Protection or surveillance: US police can access home video surveillance - ForumDaily
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Protection or surveillance: US police can access home video surveillance

Financially constrained and faced with a spike in homicide, Jackson, Mississippi leaders are expanding police oversight over the city. Residents and business owners will be allowed to send live video feeds from CCTV cameras, including popular doorbell cameras, directly to a dedicated center for real-time surveillance. Writes about it Yahoo.

Photo: Shutterstock

The technology is now undergoing final legal due diligence in Jackson and is attracting interest from other small towns that lack the resources to build their own surveillance systems. But not everyone agrees with this, as they fear a violation of confidentiality. Civil liberties advocates say these fears are valid, as technology could lead to increased police surveillance of people's daily activities and an increase in arrests for minor offenses.

The opening of a new dedicated surveillance center in the city made Jackson, who has struggled to keep up with advances in high-tech crime-fighting, one of two dozen locations in the country where police signed deals with Fusus this year. This is a small company from Georgia that strives to make life easier for people. US law enforcement is building networks of public and private CCTV cameras.

One of those agencies, the Ocoee, Florida Police Department, said it plans to use the home live streaming feature as part of a deal with Fusus approved last month. Other Fusus clients, including police departments in Minneapolis and Rialto, California, have said they are not interested in receiving live video from doorbell cameras.

The company helps police departments build networks of public and private cameras. The service includes devices (black boxes the size of a Wi-Fi router) that convert video from almost any camera into a format that can be recorded or transmitted in real time to a police surveillance center. Fusus contracts with police departments, which typically sell, subsidize, or donate devices to private users. Documents obtained from government inquiries show that Fusus prices range from $ 480 to $ 1000 per year per device.

The appeal of real-time surveillance is obvious to some of Jackson's officials.

“We can locate and monitor all cameras within a certain radius,” Mayor Chokwe Lumumba said in October when the City Council approved a 45-day trial of the program. “If someone runs out of the building, we can follow them.”

But the idea of ​​police having access to real-time video from a Ring camera — one of the best-selling doorbell camera brands — has spurred Jackson into a debate about law enforcement's growing reliance on private companies, and the privacy of residents.

On the subject: 'Fear is for sale': how the doorbell turned into a network that monitors America

Why Jackson?

Jackson is the state capital with a population of about 160 people. The city ended 000 with 2018 murders, the highest in two decades. In the same year, the US Department of Justice discovered that urban police technology was outdated, and this led to discussions about strengthening surveillance functions.

Lumumba announced plans to build a surveillance center in early 2019 following a series of deadly mass shootings. But progress has been slow and fragmented. The urgency of addressing the urban crime problem has only increased: in the first 11 months of 2020, the number of murders in Jackson has already exceeded 1995, the deadliest on record.

The Fusus trial program was attractive to executives because it saves money by shifting costs to businesses and homeowners who buy devices from the company.

"We're not doing anything nefarious"

Fusus says the program allows police to monitor channels with less equipment and office space than many existing police surveillance centers. The company developed it as an affordable option for smaller cities, Sahil Merchant, director of strategy for Fusus, said in an interview.

Camera owners can decide what access to give police, he said. Options vary from specific recorded video to alarm-triggered live broadcasts, from 24/7 broadcasts to complete failure. Merchant emphasizes that police cannot access the camera's video without the owner's prior permission.

“We're not doing anything nefarious,” he says. “We do this for public safety, not at the expense of civil liberties or privacy, because it’s all up to the user.”

Several cities, including Atlanta, Detroit and New Orleans, have negotiated with private companies to sell cameras to businesses, which then transmit the video to the police. An increasing number of these networks are equipped with software that is aimed at identifying people by their faces or tracking them by their clothes or license plates and transmitting all this information to police surveillance centers.

Ring distanced itself from Jackson's program and said it "is not working with any company or city in connection with this program."

In Ocoea, Florida, where the city commission last month approved a trial run of Fusus, Deputy Police Chief Vincent Ogburn said the department will seek prior permission from businesses and homeowners to access live feed from their cameras to help investigate crimes faster.

"Big brother is watching you"

But by striking deals with technology companies that feed feeds from private cameras to a centralized hub, police are ignoring demands for transparency - public bidding, public meetings, public installation of cameras, said Matthew Guariglia, an analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes making more available to the public. information about new surveillance measures.

Guarilla is concerned that police are gaining unhindered access to homeowners' cameras.

“If you put any neighborhood under a microscope, you'll find things that are illegal and people can be arrested for them,” Guariglia said. He believes live streaming also increases the risk of police abuse.

In Rialto, California, the police department hired Fusus to create a camera registration program and create a network of public and private cameras.

While the new system allows homeowners to stream live video from their doorbell camera, the department has no plans to install Fusus devices in homes and will only request recorded video from homeowners if police believe it will help solve a crime, said Capt. Anthony Vega.

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The Minneapolis Police Department has been using Fusus since the company's previous version, SecuroNet, provided surveillance technology for the 2018 Super Bowl. But the department has no plans to use live streaming from home, said Commander Scott Gerlicher.

“Residents may have the false impression that the police are watching their property, and some will view it as a total surveillance theory (Big Brother is watching you),” he said.

Aaron Banks, president of Jackson City Council, said that while an expanded camera network can help solve crimes, it shouldn't come at the expense of hiring more police officers, investing in social services programs, or people's privacy.

“People don’t want to feel like they’re being watched,” Banks said. “They want to do what they do every day and not be embarrassed about it.”

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