Problems with Mass Surveillance Data

This week we talk about mass surveillance, smart doorbells, and the Patriot Stack.

We also discuss Amazon, Alexa, and the Super Bowl.

Recommended Book: Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

Transcript

In 2002, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the US government created a new agency—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operating under the auspices of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was also formed that year for the same general reason, to defend against 9/11-style attacks in the future.

As with a whole lot of what was done in the years following the 9/11 attacks, a lot of what this agency, and its larger department did could be construed as a sort of overcompensation by a government and a people who were reeling from the first real, large-scale attack within their borders from a foreign entity in a very long time. It was a horrific event, everyone felt very vulnerable and scared, and consequently the US government could do a lot of things that typically would not have had the public’s support, like rewiring how airports and flying works in the country, creating all sorts of new hurdles and imposing layers of what’s often called security theater, to make people feel safe.

While the TSA was meant to handle things on the front-lines of air transportation, though, X-raying and patting-down and creating a significant new friction for everyone wanting to get on a plane, ICE was meant to address another purported issue: that of people coming into the US from elsewhere, illegally, and then sticking around long enough to cause trouble. More specifically, ICE was meant to help improve public safety by strictly enforcing at times lax immigration laws, by tracking down and expelling illegal immigrants from the country; the theory being that some would-be terrorists may have snuck into the US and might be getting ready to kill US citizens from within our own borders.

There’s not a lot of evidence to support that assertion—the vast majority of terrorism that happens in the US is conducted by citizens, mostly those adhering to a far-right or other extremist ideologies. But that hasn’t moved the needle on public perception of the issue, which still predominantly leans toward stricter border controls and more assiduous moderation of non-citizens within US borders—for all sorts of reasons, not just security ones.

What I’d like to talk about today is an offshoot of the war on terror and this vigilance about immigrants in the US, and how during the second Trump administration, tech companies have been entangling themselves with immigration-enforcement agencies like ICE to create sophisticated surveillance networks.

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In mid-July of 2025, the US Department of Defense signed one of its largest contracts in its history with a tech company called Palantir Technologies. Palantir was founded and is run by billionaire Peter Thiel, who among other things is generally considered to be the reason JD Vance was chosen to be Trump’s second-term Vice President. He’s also generally considered to be one of, if not the main figure behind the so-called Patriot Tech movement, which consists of companies like SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, all of which are connected by a web of funding arms and people who have cross-pollinated between major US tech companies and US agencies, in many cases stepping into government positions that put them in charge of the regulatory bodies that set the rules for the industries in which they worked.

As a consequence of this setup and this cross-pollination, the US government now has a bunch of contracts with these entities, which has been good for the companies’ bottom lines and led to reduced government regulations, and in exchange the companies are increasingly cozy with the government and its many agencies, toeing the line more than they would have previously, and offering a lot more cooperation and collaboration with the government, as well.

This is especially true when it comes to data collection and surveillance, and a great deal of that sort of information and media is funneled into entities like Palantir, which aggregate and crunch it for meaning, and then send predictions and assumptions, and make services like facial-recognition technologies predicated on their vast database, available to police and ICE agents, among others such entities.

There has been increasingly stiff pushback against this melding of the tech world with the government—which has always been there to some degree, but which has become even more entwined than usual, of late—and that pushback is international, even long-time allies like Canada and the EU making moves to develop their own replacements for Amazon and Google and OpenAI due to these issues, and the heightened unpredictability and chaos of the US in recent years, but it’s also evident within the US, due in part to Trump’s moves while in office, but also the on-the-ground realities in places like Minneapolis, where ICE agents have been brutalizing and blackbagging people, sometimes illegal immigrants, sometimes US citizens, usually non-white US citizens, and the ICE agents are being rewarded, getting bonuses, for beating up and kidnapping and in some cases murdering people, whether or not any of these people are actually criminals—and it’s illegal to do that kind of thing even if they are criminals, by the way.

All of which sets the scene for what happened following the Super Bowl, this year.

Ring is a home security and smart home device company that is best known for its line of smart doorbells, but which also makes all sorts of security cameras and other alarm system devices.

Even though smart doorbells, complete with cameras and other sorts of functionality, existed before Ring, this company basically created the smart doorbell industry as it exists today back in 2014, when it received a round of equity investment and changed its named from Doorbot to Ring. It was bought by Amazon four years later, in 2018, for a billion dollars.

One of Ring’s premier features is related to its camera: you can use your phone or other smart home device to see who’s at your door when they ring the bell, but it can also be set to record when it detects movement, which makes it easy to check and see who stole your Amazon package from your porch when you weren’t at home, for instance, and resultingly Ring door camera footage has become fundamental to reporting, and on occasion pursuing, some types of crime.

As a direct result of that utility, Ring introduced its Neighbors service in mid-2018, this service serving as a sort of social network that allows Ring device users to discuss local issues, especially those related to safety and security, anonymously, while also allowing them to share photos and videos taken by their devices. This service also created relationships with local law enforcement, and allowed police to jump onto the network and request footage from Ring customers, if they thought these doorbell cams might have photos or video of someone escaping with a stolen car, for instance, which might then help the police catch that crook.

It’s generally assumed that Amazon probably bought Ring, at least in part, to entrench itself as the lord of the internet of things world, as it launched its Amazon Sidewalk platform in 2020, which allowed all Amazon devices, including Ring devices, to share a wireless mesh network, all of them communicating with each other and all using Amazon’s Alexa as an interface.

In 2023, Ring was sued by the FTC for $5.8 million because it allowed its employees and contractors to access private videos by failing to have basic security and privacy features in place—so not only could any Ring employee view their customer’s private video feeds, hackers could easily access all this media and data, as well. Just one example surfaced in that lawsuit shows that a Ring employee viewed thousands of video recordings of at least 81 different female users over the course of a few months in 2017.

So Amazon was building a surveillance network that worked really well, in the sense that it was predicated on popular, at times quite useful devices that people seemed to love, but which was also quite leaky, giving all sorts of people access to these supposedly private feeds, and it was shared with law enforcement via that social network. It’s also been alleged that Ring (and Amazon) have used users’ footage without further permission for things like facial recognition and AI training. Their partnership with police agencies also allegedly created incentives for the police to encourage citizens to buy Ring cams and other security devices for their homes, creating perverse incentives. And again, these devices connect wirelessly to other internet of things devices, expanding their reach and the potential for abuse of collected user data.

In late 2025, Ring announced a new partnership with Flock Safety, a company that’s best known for its security offerings, including automated license plate readers and gunshot detector systems.

These are mass surveillance tools used by some governments and law enforcement entities, and they use cameras and microphones to capture license plates, people’s faces, and sounds that might be gunfire and aggregate that data to be used by police, neighborhood associations, and in some cases private property owners.

This sort of technology is incredibly useful to companies like Palantir, which again, aggregates and crunches it, on scale, and then shares that information with police, ICE, and other such agencies.

These tools can sometimes help flag areas where guns are being fired or where crimes are being committed, but they’re also imperfect and at times biased against some groups of people and areas, and some data show that not only is crime not reduced by the presence of these systems, but there’s a fair bit of evidence that this data often falls into the hands of hackers or is used by employees for nefarious, stalkery purposes, as was the case with Ring’s cameras. So most civil liberties groups, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are vehemently against them, but governments like the second Trump administration like them, because they create a surveillance mesh they can tap into and use for, for instance, figuring out where to deploy ICE agents, or, in theory at least, spying on your political enemies or ex-spouses for abuse or blackmail purposes.

Ring’s late-2025 announcement wasn’t widely reported, but in early 2026 the company bought a Super Bowl ad to announce a new feature called Search Party, enabled by their partnership with Flock.

The ad showed a neighborhood coming together to find a lost dog, using the web of doorbell cameras on all the homes in the area to track the dog and figure out where it went—all the cameras activated at once to create a surveillance mesh of live footage.

This ad landed with a resounding thud,, as to many people it felt more menacing than heartwarming, the new feature overtly raising the potential that government agencies, including ICE, could tap into it to surveil and track their neighbors. The response was so negative that Ring quickly issued a statement saying that it was no longer moving forward with its Flock partnership, attempting to reassure its customers that “integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever send to Flock Safety.”

This result is notable in part because it’s a rare instance of a major tech company backtracking on a major feature decision due to public backlash, but also because it suggests backlash against ICE is reverberating through other aspects of life and interconnected industries.

Ring device users mostly buy these things for their surveillance capabilities, but the increasing, and increasingly hostile and violent acts committed by members of ICE seem to have nudged the conversation so that folks are more worried about these agents than about the porch pirates and other criminals that these devices and this partnership could ostensibly help them identify.

It’s too early to say what this might mean for the burgeoning patriot stack of tech companies and government agencies, but it does suggest there are limits to what people will put up with, even when those in charge are adhering to a playbook that has typically worked well for them, in the past, and the devices and services they’re using to build their surveillance network are otherwise beloved by those who use them.

Show Notes

https://restofworld.org/2026/big-tech-backlash-alternatives-upscrolled/

https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/trumps-power-switch

https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/realestate/smart-home-cameras-nest-ring-privacy.html

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/platforms-bend-over-backward-to-help-dhs-censor-ice-critics-advocates-say/

https://www.theverge.com/report/879320/ring-flock-partnership-breakup-does-not-fix-problems

https://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceled

https://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/children-of-color-projected-to-be-majority-of-u-s-youth-this-year

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-expansion-across-us-at-heres-where-its-going-next/

https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-appointment-details-ice/

https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-ring-kills-flock-safety-deal-after-super-bowl-ad-uproar/

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-crashing-us-court-system-minnesota/

https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-employee-questions-on-ice/

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-ice-forum-where-agents-complain-about-their-jobs/

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