Every time I write about the unfolding scandal of Amazon’s secret partnerships with hundreds of US police departments
who get free merch and access to Ring surveillance doorbell footage in
exchange for acting as a guerrilla marketing street-team for Ring, I get
an affronted email from Amazon PR, implying that I got it all wrong,
but unwilling to enter into detailed discussions of what’s actually
going on (the PR flacks also usually ask to be quoted officially but
anonymously, something I never agree to).
For example, when I published this story,
an Amazon PR person wrote to tell me that the statement that “Amazon
provides their local law enforcement with comprehensive dossiers on
everyone who activates a Ring doorbell, including ‘where they live, the
MAC addresses of each of their devices, and how to reach them by email
or phone’” was incorrect, but could not explain why a public records
request showed that the cops had all that information. At first, they
said that the Ring owners must have provided it voluntarily to law
enforcement, but when I asked if they really believed that someone had
found the MAC address for their surveillance doorbells and painstakingly
entered the long hexadecimal number into a website or dictated it over
the phone, they said “We defer to law enforcement for questions about
their process and operations.”
One common thread in the PR spin I get on this story is that any access
that law enforcement gets to Ring footage is a result of the cops asking
– via Amazon – whether Ring customer will voluntarily provide it.
They do not mention that if a Ring customer refuses a law-enforcement
request, the cops can just tell Amazon that they need it for their investigation and obtain it that way.
But they also don’t mention that Amazon has a whole program devoted to
helping cops convince Ring owners to be part of a public-private
surveillance grid, and that providing law-enforcement with warrantless
access to surveillance footage is a form of civic virtue.
A newly released tranche of public records
– from Maywood and Bloomfield, New Jersey – show that Ring’s internal
product team devotes substantial effort to coaching the cops in how to
prime their communities to provide warrantless access to surveillance
footage. These “Partner Success Associates” help cops spin a message
encouraging Ring owners and others sign up for Amazon’s “Neighbors” app
(which streams terrifying messages about local crimes, ganked from 911
dispatch calls, which Amazon secretly does deals to obtain), and then they use the app, and other social media, to normalize the idea of turning over video to the cops without a warrant.
This program shows how Amazon has constructed a business that rewards
cops for promoting its products: you sell Ring doorbells, we’ll get you
surveillance footage without your having to convince a judge that you
really need it.
Confused? Don’t be! We get a ton of questions about Fermi and figured we’d take a moment to answer a few of them here.
1. Who was this Fermi guy?
The Fermi telescope was named after Enrico Fermi in recognition of his work on how the tiny particles in space become accelerated by cosmic objects, which is crucial to understanding many of the objects that his namesake satellite studies.
Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist and Nobel Prize winner (in 1938) who immigrated to the United States to be a professor of physics at Columbia University, later moving to the University of Chicago.
Original image courtesy Argonne National Laboratory
Over the course of his career, Fermi was involved in many scientific endeavors, including the Manhattan Project, quantum theory and nuclear and particle physics. He even engineered the first-ever atomic reactor in an abandoned squash court (squash is the older, English kind of racquetball) at the University of Chicago.
There are a number of other things named after Fermi, too: Fermilab, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, the Enrico Fermi Institute and more. (He’s kind of a big deal in the physics world.)
Fermi even had something to say about aliens! One day at lunch with his buddies, he wondered if extraterrestrial life existed outside our solar system, and if it did, why haven’t we seen it yet? His short conversation with friends sparked decades of research into this idea and has become known as the Fermi Paradox — given the vastness of the universe, there is a high probability that alien civilizations exist out there, so they should have visited us by now.
2. So, does the Fermi telescope look for extraterrestrial life?
Fermi does not look for aliens, extraterrestrial life or anything of the sort! If aliens were to come our way, Fermi would be no help in identifying them, and they might just slip right under Fermi’s nose. Unless, of course, those alien spacecraft were powered by processes that left behind traces of gamma rays.
Fermi detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light, which are often produced by events so far away the light can take billions of years to reach Earth. The satellite sees pulsars, active galaxies powered by supermassive black holes and the remnants of exploding stars. These are not your everyday stars, but the heavyweights of the universe.
The LAT sees about one-fifth of the sky at a time and records gamma rays that are millions of times more energetic than visible light. The GBM detects lower-energy emissions, which has helped it identify more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts – energetic explosions in galaxies extremely far away.
Nope. In movies and comic books, the hero has a tragic backstory and a brush with death, only to rise out of some radioactive accident stronger and more powerful than before. In reality, that much radiation would be lethal.
In fact, as a form of radiation, gamma rays are dangerous for living cells. If you were hit with a huge amount of gamma radiation, it could be deadly — it certainly wouldn’t be the beginning of your superhero career.
5. That sounds bad…does that mean if a gamma-ray burst hit Earth, it would wipe out the planet and destroy us all?
Thankfully, our lovely planet has an amazing protector from gamma radiation: an atmosphere. That is why the Fermi telescope is in orbit; it’s easier to detect gamma rays in space!
Gamma-ray bursts are so far away that they pose no threat to Earth. Fermi sees gamma-ray bursts because the flash of gamma rays they release briefly outshines their entire home galaxies, and can sometimes outshine everything in the gamma-ray sky.
If a habitable planet were too close to one of these explosions, it is possible that the jet emerging from the explosion could wipe out all life on that planet. However, the probability is extremely low that a gamma-ray burst would happen close enough to Earth to cause harm. These events tend to occur in very distant galaxies, so we’re well out of reach.
We hope that this has helped to clear up a few misconceptions about the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. It’s a fantastic satellite, studying the craziest extragalactic events and looking for clues to unravel the mysteries of our universe!
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
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