FBI warns that doorbell cameras — widely seen as police ally — could actually sabotage investigations
Doorbell security systems like Amazon’s Ring, which have long been considered an ally in the fight against crime, could actually sabotage police investigations and pose a safety risk to law enforcement personnel, the FBI warned in a leaked document.
The internet-connected cameras have been used to alert suspects when police show up on their premises to conduct searches, the agency wrote in a technical analysis bulletin issued in November 2019.
In one incident described in the document, a suspect remotely watched FBI personnel move through his property and alerted his neighbors about their presence there. The 2017 incident is an example of how such cameras can hinder an investigation and present a risk to officers’ “present and future safety,” the agency warned.
Online news website The Intercept recently spotted the bulletin among a trove of documents that were hacked from 251 police websites. The hacked data, known as BlueLeaks, “represents an unprecedented exposure of the internal operations of federal, state, and local law enforcement,” according to The Intercept.
