Amazon Ring should get a warrant, like everyone else

There are emergencies — and then there are what some trigger-happy law-enforcement agencies tout as emergencies, without consulting anyone else.

There’s privacy — and then there’s living in the surveillance age, with a government camera on every corner, not to mention peeping out toward the streets from millions of American front doors.

Ring any bells?

Ring, as it happens, is the name for the surveillance arm of that “everything store,” Amazon, which has a finger in seemingly every economic pie in the nation.

Security-conscious homeowners can of course choose to put video cameras where they choose to, and to hook them up to whatever internet portals they like, in the pursuit of making theirs a “smart house.”

But such smarts can backfire, or become just a tad intrusive, as anyone who’s ever mentioned, say, how cool that new Sprinter looks within earshot of a “smart speaker,” only to find their email, text messages and social media overwhelmed with advertisements for camper vans within a few minutes knows.

As NPR’s Scott Simon reported this month, Amazon “has revealed that they’ve shared video and information from their Ring cameras with law enforcement officials without consent or warrant. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is investigating the matter. And in a response to his inquiry, the company said it provided video footage 11 times so far this year when an emergency request was made.”

It should come as no huge surprise that as the tremendous volume of surveillance video grows around the world each year, police agencies are going to try to access it. That’s what police agencies do. We have no doubt that many or most or all of the requests for Ring access were at least in some way legitimate, and made with the public safety in mind.

The problem here, the slippery slope, is the “without consent or warrant” part.

Law enforcement has constitutionally always had to get a warrant to knock down a door or otherwise access private property in the furtherance of its duties. Judges are available around the clock to create an emergency warrant, as they always have been. Just because the access is now through accessing “smart” devices doesn’t change the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution one bit: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things.”

In response to Sen. Markey’s request, Ring said that “more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies and more than 450 fire departments are enrolled in what they call its Neighbors safety app. And they have an online portal where they can request the data,” Markey told NPR.

Then he added that this marks “a fivefold increase in law enforcement on its platform just since 2019. So this is turning into a partnership between Amazon and the police of the United States of America. And Ring revealed that it has shared user recordings with law enforcement through a process that does not require user consent.”

The defense will be, though Amazon wouldn’t even comment for the story: “Well, these were cases of imminent danger, and there was no time to lose.”

But Markey’s response to that line of reasoning is the proper response of all freedom-loving Americans: “But if this information is compromised, it should have to go through the same legal process that any other search of private property would have to go through in our country. It just can’t be an exception because it’s available.”

And if we don’t object now, since it is available, law enforcement will use it, growing the surveillance society in which every move we make is tracked and recorded. And that’s not a society we want to live in.