We learned last week that a group of hackers gained access to cameras installed by a surveillance camera company, and said they were able to access live feeds from 150,000 cameras inside schools, hospitals, gyms, police stations, prisons, offices, and women’s health clinics. Some of the video footage — showing patients in their hospital rooms, for example — was extremely privacy-violating.

The company, Verkada, does not merely sell security cameras; it also provides a variety of surveillance services to its clients, including cloud storage of video footage and remote access to camera feeds on smartphones or other devices. Because the company streams video to a centralized source (its servers) to provide these services, the hackers were able to access not just a few cameras here and there, but a vast number of video feeds.

What does this breach tell us about the state of security today? While the story has many dimensions, it offers four principal reminders about surveillance, video, and internet-connected devices.

1. The dangers of connected cameras

When you hook up a camera to the internet, you are making it vulnerable. And you are making the privacy of anybody recorded by that camera vulnerable. We have previously warned people who are considering buying a doorbell camera or other internet-connected camera for their home — or other kinds of “Internet of Things” devices — that they are susceptible to hackers. In this case, the hackers reported that they were able to watch video showing such things as a man struggling with staffers inside a psychiatric hospital, a man being interrogated in a police station, patients in a hospital intensive care unit, and a family doing a puzzle inside their home. The hackers reported accessing not just live video but also videos customers had saved to the cloud — in other words, onto Verkada’s servers.

Digital security is difficult. The bottom line is that it’s simply easier to attack an online asset than to defend it. To protect it, your defenses have to be perfect, while an attacker only needs to find one way to succeed — one weak password, one unpatched vulnerability, or one gullible worker. Many companies, especially less established ones, don’t make cybersecurity a priority. That’s because good cybersecurity is expensive, and with the occasional exception of a few days’ bad headlines, the consequences of failure typically fall on others, rather than on the company.

2. Device vendors can be device snoopers

Internet-connected devices are vulnerable to three broad categories of privacy invasion: hackers, the government, and the companies that make the devices. We don’t know of any government intrusion here — though any collection of sensitive data is vulnerable to domestic or foreign governments through legal or other processes. But this breach is certainly a reminder of that third vulnerability.

The intruders gained access through a pre-existing Verkada “Super Admin” account that let employees watch video from any of the company’s cameras. The very existence of such an account is a scandal in itself. Bloomberg and IPVM reported that the use of these Super Admin accounts was widespread within Verkada, with more than 100 employees having access. One former executive told Bloomberg that such access extended to sales staff and “20-year-old interns.” It’s unclear how many (if any) of Verkada’s customers knew about this centralized access, though if any did, they weren’t notified when it was happening — and it’s pretty likely they didn’t expect it to be so casually used.

Unfortunately, such centralized access to surveillance feeds by vendors is hardly surprising. Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell camera company, gave workers access to every Ring camera in the world together with customer details. Other companies offering similar services have also granted such access, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.

3. The inappropriate deployment of cameras

By providing a window into video surveillance systems across a wide range of institutions, the Verkada hack reveals how some of those institutions deploy cameras in inappropriate or unethical ways.

If I were lying in an ICU bed, I know I wouldn’t want a camera on me. And if there was a camera set up for observation by medical staff, I certainly wouldn’t want it sending data to the internet. Nor would I want an internet camera on me while I worked out at a gym or visited a clinic, or on my children at school. If there was a camera, I’d like to know it — and if it were connected to the internet or using face recognition I’d like to know that, too.

Videos viewed by Bloomberg showed that in one Alabama jail, cameras were hidden inside vents, thermostats, and defibrillators, and tracked both incarcerated individuals and correctional staff using face recognition. If that jail could do that, so presumably could any of the company’s clients who chose to do so.

Aside from Verkada’s failings, these institutions have failed the people who appeared on their cameras. Most of the subjects of this surveillance were not Verkada’s customers, had no relationship with Verkada, and probably were not even aware of the company’s existence. Even if Verkada had the best, most transparent contractual relationship with its customers, many of those subjects were still being surveilled in ways they shouldn’t have been.

4. The power of face recognition and video analytics

Among the services that Verkada offers are face recognition and other video analytics, including “people and car detection” as well as intelligent search functions that allow for “search and filter based on many different attributes, including gender traits, clothing color, and even a person’s face.”

We have written in detail about how video analytics can let computers not just store video but understand, analyze, and intelligently search it. That is making video a more powerful and intrusive surveillance mechanism. But it could also make video a more valuable asset for hackers. If face recognition or other characteristics are pre-computed, for example, the video archive could become more manageable to an attacker looking for a specific target.

In that respect, one finding was troubling: According to images viewed by Bloomberg, cameras in the offices of the company Cloudflare were using face recognition, but the company said that it has “never actively used it.” If the company is telling the truth, that would suggest that face recognition was being applied to a customer’s video by Verkada without that customer’s knowledge.

These four lessons should be taken to heart by policymakers, institutions, and individuals. The Verkada hack involved a veritable Russian nesting doll of victims: The hackers breached Verkada, which appears to have been intruding upon its customers by allowing free access to their video feeds. And those customers betrayed those who appeared on Verkada’s cameras not only by putting too much trust in the company in particular and in cloud services in general, but in many cases by collecting video that was inappropriate in the first place. Verkada touts centralized management of video as a must-have security feature, but this hack dramatizes the downsides of such centralization. Instead of providing security to its customers and the people captured by their cameras, that centralization provided invasion and insecurity.

Like other essential workers, domestic workers are bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic without the luxury of being able to telework, social distance, or even take a sick day. They also face unique and challenging circumstances due to the nature of their work, which is undervalued and under-regulated by the U.S. government. As a result, domestic workers often endure horrific abuses that go unchecked. Many are brought to the U.S. by employers promising a better life, only to find themselves subjected to forced labor, denied wages, and threatened with deportation.

Today, the ACLU and the Global Human Rights Clinic joined a coalition of workers’ rights organizations calling on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to acknowledge and address the U.S. government’s failure to protect the rights of domestic workers. These workers are overwhelmingly women of color and/or migrants, and include house cleaners, nannies, caregivers, and others who work out of public view and in their employers’ homes. Below, four domestic workers explain in their own words the all too common abuses that continue unheeded because of the government’s failure to act.

My trafficker was a Malawian diplomat to the U.S. I had known her for years back home in Malawi, where I worked for her as a nanny before coming here. When she was stationed in D.C., she asked me to come with her, promising better opportunities — I could get an education, get a better job, get out and see the world. As a young person, what else could you want? She gave me a contract and travel documents and rushed me to sign them even though I could not speak or understand English at the time. After I was granted an A3 visa, which is a special visa for diplomats’ domestic workers, we left for the U.S., where we moved into a home in a beautiful neighborhood in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Everything changed when we got to the U.S. My trafficker was no longer the person I knew in Malawi — she turned into a tiger. She forced me to work more than 16 hours per day for less than 40 cents per hour, cooking and cleaning and doing laundry, even ironing the family’s underwear. Who does that?

I lived in my trafficker’s home, but not as an equal. I lived like a slave. She made me sleep on the basement floor and forbade me from using any of the family’s soaps or other items, so I would not “contaminate” their belongings. She cut my phone access, so I was not able to communicate with my family at all for three years. I was refused medical care when I was sick. The only food I could eat were leftover scraps. Many times, I had to watch the family eat while I was starving and malnourished.

While I lived there, I was raped by a family friend. I could not receive any help because I did not speak English and did not know what to do. Whenever I tried talking to my trafficker about anything, she would call me ungrateful because she had taken me from my poor home village. Often, she would say “I can do anything I want, I’m a diplomat, I have immunity.” She also accused me of sleeping with her boyfriend.

The pain was too much. I was dying slowly, and I could not take it anymore. I wanted to die, but I knew that if I died in that house, my trafficker would throw my body in a dumpster and no one would ever find out. So I thought maybe, if I die in the street, people will find me and my family will learn of my death, maybe on the news.

One day, I found my passport and snuck out of the house through the garage. I was so thin, I managed to squeeze myself through the gap beneath the garage door. Then I ran away, leaving everything behind.

Today, I am a survivor. What happened to me doesn’t define me. While I still have not overcome my traumas 100 percent, I empowered myself through learning about who I am, my rights, and trafficking laws. I learned that trafficking is not just sex trafficking, and it was labor trafficking that brought me to the U.S. and entrapped me. Now I am a leader. I am a member of the National Survivor Network and a board member of the Survivor Alliance. I have spoken before Congress and at conferences. I work alongside NGOs to change policies, including a labor statute in Maryland that I advocated for.

Still, I am angry that domestic workers are invisible to many people. The whole time I was suffering, nobody saw me. I remember shoveling snow in my trafficker’s driveway, without gloves, boots, or warm clothes, watching cars pass as everybody missed those red flags.

It’s hard to identify trafficking of domestic workers since it usually happens behind closed doors, but the community should learn how to identify these situations and hold labor traffickers accountable. Domestic workers deserve fair treatment, decent pay, and benefits. The government, Congress, and our communities need to make sure survivors always have a seat at the table. Nothing about us, without us. It’s our pain and our story. You cannot fight trafficking without survivors, period.

When I first came to the U.S., I didn’t realize I was being trafficked or that my working conditions were not normal. I had come here for the same reason as a lot of Filipinos — a simple dream, especially as a father, to bring my family out of poverty. I didn’t know about my rights. All I knew is that I came here to work. I was just so happy and excited to be in America.

Before I came here, an employment agency in the Philippines found me a job as a cook at a country club in Florida. I had to pay them $3,000 just for all the paperwork to get here. Once I arrived, I stayed in a small house with a bunch of other workers, about six or seven of us in each room. I thought it was all normal. I believed in the lies my employers told me about the contract, the salary, the house, the visa. They told us we would get green cards and be able to bring our families here.

After working for a few months in Florida, they moved us to another country club in Arkansas. They told us our visas had expired, so there was no contract and no paycheck, just a cash advance of $500. My pay was only enough to cover my basic needs in the U.S. I had no money left over to send back home to my family.

They threatened that if we tried to leave, they would call the police and report us to immigration. The treatment was so bad that some of us ran away anyway, but I was too afraid of being deported. I said to myself, I’m here in America for my family. They were still suffering so much to get food on the table. All they could afford to eat was rice and soy sauce.

One night I decided to do it. I got on a Greyhound bus at 3 or 4 a.m., with just my passport and $500 in my pocket, and traveled from Arkansas to Texas, where I stayed with my aunt for a little while until my uncle found me a job in California. I took that job, but it ended shortly after. I had no work for three months. I felt homeless and that I had ruined my family. That’s when I became an alcoholic. I wanted to be drunk all the time, to fall asleep and forget everything that had happened in America. Every time I try to remember everything, it all comes back to me, all the depression and fear.

I thought about going home, but I knew I could not go back to the Philippines for a very long time. I told myself I was already here and that I needed to be patient. Back home we call America the land of opportunity. At that moment, I didn’t know if I could call America that, but I never surrendered or stopped looking for a job. I kept fighting for my family. The only thing I had to hold onto was my faith. I prayed that one day it would all be okay.

My life restarted again when I found a job as a cook and housekeeper in a big house in Beverly Hills. Now I am in another job, working as a caregiver. I still have anxiety every time I see police and fear being caught. I still have trouble sleeping. But I got help for substance abuse and treatment for my depression and anxiety. Today, the trauma is still there, but it’s not as heavy anymore.

It has been 13 years since I was home in the Philippines. I still have hope to bring my family here and get a fresh start. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to my children.

For me, coming to the U.S. was the realization of a dream, not only for myself but for my family. I was a physical therapist in the Philippines so I was really happy when an employment agency got me a job doing the same work in the U.S. But when I got here, it was nothing like they promised. We were thrown into a hotel in a rough neighborhood. There was no work, no visit to the jobsite, no employer nor a representative who came to welcome us and see how we were doing. We were left on our own. We survived for 14 days eating noodles from the 99 cent store.

I endured the treatment because I had no choice and I didn’t know the laws in the U.S. It was tormenting and traumatic being in a foreign land with no knowledge of the laws, specifically laws about employment and immigration. I also didn’t know before I came that I would have very, very limited job choices as an undocumented immigrant resulting from my trafficking. Living in fear of being deported was stressful and suffocating. Even more because I cannot afford insurance or medical care so I had to just take vitamins and pray to God, and by God’s grace I was able to stay well.

I learned a little from a childhood friend who has been a U.S. citizen for a long time and also works as a physical therapist. He told me that he learned about four physical therapists who had reported their agencies for violations of human trafficking and that they won their cases and got justice. At the same time, my Filipino values of perseverance and faith somehow deterred and delayed me from seeking help for myself.

Information about domestic workers’ rights and human trafficking abuses should be readily available to immigrant communities. It should be easy for workers to contact authorities, even their local embassies, and get help. Labor rights should be plainly black and white and both employers and employees need to adhere to them. There should be a collaboration between the host country and the country of origin of trafficking victims so these predators are stopped from the very beginning. We must treat each other with respect and humanity. We are human beings too and not just nominal subjects for profiteering.

I came to the U.S. from the Philippines to support my family. One of my children had cerebral palsy and was prone to pneumonia, and was always in the hospital, which was expensive. I could not afford his treatment. So when I found an opportunity for a job abroad, I tried my luck and took it.

An employment agency in the Philippines connected me to a job in a chicken factory in Washington State. To get here, I had to pay the agency $5,000 plus airfare. All the problems started when I arrived. The agency told me and other Filipino workers it would cover housing, but when we got there we found out we had to stay in another employee’s home for the first three weeks, and during that time we had to do her housekeeping and take care of her three children, on top of going to work at the factory. Finally they moved us to a housing unit. We were 20 people with one bathroom and no furniture. The women slept in the attic, about 10 of us.

Working at the factory was difficult and dangerous. My job was to debone chicken with an electric sensor on a conveyor belt. We had to work fast, which made it hard to protect ourselves. Fingers were always being cut. There were also immigration raids so we were in constant fear of being caught and deported. I had a visa, but some of the other employees did not have papers. All of us were afraid.

After six months, the company let us go even though our contracts were for a year’s work. Some of my other coworkers from the Philippines were afraid they would lose their visas from being out of work, so they went home. I missed my family and wanted to go home, too. I wanted to provide for them but at the same time, I have to pay my debt. I am still paying off the loans I borrowed to pay the employment agency fees.

In the Philippines, we have this idea that going to America will bring you a bright future. So even though I wanted to go home, I knew people would treat me like a failure if I did — I had been planning to bring my family there and I had failed. All of a sudden you’re back with nothing but debt. People think only criminals get deported. So I stayed.

To get another job, I had to pay the agency a $500 processing fee and they placed me at a resort in Sedona, Arizona. Our living conditions were better there, but the work was physically exhausting. We worked in teams of two to clean 20 rooms per day. I got sick with high blood pressure and vertigo, which made it very difficult to continue working, but I didn’t go to a doctor because it was expensive and I didn’t know about insurance. I decided to resign, but when I told my employer, he threatened to deport me. I ended up staying for three months before I finally broke free. Then I started looking for another job, one that would not take a toll on my health.

My friend found me a job as a caregiver in California. That’s where I live now. I share a place with a senior who needed help paying rent. I spend most of my salary on phone cards calling home, and while the job is steady, the landlord threatened to evict me because I am not on the lease. California’s eviction moratorium has prevented that for now.

I came here to support my family, but I am still trying to save up enough money to see them. My son passed away from his illness last year and I was not able to be there. Many times, I wished that I never came here, that I never had to go through what I did. Had I known that what my traffickers had promised were lies, I would have stayed in the Philippines in the first place.

All I want as a domestic worker is recognition. Domestic work is seen as a lowly job but it’s a decent job and it’s vital to society. We should not be ignored. We are important.

There are potentially thousands of domestic workers living across the U.S. right now, who have been trafficked and forced into labor while being subjected to many of the same inequalities other essential workers face. In fact, COVID-19 has only laid bare the dangers and abuses of domestic work that long predate the pandemic: low wages (often below local minimum wages), overwork, unhonored or nonexistent contracts, employer surveillance, lack of access to healthcare, and more.

The petition was filed by the ACLU and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. It demands immediate action to address these abuses, and draws from the expertise of four individual domestic workers as well as workers’ rights organizations including National Domestic Workers Alliance, Adhikaar, Damayan Migrant Workers, Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Human Trafficking Legal Center, Fe y Justicia, and Pilipino Workers Center.

Last year, then-President Trump imposed unprecedented sanctions against the world’s only permanent international criminal court and my work to support justice for the victims and survivors of human rights atrocities ground to a halt. Since 2012, I have served as the special adviser on crimes against humanity to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda. In this role, I provide Bensouda and her staff with legal advice and assistance in their investigation and prosecution of crimes against humanity around the world.

In June 2020, Trump issued an executive order authorizing the imposition of sanctions against ICC officials involved in investigations and prosecutions of U.S. personnel (and those of certain allies) for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It also punishes anyone, including experts like me, who supports these ICC officials, regardless of whether that support is related to investigations and prosecutions of U.S. and allied personnel. Last September, then-Secretary of State Pompeo designated Bensouda and another senior court official under the order, and the U.S. government implemented sanctions against them. As a professor of international criminal law and special adviser to Bensouda, I can no longer continue my work without risking prosecution and punishment by my own government.

That’s why, with two other law faculty and an ACLU human rights attorney, I challenged the Trump administration’s order in a lawsuit filed January 15. The order violates our First Amendment rights and those of other academics, lawyers, and human rights advocates by punishing our provision of legal and technical advice to the court. We can no longer share our human rights expertise, provide evidence of human rights atrocities to the court, or represent victims in proceedings before the court.

I had hoped that the Biden administration would quickly rescind the executive order. After all, the administration has promised that “America is back” and ready to work closely with its allies to meet shared challenges. The ICC is a critical part of the international legal order — the 123 states parties to the court include many close allies of the United States. Unfortunately, although the Biden administration has rejoined the Paris Agreement, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Human Rights Council, it has not yet rescinded Trump’s order and my co-plaintiffs and I continue to experience harm. Last night, we asked the court in our case to issue a preliminary injunction against the effects of the sanctions regime so our constitutional rights are protected while our lawsuit is pending. We must be allowed to continue our work to support justice for victims of atrocity crimes.

The ICC was created in 1998 to investigate and prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity when national systems fail to, or are incapable of doing so. The court began operating in 2002, filling a critical void in enforcement of international human rights and establishing a path to justice for victims of grave human rights violations when national legal systems have failed them. It is the direct successor of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which the U.S. and its allies established after World War II to try members of the Nazi regime for the atrocities of that war, including the Holocaust. Its establishment is a tribute to American ideals and commitments to justice and the rule of law.

Before the Trump administration’s order, I worked closely with Bensouda and her staff by providing pro bono legal advice and conducting trainings for the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP). Because of the order, I am no longer free to do this work. I have also been unable to contribute to important conversations about the ICC, including on recent judgments for fear of punishment. My students have paid the price as well; I had to cancel one of my annual research seminars in which students would have conducted ICC-related legal research in support of my work for the OTP.

The work of my co-plaintiff K. Alexa Koenig was also abruptly stopped by the executive order. Koenig specializes in the use of emerging technologies to help map and document human rights abuses and mass atrocities in conflict zones. With her law students, she regularly worked with OTP staff, consulting on how scientific and technological evidence and tools might be employed to aid the office’s work. Koenig’s work resulted in the creation of a Technology Advisory Board at the OTP. All of this work — including that of students and other human rights lawyers who collaborated with her — is now on hold.

My co-plaintiff Naomi Roht-Arriaza, who is also a law professor in our suit, was also forced to abandon her critical research and advocacy. Professor Roht-Arriaza has worked alongside Latin American civil society groups investigating the role of “grand corruption” — corruption occurring at the highest levels of government — in human rights atrocities. Her pioneering work on grand corruption shows, for example, patterns of murders tied to illicit mining and natural resource extraction operations in Venezuela. Prior to Trump’s executive order, she was meeting with OTP officials and urging them to expand the scope of their investigation into Venezuela to incorporate the issue of grand corruption. In the face of civil and criminal penalties under the U.S. sanctions order, Professor Roht-Arriaza had to cease all communication and engagement with the ICC.

The executive order has also interrupted crucial efforts to bring relief to survivors and victims of U.S. human rights violations. Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Human Rights Program and the final named plaintiff, represents six survivors and victims of forced disappearance, torture, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by U.S. military and CIA personnel in Afghanistan. The ACLU sought justice on behalf of these clients in U.S. courts, but the U.S. government intervened to have all but one of the cases dismissed. Until the sanctions regime stopped him, Watt was providing documented evidence of torture to Bensouda’s office to support its investigation in Afghanistan. He had also applied to represent his clients as official victims in the ICC proceedings, but can no longer proceed. For these six men and hundreds more survivors and victims of U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan, the ICC is their last hope for accountability. The sanctions regime extinguishes that hope.

As it stands, the regime bars me and my co-plaintiffs, under threat of severe civil and criminal penalties, from engaging in activity clearly protected by the First Amendment. The sanctions regime has not only chilled our constitutionally protected speech, but also that of many other human rights advocates, lawyers, and others whose work supports the ICC’s pursuit of justice.

One federal court has already ruled, in a separate lawsuit filed by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), that the Trump sanctions regime punishes those who speak directly in support of the OTP and its work. That ruling temporarily blocked the U.S government from enforcing its ICC sanctions regime against OSJI and four academics and human rights lawyers. Our lawsuit seeks to invalidate the executive order and block its enforcement against any individual seeking to assist the ICC.

President Trump’s unprecedented executive order harms international and U.S. efforts to provide accountability for gross human rights violations. It is actively preventing us from providing our knowledge and expertise to our students, colleagues, and the American public more broadly. The Biden administration should rescind the executive order immediately and demonstrate to the world that America really is back and ready to stand up for the rule of law and human rights. Our work — and the work of so many others who are supporting the pursuit of justice for human rights atrocities — depends on it.