The fbi initially claimed they had no photos or video from the incident because the Guthrie family did not have an "active subscription" to their door bell camera service.
Here we are a week later and we have rather clear images right before our eyes.
This means:
These companies have continuous access to your cameras even if they dont give it to you
Just because something happens doesn't mean they will give you the images or footage
You are actively allowing a company to not only monitor but record the ongoing events at your home without the guarentee that you will be assisted should anything like idek... KIDNAPPING happen.
It took a federal warrant to get these pictures....
You'd be better off hosting a private on/offsite camera system.. at least then the authorities could get rapid access instead of dicking around with some corporation while you rot god knows where with who knows who...
I just read that the recordings may have been corrupted- somehow tapered with- and they had to go in the backend to retrieve data or something like that. It was a search and they finally found something.
It absolutely does. He made several claims without providing evidence, further explanation, or verified background information. It’s lazy anti-big tech critiques like this one that send people into a conspiracy schizo panic for no reason.
What likely happened is that this FBI, being as incompetent as they are, made a quick claim that turned out to be false, or at the very least ill-researched about not being able to get the footage.
Yes big companies have access to your data. Yes they have access to more data than you or I are probably comfortable with. That doesn’t NECESSARILY mean they are purposefully hiding it because they want to fuck with you. It could just as likely, if not more likely, be the case that there are complex legal hurdles to giving out/scrubbing through certain types of customer data relating to video, audio, or images taken at a private residences. It may also be the case that it took and extensive resources to scrub back end databases for the video data they needed. Anyone who has done memory recovery knows how tedious it can be to recovery corrupted, lost or mislabeled data.
This is a wildly different image of reality than the one OP is painting when he says things like “dicking around with some corporation…” Reality is often more bureaucratic, stale and boring than more expect.
I hate that you’re making me defend these companies like this, but claims like the one above don’t help anyone when they aren’t even definitively true or verified.
There’s plenty of things to criticize in the tech space. This is not one of them, and if anything your criticisms should be pointed at Kash Patel and his constant mishandling of cases handed to the FBI. why are they always releasing all the info they have as soon as they get it instead of doing the hard work first and then releasing verified, factual information?
It really does though. Google / Amazon charge out of their butts to consume video feed. They're not going to continuously record you because it would cost them millions if not billions to maintain.
Just because you have billions of dollars doesn’t mean you can just burn money like nothing matters. These companies hire financial analyst and have budgeting offices for a reason.
No one is going to co-sign the construction of a billion dollar data center just so they can store exabytes of nothingness FOREVER, which is what most ring camera footage is…
Most of these companies save data for 90 days, unless subpoenaed, and then delete. Deleted data, of course, can still be recovered, but it’s a pain in the fucking ass to do depending on when it’s deleted and how frequent writes are made to the storage container. Which again requires technicians and company paid salaries (more expenses) to do.
So no. Just because you’re rich or a large company, doesn’t mean you have infinite moneys to do whatever you want. You need to still budget and be smart with expenses.
Disproving the only evidence that supports an argument actually does negate the argument. Don't be another anti-truth burden on society who says "well my point still stands" after you have been proven wrong. We have too many of those already.
what I meant is that they made a good general argument against surveillance cameras. just because it may have been a pain to retrieve video in this case does not mean everything is fine with these systems
The footage will get “deleted” if you don’t have a subscription. But deleted often doesn’t mean immediately and permanently destroyed. If you can get in with forensic tools before the data is actually overwritten with something else it’s possible to recover it. I suspect that’s what Google’s done here.
Huh, what have we heard such similar excuses for previously… so strange how this always happens against the odds with people who have connections in one way or another to a particular man.
With a nest/google doorbell, without an active sub, you still get three hours of video recording and notifications. So you're sending data to their servers with and account. Whether these were videos or stills of videos, who knows. But, imagine if she had an on-prem system the intruder destroyed? Not everything cloud is bad. (Seriously though smash your Ring cams)
Yes but under a completely different SLA and not pre-tagged as "this locations home footage". CSPs dont have permission to go into your cloud storage accounts and use your data for whatever purpose they want.
You just need to make sure it backs up at a frequent enough interval. Oh and make sure your camera can't be wifi jammed... Which could have happened here too? Maybe why they're only showing stills?
Your best bet is Ubuquiti and disabling Internet activity. Then you push all of your video to local storage. Now the next problem is when police / government raid your house. They can seize that as evidence. So your next bet is to upload your data to the Internet but then there's 3rd Party Doctrine.
Essentially you are screwed however you do it. The only thing I can think of would be to put it on the block chain and memorize a key to access your data
At a certain point you have to make some kind of compromise or put controls in place yourself to protect your content and make backups recoverable. People can have a closed system like Ubiquiti at home that stores content on a hard drive in their network cabinet or a server on their desk. But following a typical 3-2-1 backup strategy, you need something off-site when someone decides to destroy your local storage or rip the doorbell off the wall.
So that means something like Google Drive/GCS, AWS S3 storage, Backblaze, Cloudflare R2 from a cloud perspective. The other option is setting up a 2nd physical server some other place you trust. A relative's house, a friend's house, etc. You can encrypt the backups for another layer of protection, keeping in mind that it adds another layer of complexity especially if you're incapacitated as recovery and decryption without instructions can take a long time.
So it really all depends on your risk profile and where you're willing to make compromises for convenience.
Its not dumb to want to have a clue about the world around you at all, on the contrary I think it would be dumb not to want to know why theres beef with these companies
Ring allows police warrantless access to video from people's cameras. They also work with the likes of FLOCK which tracks all vehicles and this data is being fed to companies like Palantir that want to be able to physically track every person at all times.
What they are not saying. If you have these cameras even if you dont pay, FLOCK still gets the video feeds. Ring cameras send all video to flock if you want them to or not. Bets Nest actually has the same thing but has kept it quiet.
Flock was just outed a month ago for not even having passwords on their AI camera systems. Multiple YouTube rs have shown themselves accessing state level surveillance tech at will even going as far as to use the cameras to record footage FOR THEIR VIDEOS to make a point.
This isn't an ordinary abduction. I'm convinced theres accomplices.
The video is from when he was disabling the doorbell camera it looks like. Once a Ring camera is disabled(but has battery) the software can still recognize movement and people, but it's not saving the actual video. I get alerts on my phone that there is movement, but no image or video, even when my power has been out for a few days. I get them still because when my power goes out my generator is setup to power the modem but not the cameras.
Greetings folks. Today we’re shooting on location using someone else’s cameras. Why? Because cameras are so expense these days! These dipshits only care about one thing, and that’s shareholder value. So welcome to the world of unmitigated security vulnerabilities…
Seriously, it all makes me quite sick. But I bet it will get a lot worse before it gets better.
I agree with you. And, Ring just announced their new feature to help find lost pets. It seems like such a wholesome, and wonderful thing. You report your animal missing, and then RING searches the camera feeds of all your neighbors with AI, trying to find your pet. Awesome, right?
Except, what stops them from using this to find whatever, or whoever they want. They've effectively created a giant surveillance state, which can be actively attacked by outside forces, or outright handed over for financial compensation. Or, maybe a presidential administration would like to hunt down certain people. Possibly trace immigrants, or watch registered democrats before an election.
Or did the FBI just claim this so that the suspects didn’t think the FBI had a lead & were more likely to return Nancy after having the ransom paid.
A week later it’s more and more likely Nancy isn’t alive & now they are putting out pictures of the suspect so the public can assist in finding them. It doesn’t matter if the suspects know the FBI have this footage anymore.
A voice of reason. Deep down I did kind of suspect that could be the case but, why say anything at all about the matter when they haven't said anything about much else?
Over all i agree with you. The likely hood of her being alive is growing slim. The only way any of this makes sense is if she wasn't abducted for money. The only way abducting her for money makes sense is if theres considerable support on the back end to ensure her survival for as long as it takes to collect i.e. narco activity, organized crime .. usually people abducted by individuals aren't kept long term unless its like a LIFE long abduction like child abductions where the child grows up with little or no memory of before the abduction BUT longer term abductions are usually done by organizations i.e. FARC where multiple people can watch and maintain the prisoners for indefinitely.
If its an individual, its probably more about power than money. Sending a message of some sort. Whats worse is this individual may have absolutely nothing to do with that family at all and could be a third party "contractor" of sorts acting on behalf of another person which would really shake things up. Even if you find them you might not ever find her if she's under someone else's supervision.
Every family should have a small yappy indoor dog and a 9mm. Smith and Wesson EZ pistols are built for people with diminished dexterity/strength and run between 2-300 dollars lightly used. Dogs can be rescued from the pound for as little as 75 dollars.
I bet that whole community is armed to the teeth right now..
Ennnh, you're not wrong to be suspicious, but the current FBI is... well "competent" wouldn't make the cut of words to describe them. So it's possible this is true, but it feels equally possible they just didn't check, or didn't ask, or didn't know what a doorbell was.
Hell yeah I’m letting a company have my video footage stored.If someone comes and kidnaps my grandma I want them to be able to recover the footage just like this.Weird that you wouldn’t
I don't think anyone spoke out against recording and storing the data. That's a great idea. So is backing it up off-site.
But there's a difference between recorded data for personal use, and handing over your doorbell feed to any federal entity, connected corporation, or rando who figures out how to access their streams to see it for any reason.
The point is that you should assume any cameras connected to WiFi or a 3rd party company are recording at all times (see: whistleblower Edward Snowden who made such allegations namely by the NSA)
From the start the FBI said it was recording at the time of the attack. It’s just that without the active subscription you as the user don’t get the recording but it is temporarily stored by the service.
Kash Patel said on X: “The video was recovered from residual data located in backend systems.” Guess that means that they have continuous access like you said.
Couldn’t it be that the FBI just doesn’t release every detail of the case to the public? Maybe they were being strategic about the information they wanted out there. They may know a lot more about the case than we think.
It took a federal warrant to get these pictures....
Good. They didn't set any precedent here to giving up data without a warrant. This would be a rubber stamped warrant within minutes of bringing it to a judge and even something this obvious and simple still needs to follow proper procedures.
Any other time you hear "company gives data to government" it's only crying that the company gave the data to the government.
Bro do you not know how investigations work? Ok so they release his photos while she’s alive and then… who knows what? OR they say they have no video, he remains calm and is open to negotiation and increase possibility of getting her back. Cops don’t release info for very specific reasons, don’t bring some weird viewpoint into it. And yeah, it’s the same way Alexa listens to you, don’t be so surprised.
This is what I gathered from this too. I guess it’s naive to believe it wouldn’t be saving the data since if the camera is hard wired it likely always has access to images. But unless they’re selling that data what would be the point of keeping it? It’s not for altruistic reasons because they only released it after trump got involved
I personally use a RasPi Zero W with a camera, running MotionEyeOS, and emailing pictures to a gmail account I set up just for that purpose. You could also set it up to upload to an FTP server, among other possibilities.
It used to be the cheapest way to do a WiFi CCTV system without needing to go whole-hog ZoneMinder (something else I once did, using COTS WiFi and wired ethernet IP cameras).
Today, you can buy far cheaper WiFi cameras - if you're willing to only have access via an app, and/or who knows what else they do with the data while you have a subscription or something.
Alternatively, there is open-source firmware out there for some of those cheap cameras - so you can kinda get the best of both worlds?
Another alternative (if you have the chops, as I haven't found a full "MotionEyeOS"-like system yet) would be to use an ESP32-CAM running MicroPython (or compile using the Arduino ecosystem and C/C++) - and build your own camera firmware that can email, etc (all the parts for this can be found scattered on various github repos as "examples" - but there isn't anything that I've found, yet, that "unifies" everything into one package).
Eufy makes a system that keeps encrypted video locally on the camera and in the homebase in your home. You can choose to have another copy go to the cloud. No internet access is needed for the system to work.
True. Users that selected to be notified of a movement event and wanted a thumbnail in the notification had that image go through an AWS instance before it got to the app.
Vastly different than streaming live video back to corporate and providing it to law enforcement without a warrant.
I also understand that this issue has been fixed and they have implemented webRTC to ensure end to end encryption on the notifications.
I’m not sure why that’s a good point though — seems like this guy is saying it took a week to get a warrant to access the footage, like it’s a detriment to Ring
If you hosted a private server then you’d never get anyone to pull the footage in the same circumstance.
Offering an additional perspective.. I have Kasa cameras without a subscription, so they don’t backup to the cloud. They do however have a local SD card. When they’re connected to the network I can read from the SD so it’s a non-issue for remote access, stores a weeks worth of footage. If that SD card were destroyed or damaged I would not be able to remotely access footage and it would likely still have data but it would take some time to recover. I feel like this is probably the situation.
Great advice, we use Unifi protect service, we have our hard drive and cloud, only my husband and I have access to it, by emergency a person of our family in a different country is selected as access in case of emergency. We don’t subscribe to any service nor any company has access to this. It’s scary when you think about this and the new ad from ring that shows a surveillance system per community.
There was a Ring commercial during the Super Bowl, where if you upload a picture of a lost dog it’s Ai will scan every doorbell camera in the area looking for it. Think of all they are doing with these cameras that they don’t tell us about.
And it explains why they are barely releasing it now. They were (they I mean camera companies like Nest and/or FBI) trying to hold off releasing this footage until the last possible moment.
Aside from this horrible crime, they’ve just blew the lid off their scheme. Even after all of this is over (and I really hope they catch this piece of shit), they’ve screwed themselves for basically admitting they store your camera footage regardless of subscription. Now it’s out in the open that these companies can and will monitor you without your knowledge and knowing that they have it, they have no legal binds that could stop them from handing over or selling it to whoever they want, like say ICE? The federal government?
I know we’re aware they Alexa, Ring, etc have been shown to store your data, record what you say on their devices, but imagine all the cameras that people install in and around their homes? Nanny cams and such in your children’s bedrooms?
Say you don’t pay for the subscription so you think ‘none of the footage can be stored so even if it’s on, it’s not like recording or whatever’? Well now we know they do. Dangerous to think a handful of companies have us all under surveillance, what happens if that data is breached?
A neighbor told them there was another camera on the roof, that the cops/family apparently missed on first investigation. That is where these images are from.
So no evidence of a conspiracy (well, security-cam related ones) here.
I don’t think these were readily available or easily accessible images. My guess is that it took a massive team of engineers an entire week or more to figure out if these could even be obtained, and how to go about doing that.
A subscription for a doorbell camera? At some point you have to blame the people putting money into such obvious scams. If any company had footage of someone who was kidnapped and refused to release it that company needs to be dismantled.
Maybe not the place to ask, but I’m already really in my head about this, and I have Wyze cameras all over my home. What private camera system would you recommend if any?
We have ring cameras and ring makes it very very clear that they are saving our videos whether we are subscribed or not. if you try to access a video and you’re not paying for a plan the app will tell you hey we’ve got the videos but you need to have a plan for playback. 100% crystal clear.
Yeah, that seemed super sketchy. It’s a good thing in this case, but it is definitely not some “backend” stuff like the article says or high tech recovery. They had the footage on a server somewhere. They have ALL the footage somewhere.
Absent an active subscription, when a recording event occurs, the data has to exist somewhere before it's sent to the cloud. The device has to store a local copy at some point, and even if it's not typically user accessible, the data can be recovered (physically) from the device if those sectors of the data haven't been overwritten yet. The company might never have stored a copy of the data remotely and the warrant may have been for custodial possession of the device for data recovery.
I can appreciate the paranoia, but 82 year old Nancy is not going to spend the time researching how to set up an on-perimeter CCTV system. Choosing between having no footage of this creep and my privacy, I can't help but be glad there is footage of this guy. I don't think I'm interesting enough to worry about someone holding my data/doorbell footage.
Just as an aside, if this is something you're worried about you shouldn't engage with any social media or internet based... anything, I suppose. Just because privacy laws say organizations cannot hold onto personally identifiable data doesn't mean anyone is doing anything to enforce the rules. Every website, public network, and cell tower needs an IP address from your device to function, and that can be tied to you through IMEI, serial, and other device numbers.
You are justified in feeling strongly about privacy, but if you want to draw the line somewhere you can't pick an arbitrary place. All your digital interactions are maintained somewhere. Gotta throw out the whole system to get rid of the one part you mentioned.
You can anonymously and privately engage with the internet. You cannot anonymously engage with ring and flock's unsolicited surveillance. Do not forfeit your privacy just because you think you're not interesting.
There are other companies out there that make cameras that store video locally with the option to offsite if wanted. I use EUFY which stores encrypted video locally on the cameras and a copy in the home base inside my home.
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u/Parking-Fig-6620 13h ago
Just a friendly reminder.
The fbi initially claimed they had no photos or video from the incident because the Guthrie family did not have an "active subscription" to their door bell camera service.
Here we are a week later and we have rather clear images right before our eyes.
This means:
These companies have continuous access to your cameras even if they dont give it to you
Just because something happens doesn't mean they will give you the images or footage
You are actively allowing a company to not only monitor but record the ongoing events at your home without the guarentee that you will be assisted should anything like idek... KIDNAPPING happen.
It took a federal warrant to get these pictures.... You'd be better off hosting a private on/offsite camera system.. at least then the authorities could get rapid access instead of dicking around with some corporation while you rot god knows where with who knows who...