refusal, the police can reportedly still see the person's house with the use of a neighboring camera. Just a few months ago, it was reported that Jackson stood up for all of its residents. This meant that Jackson became the first city located in the southern United States to eventually ban police use of the said face recognition technology.
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Written by Urian Buenconsejo
