[…]
“There’s a guy in there who just shoots the shit with you when you come in to pay,” Jackson says. “He’d heard that I had previously given some pro bono legal help to a family who owned a barbecue restaurant. He said there was family in the area where the dad had been caught up in one of the ICE workplace raids and they’re really freaking out. The parents were undocumented, while one of the kids is DACA and the other is a U.S. citizen.”
The man asked Jackson if he would be willing to “just talk to them and make sure they know their rights and where they can some help. I said absolutely. I’m not an immigration lawyer, but they were scared to reach out to anyone, so I said I’d go there and try to just give them the basics.”
[…]
“A couple days later, on March 6, I was working from home at around 11:30 when I got a notice that my VPN had gone down,” he says. “I didn’t think much about it. It can cut out from time to time. About 10 minutes later, I got a knock at the door.”
Two men were outside Jackson’s door, dressed in slacks and polos. They were not wearing badges.
[…]
The officers never identified themselves. They did ask if they could come inside.
“I said absolutely not,” Jackson says. “I asked for their names and badge numbers. They said they didn’t have to provide that information at this time. So I told them I’d be calling my lawyer and I shut the door behind me.”
Jackson says his mind started racing. “I needed to know who they were, what agency they were with. Then I remembered that I have the Ring camera. Maybe I could watch the video of the incident and figure out who they were from that.”
There was no video. “That’s when I learned why my VPN had gone down. It wasn’t the VPN. Someone had shut off my Wifi.”
[…]
“So there was about a 30-minute period where my Wifi was down, and it happened to be the period where these officers came to my door, which prevented my Ring camera from recording them,” he says. “I guess it could be a coincidence. But that’s a big coincidence.”
[…]
It isn’t that Jackson regrets what he did. But the visit from those two officers made him feel as if he should — as if he’d brought the visit from the police upon himself.
When I reminded him of this, he replied, “Thanks for saying that. It’s something I have to keep reminding myself. Helping people out pro bono is part of my professional obligation as a lawyer. I did nothing wrong.
He then paused for a moment. “But can I just be honest with you? I’m fucking scared to be in Texas right now.”
Jackson’s bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/clayjak.substack.com/post/3lni7qldokk2d
Well, the camera needs to talk to your onsite storage in order to store video. A simple consumer device like a Ring isn’t going to be hardwired; it just uses Wi-Fi (which every household can be assumed to have) to connect to your LAN and talk to the storage device.
The question is why the Wi-Fi could be turned off on the first place. Probably an ISP-managed router; I doubt they’d go and jam the entire spectrum between 2.4 and 7 GHz.
That’s one reason why people should use their own router and/or access point whenever possible.
I wish I could tell you how I know: they can burn out a wifi router, but it’s permanent and costly because they have to go replace it. It’s a rarity. They absolutely DO employ people as plants in one of our major ISPs that I know for sure, and I’m certain they’ll be doing it to all of them. Shut off your wifi for 30 min? Okay.
Whether your wifi goes off or not, if someone’s at your door you don’t know, don’t open it. That’ll just encourage people to do it again.
My doorbell camera has an SD card in it.
And it’s pretty trivial to hack a consumer wifi device. The government absolutely has that ability.