An insecure government surveillance camera has been located outside the home of an African American family at the above mentioned address. The victims include the adult male in the screenshot as well as several small children including at least one boy and one girl that have been seen playing in front of the camera.
The location of this surveillance was located after zooming in on the area above the garage that contains the 7144 address and failing to find a match with houses in the Dallas area that share that number. Dallas was the first search target because the IP address of the camera is in Dallas, Texas, so obviously there is some sort of proxy configuration here that allows a Texas IP to broadcast a camera in Florida. We also noticed a vehicle in the garage with Florida license plate number Y07ATM, but were still looking in Texas because similar cameras exposed in other parts of the country were near their IP locations. That changed when the sun started setting where the camera was. We were curious to see low light it was in Dallas, so we looked at a live skyline camera on some news site that showed plenty of daylight. Then we looked at Florida cameras that showed more darkness on the east side of the state and more light on the west side. Orlando is in the middle and after doing a Google search for "7144 Florida address" noticed this house with the same neighboring house and a house numbered 7147 across the street just like the camera can see.
Another target of this camera may also include the 7147 house across the street. Similar cameras exposed in other cities did not have two view ports.
Like every other camera exposed as part of this investigation, this one is obviously a government camera targeting a specific home or series of homes, password protection is all they would have had to enable to keep the location a secret, and due to their incompetence their secret is out. What is the creepiest thing here? Is it that the police are spying on people in this way or that anyone can use their cameras to peek into the lives these people?
In a similar case this past week we exposed cameras in Delaware. When the local media began asking questions they were password protected or removed. The state police later admitted to operating the cameras without warrants but said that they were only spying on what was in plain view.
Is This Legal?
Only with a warrant unless the only target is public property, which was not always the case in Delaware. Under federal law prolonged video surveillance of a home is considered a 4th Amendment search that requires a warrant. That has been the position taken recently by federal courts that have looked at similar surveillance since the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018). In the words of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts:
"Casual observations of a person's forays in and out of her home do not usually fall within the Fourth Amendment's protections. Here, the defendants ask the Court to consider whether a precise video log of the whole of their travels in and out of their home over the course of eight months, created by a camera affixed to a utility pole that could also read the license plates of their guests, raises Fourth Amendment concerns. After a thorough analysis of the parties' arguments and recent Supreme Court authority, the Court rules that it does." - United States v. Moore-Bush, 381 F. Supp. 3d 139 (D. Mass. 2019)
You can read the entire Moore-Bush decision by clicking on the PDF icon above this article. The First Circuit heard the case and either supported the district court or has not decided the case. We can't find any copies of a written decision, but we did find a recent police training manual stating that the First Circuit ruled against the warrantless surveillance.
The camera can be found at http://166.161.35.168:8081/viewer/live/index.html?lang=en
UPDATE: A sticker has been spotted. It is visible if you rotate the camera to the far left. Below you can barely make out the words "DRUG ENFORCEMENT" and if you move the camera up the rest of it starts with an A and is really blurry, but the rest of it appears to stay "DMINISTRATION" which would make the entire sticker read "DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION"