There's this thing called the internet, it's an interconnected network that allows people in one jurisdiction, say, the United States, to access servers in another jurisdiction, say, Russia, who is well-known to not cooperate with international law enforcement.
Get an American court to issue a subpoena for the data on my Russian dedi. The judge and prosecutor will die of old age before they get so much as a boilerplate response in a Cyrillic alphabet.
You gotta find a Russian dedi that is unwilling to respond to subpoenas but also secure enough not to be compromised by the NSA, who presumably has an ongoing operation to monitor “sketchy hosts” and poke holes in them by signing up, testing the internal management infrastructure, etc…
NSA is not a law enforcement organization, and the national security need to keep NSA processess, techniques, tools, and practices as secret as possible is a powerful motivator to keep any traces of NSA capabilities far away from the legal discovery process of a courtroom. Parallel discovery is possible, but do you think the NSA is eager to risk tipping their hand to Russia just over some nobody's CCTV footage?
While this is true, the Fifth Amendment protects witnesses from being forced to incriminate themselves, and there is currently no law compelling key (or password) disclosure in the United States.
That's partially true. Self incrimination refers to testimonial acts, and turning over data on a hard drive (or a physical key) is not a testimonial act.
No one has mentioned Frigate. It has taken the "homelab"/selfhosted world by storm & utterly dominates. Open source, works great, & by far some of the most sophisticated detection/triggering schemes one can acquire, period. https://frigate.video/
I have two Hanwha units I never got around to using at my last place. H.265 IP streaming out. Onvif is the main standard everyone seems to use for streaming out.
From a DIY relatively easy perspective most NAS box (Synology & QNAP) come with "Surveillance Station" type software that handles network cameras and ring buffer storage of footage with addons for { motion detection | face recognition | alerts ( SMS | text | email ) | etc. }
The consumer boxes typically have something like Two Cameras Free (flat rate one time fee for each extra camera ($50 each for Synology)).
I believe (but haven't recently checked) that FreeNAS | TrueNAS setup's likely come with open source camera software .. YMMV.
The NAS advantage is you can have a single central home NAS box doing home storage and camera footage storage - disadvantage (of single box) is having camera footage "seized" by police or intruders in event of incident, yada yada ya.
I should know more but I still use software I wrote years back for handling images & footage from exploration geophysics craft ( cars | boats | airframes ) because "it was sitting about and worked".
Reolink is fairly inexpensive but their apps are pretty lacking.
Unifi Protect is my go-to because of usability but does (somewhat) rely on their SSO cloud login. All stored locally though on purchased NVRs and their app is soooo much better than Reolink's.
Reolink outside camera’s are too cheaply build. I have several and most have been replaced within a year. I am looking for alternatives that are built better.
I attest to reolink, have used it for security, 16 cameras, 3000 miles away, for ~2-3 years. Setup includes UPS on everything. Has been very stable. It even has a pretty easy to reverse engineer cgi-bin API (and very insecure) but sadly my ISP plugged the firewall hole I made for that :(
I have in some cameras had issues with connectivity but as far as I can tell, it's from using an indoor ethernet cable outside... and the RJ-45 end-of-cable wire threads literally dissolve into dust from the moisture... but that's not on the camera
Depends on how much you want to spend, though some low price units often hit well above their weight, it seems.
It also depends where you stand ethically - for example, Hikvision often makes great stuff, but they also literally built a camera with an AI built-in that identifies Uyghur people and triggers an alarm if it does.
The Hook Up does reviews heavily focused on image quality, and setup/installation, both physically and network/software wise. He often covers a wide range of price points instead of just focusing on cheap stuff or expensive stuff, and does image tests in daylight, nighttime, stationary, moving, license plate and person, etc. Even does edge-of-the-lens tests to find cameras that have crappy lenses.
The current 'hotness' would be low-light color cameras; sensors have gotten good enough that some ambient light will do, and the color helps with IDing people's clothing, and cars. Potentially license plates, too.
Hardly uses my gigabit connection, and the cloud video is impossible to destroy by anyone with access to the cameras.
And it's my own Linux server. Nobody is going to hand anything over to the authorities behind my back.