John Oliver used the latest episode of “Last Week Tonight” to take a deep dive into the frightening ways police use surveillance tools.
Oliver turned his attention to Rialto, California, where police can reportedly tap into over 150 livestreams across private businesses via cameras from Fusus, a company that aims to provide departments with fast access to privately owned cameras and recorded footage.
“Technology is amazing, but it does feel like turning on the panopticon should be a bit harder than that,” Oliver stressed.
Oliver highlighted how Rialto requires new businesses to link their cameras to Fusus, an effort that nudged his team to file several public records requests with the city’s police department, including one for a “searchable digital file” of a log database showing when police “peeked” at a private camera.
The result? His team received a “huge” 30,413-page PDF file that, when printed out, filled up a cart that one of the show’s staffers rolled out onto the set.
“Last Week Tonight” combed through the massive document and uncovered well over 100 occasions of police accessing cameras at fast food places, instances that include a check on the grill at a local Wienerschnitzel as well as a two-hour monitoring session across five cameras inside a Chick-fil-A.
“[That] feels a little weird to me,” Oliver said.
He went on to note that police spent “hundreds of hours” accessing cameras at the local Days Inn, including one facing the hotel’s pool.
“And come on, getting secretly watched in your swimsuit is not supposed to be one of the perks of staying at the Days Inn,” Oliver quipped.
The department, per Oliver, insisted that some of the hits involved monitoring a wider area that included cameras in those locations, or the hits were linked to cameras that were left on in the background at the office.
“But that is just not as reassuring as I think they want it to sound,” he said.
“Look, it sure seems to me like these surveillance tools have much bigger flaws than the people selling and using them are comfortable admitting.”
