15 August 2022

RING NATION: Amazon's Comedy/Reality TV Show... Propaganda campaign to normalize surveillance

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San Francisco – Research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows that hundreds of U.S. police departments with deadly histories have official partnerships with Amazon’s Ring—a home-surveillance company that makes it easy to send video footage to law enforcement. Ring sells networked cameras, often bundled with doorbells or lighting...
 
An array of laptops, each with a virus image, except one, which has a surveillance eye.


www.vice.com

'Ring Nation' Is Amazon's Reality Show for Our Surveillance Dystopia

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Amazon's propaganda campaign to normalize surveillance is about to hit a higher gear: Wanda Sykes is going to host a new show featuring videos taken from Ring surveillance cameras, Deadline reported on Thursday. It will be called Ring Nation

The show is being produced by MGM Television, which is owned by Amazon, and Big Fish Entertainment, which ran ano


ther dystopian reality show: a piece of copaganda called Live PD which centered on commentary of police footage. 

According to Deadline, the show will feature lighthearted viral content captured on Ring cameras, such as "neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals." These types of videos frequently go viral online, but hardly represent the reality of what Ring is used for. Besides home surveillance, Ring is a source of surveillance video for police departments in the U.S. and abroad. 

Amazon has done a lot of work to turn the U.S. into a Ring nation off-camera. Ring’s surveillance cameras and surveillance network have been aggressively rolled out by Amazon mainly by cultivating fear in suburbs about crime, and by entering partnerships with police departments to give them unfettered access to surveillance footage. Last year, advocacy groups pushed for Amazon’s Ring to be banned entirely by the Federal Trade Commission over concerns its facial surveillance technology could fuel criminalization of Black and brown people in public spaces. 

It's unsurprising, then, that Ring Nation would come from the production company that produced Live PD. As Adrian Horton writes for The Guardian, "Think NFL Red Zone, but for arrests of people not given the chance to sign release forms because the show bills itself as live news." In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings, Live PD was briefly canceled along with Cops though both were revived just this year. And while Cops may be more familiar to some, Live PD was the more popular, more audacious, and more vile of the two by far.

Over the years, Amazon has tried harder and harder to roll out various forms of surveillance technology, enmesh us within this network, and normalize this encroachment of public spaces and individual privacy. In 2020, Amazon announced it was pausing (for one year) its rollout of a facial surveillance algorithm called Rekognition that it was offering to police departments after the tool was repeatedly found to be ineffective on its own terms and racially biased. In 2021, documents leaked to Motherboard detailed how Amazon’s new robot, Astro, would integrate with Ring to deploy surveillance technology to try and detect intruders. 

Amazon isn’t alone in this fight to cultivate an ever-growing surveillance apparatus—most of Silicon Valley is intimately involved in surveillance and the potential profits to be had by offering surveillance tools, analytics, computational infrastructure, and a host of other goods and services rooted in watching people. Still, Amazon’s Ring and attempts to normalize it harken an odious development. One peek into this came back in February, when a bizarre TikTok trend went viral where Ring surveillance camera owners made Amazon delivery workers dance for them.

At this point, it is hard to defend ownership of a Ring camera. Using fear-mongering about package theft and suburban crime, a surveillance company has convinced countless homes to affix a surveillance network node that police departments and one of the world’s largest monopolies will use to their benefit. And now they want us to laugh about it all in our (ideally) Ring-surveilled homes.


mesazona.blogspot.com

Ring-A-Ding Dong > Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn't Match Amazon's Ring's Sales Pitches

2 - 3 minutes

Here's we go again! . . . from the any-spin-necessary deptRing Continues To Insist Its Cameras Reduce Crime, But Crime Data Doesn't Back Those Claims Up
Tue, Mar 24th 2020 3:15amTim Cushing
" . . . Last month, Cyrus Farivar undid a bit of Ring's PR song-and-dance by using public records requests and conversations with law enforcement agencies to show any claim Ring makes about crime reduction probably (and in some cases definitely) can't be linked to the presence of Ring's doorbell cameras.
CNET has done the same thing and come to the same conclusion: the deployment of Ring cameras rarely results in any notable change in property crime rates. That runs contrary to the talking points deployed by Dave Limp -- Amazon's hardware chief -- who "believes" adding Rings to neighborhoods makes neighborhoods safer. Limp needs to keep hedging.
 . . . Worse for Ring -- which has used its partnerships with law enforcement agencies to corner the market for doorbell cameras -- law enforcement agencies are saying the same thing: Ring isn't having any measurable impact on crime.
. . . But maybe it doesn't really matter to Ring if law enforcement agencies believe the crime reduction sales pitch. What ultimately matters is that end users might. After all, these cameras are installed on homes, not police departments. As long as potential customers believe crime in their area (or at least their front doorstep) will be reduced by the presence of camera, Ring can continue to increase market share."
HEADS UP + LIKE SO MANY OTHER AREAS:
"Hitting the market when things are good and keep getting better makes for pretty good PR, especially when company reps are willing to convert correlation to causation to sell devices."
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1 One more report (following many earlier posts)

Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen

Then there’s this: since Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras. These partnerships are growing at an alarming rate. .
2 24 March 2020
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sa Police Department in The Spotlight Again > City Council "Study Session" @ 07:30 am Thu 06.17.2021

This starts off about 10 minutes into this Slide Show Presentation > Watch-and-Listen to what they have to about "a relationship" they have with Ring Door Bells + their Neighborhood Surveillance Networks

Official Meeting Details if you want take a look ahead of time

On agenda:6/21/2021

                                                               
Attachments:1. Council Report

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Kyiv’s Counter-Disinformation Unit: Google Maps reveals locations of Ukrainian military systems - especially since Russian groups had started sharing these images

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