Many people were not just surprised but quite shocked and alarmed to learn that what they thought was merely their own personal security system now has the ability to link with countless other Ring cameras to form a neighborhood-wide (or city-wide, or state-wide) surveillance dragnet. That Amazon emphasized that this feature is available (for now) only to those who “opt-in” did not assuage concerns.

Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program as previewing “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.”

Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today. The backlash became so severe that, just days later, Amazon — seeking to assuage public anger — announced the termination of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company (while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm).

The Amazon ad seems to have triggered a long-overdue spotlight on how the combination of ubiquitous cameras, AI, and rapidly advancing facial recognition software will render the term “privacy” little more than a quaint concept from the past. As EFF put it, Ring’s program “could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone.”

Those concerns escalated just a few days later in the context of the Tucson disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of long-time TODAY Show host Savannah Guthrie. At the home where she lives, Nancy Guthrie used Google’s Nest camera for security, a product similar to Amazon’s Ring.

Guthrie, however, did not pay Google for a subscription for those cameras, instead solely using the cameras for real-time monitoring. As CBS News explained, “with a free Google Nest plan, the video should have been deleted within 3 to 6 hours — long after Guthrie was reported missing.” Even professional privacy advocates have understood that customers who use Nest without a subscription will not have their cameras connected to Google’s data servers, meaning that no recordings will be stored or available for any period beyond a few hours.

For that reason, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced early on “that there was no video available in part because Guthrie didn’t have an active subscription to the company.” Many people, for obvious reasons, prefer to avoid permanently storing comprehensive daily video reports with Google of when they leave and return to their own home, or who visits them at their home, when, and for how long.

Despite all this, FBI investigators on the case were somehow magically able to “recover” this video from Guthrie’s camera many days later. FBI Director Kash Patel was essentially forced to admit this when he released still images of what appears to be the masked perpetrator who broke into Guthrie’s home. (The Google user agreement, which few users read, does protect the company by stating that images may be stored even in the absence of a subscription.)

While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.” 

All of that might be encouraging if not for the fact that this was the exact playbook run by Israel and the U.S. prior to their last joint bombing campaign on Iran. In the weeks leading up to Israel’s surprise attack, Trump had repeatedly assured the public, and Iran, that he believed negotiations were rapidly progressing to a deal that would render unnecessary military conflict with Iran.

And, just as now, coordinated leaks — typically laundered through Axios’ always-helpful Barak Ravid, the former IDF soldier who served in Israel’s notorious intelligence Unit 8200 — depicted a major rift between the two leaders as a result of Trump’s refusal to sanction a war with Iran. It seems clear that last year’s reports of a major “rift” were designed to lower Iran’s guard against what Trump ultimately acknowledged was a jointly planned U.S./Israel attack.

The supposed “dispute” between Washington and Tel Aviv this time rests on the scope of the deal with Iran. Israel’s fiercest loyalists in the U.S. have been demanding that Trump send the U.S. military to achieve Netanyahu’s longest and most supreme goal: having the U.S. military impose regime change on Israel’s most formidable regional enemy and replace it with a pliable puppet.

The sudden outbreak of deep concern over the human rights of Iranian protesters, from the same crowd that has cheered on every U.S. and Israeli war for decades, was quite obviously intended to provoke and even force a U.S. war to dislodge the Iranian government from power. This ritual is depressingly familiar to anyone paying even minimal attention to U.S. wars over the last several decades.

As I have long documented, feigned concern for oppressed peoples is always the tactic of choice for Washington’s neocons and warmongers. When they were trying in 2005 to force former President George W. Bush to go “from Baghdad to Tehran” on what was intended to be his regime-change crusade against Israel’s enemies, Americans were suddenly subjected to stories about the cruel and abusive treatment of Iranian gay men, as if that were a motivating factor in agitating for regime change there. (Similar concerns are rarely, if ever, expressed about the at least equally repressive behavior of friendly governments in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Uganda — all governments which the U.S. actively supports.)

What Israel and its American supporters most fear is a U.S. deal with Iran that will only resolve the question of Iran’s nuclear program, while leaving the current government in place. But the position of the U.S. government and of President Trump has long been that the threat posed to the U.S. by Iran comes from the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon. By Trump’s own repeatedly stated views, that is the only legitimate concern of the U.S. when it comes to Iran.

But Israel has a far more ambitious agenda when it comes to that country. For that reason, Israel — as it did last June — is demanding the imposition of pre-conditions on Iran to which Israel knows Iran would and could never agree.

As the Israeli journalist Guy Azriel reported this week: “Despite the apparent lack of tangible progress in the Iran talks over the weekend and the unresolved gaps between Washington and Tehran, concern is growing in Jerusalem over the trajectory of the U.S.-led negotiations[.] … In Israel, there is mounting fear that any emerging deal could fall short of addressing the country’s core demands, not only regarding Iran’s regional terror proxies, but above all its ballistic missile program.”

In other words, Israel is demanding that the U.S. go to war with Iran even if Tehran satisfies Trump’s demands on its nuclear program. Netanyahu is insisting that Trump also require Iran to give up its ballistic missiles before any deal can be signed: something no country would ever do.

It may be rational for Israel to wish that their main regional rivals were left completely defenseless against any possible Israeli attack. President Trump himself admitted that Iran’s ballistic missiles were used to great effect to retaliate against Israel for its attack last June: “Israel got hit very hard, especially the last couple of days. Israel was hit really hard,” the President said, adding, “Those ballistic missiles, boy, they took out a lot of buildings.”

But what does that desire have to do with the United States? And why would any country, let alone Iran — which was just heavily bombed for almost two weeks last June — agree to give up conventional weapons that serve as a deterrent for future Israeli attacks?

Despite the best propaganda efforts of the Ellison-owned, Bari Weiss-led CBS News to convince Americans that Iran’s ballistic missiles somehow pose a threat to the U.S. rather than just Israel, the reality is that Iran cannot and does not pose a threat to the U.S., particularly if there is an agreement in place to ensure Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons (such an agreement had been in place that, by all accounts, provided a comprehensive inspection regime at Iranian facilities before it was nullified in 2017 by the U.S.).

The very idea that the U.S. should even consider sending its own citizens to fight a war against Iran is the consummate example of Israel having Americans fight wars that serve Israel’s national interest but not Americans’ interests. In the days leading up to Netanyahu’s latest in a series of visits to the U.S., Israeli officials began publicly threatening that they would attack Iran on their own if Trump refused to do it for them.