PITTSBURGH (AP) - Drive Route 19 in Washington County and whether you’re in a high-speed chase or stopping for every red light, your passage may be recorded in a police database for years to come and potentially available to federal agencies under a proposed Homeland Security plan.
From the county seat north, the artery is patrolled by police cruisers equipped with automated license plate recognition cameras. They feed into a database in North Strabane which receives, annually, around two million plate numbers - tagged with times and locations - including data from Pittsburgh, a few of its suburbs and Johnstown.
The server can instantly alert officers if a passing car is stolen or owned by a fugitive. It has occasionally allowed officers to look back in time to solve crimes.
But for every criminal caught, such systems record tens of thousands of vehicles associated with no crime. Records of their passing sit on a police computer server until it fills up, which takes about five years.
Privacy advocates argue that the occasional arrest doesn’t justify the proliferation of systems that primarily surveil the innocent.
Plates are “a tool that was created at a time when cars were started by cranking a handle, and clearly intended to identify a vehicle in specific circumstances when the vehicle was doing something wrong,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for privacy issues with the American Civil Liberties Union. “But now that has combined with technology to allow the government to track all vehicles.”
Such systems nationwide would be accessible to federal officials under a planned Department of Homeland Security arrangement. The department is seeking bids from companies that gather license plate data to find out how much they would charge to grant access to law enforcement officers at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.
A Homeland Security spokeswoman emphasized that the agency conducted a “privacy impact assessment” and that the proposal would provide privacy and civil liberty protections.
“The updated solicitation issued by ICE seeks to provide its law enforcement personnel with access to a previously established private sector run and managed license plate database that is already being used by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies across the United States,” Marsha Catron said last week. “ICE neither seeks to build a database nor collect or store bulk license plate reader data.”
Go-to technology
North Strabane Officer John Wybranowski, who runs the plate camera program, would like to expand his network, pointing to a 12-county system that spans parts of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. He said fears of misuse are overblown, because officers aren’t allowed to tap the data “until we need it for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.”
Following a February shooting at Monroeville Mall, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. singled out one tool that the property managers should have adopted: plate cameras.
“We wanted them to invest in technology, especially license plate recognition technology,” he said then.
For years, Zappala has been helping municipalities to buy plate cameras as part of a growing network of surveillance devices countywide. Four years ago, for instance, his office worked with the Port of Pittsburgh to land federal money to cover most of the $96,500 price tag of a video security system for Homestead, including $17,280 for plate cameras.
The Pittsburgh region is perfect for license plate recognition, according to John Hudson, whose firm, J.P. Hudson and Associates, of Beaver, managed the Homestead installation. Most traffic comes in and out through a handful of highways, bridges and tunnels, he noted.
“If you come into the city and commit a crime,” he said, “they will find you.”
“It would be nice to know that a known drug dealer has just entered your municipality, and your officer can monitor what they’re doing,” said Jason Miller, owner of Surveillance Group Inc., an Avalon-based contractor that installs the systems.
It’s not always that easy.
For instance, when a spate of robberies spooked businesses in Regent Square, Zappala helped Edgewood and Swissvale to install a camera and license plate recognition system. The chiefs of those municipalities said they ended up solving the robberies through traditional, cooperative policing, and haven’t made much use of the plate camera since.
Still, the plate camera remains posted, sending a stream of letters, numbers, dates and times to Surveillance Group’s server.
To the ACLU, that illustrates the inexorable creep of untethered surveillance.
“It’s so rare that once you start using a technology, you stop using it, especially when it kind of runs in the background,” said Sara Rose, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “Collecting the data, without a good reason to do so, when you’re not using it, creates significant privacy concerns.”
Baldwin Borough, which has had a plate camera since 2011, was sensitive to civil liberties concerns from the beginning, according to Chief Mike Scott. The borough’s system reveals stolen cars and suspended licenses, but doesn’t automatically record vehicle locations and only holds data for 30 days.
In response to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette records request, the city of Pittsburgh confirmed that its Bureau of Police has used plate cameras, but could not provide any policy governing the data.
Ebb and flow
While Zappala and others push plate cameras, the state police have scaled back their use.
In 2011, the state police had 25 plate recognition cameras for use on cruisers and deployed across the state. During a two-and-a-half-year period ending in early 2012, troopers used the plate cameras for a total of 62,411 hours and recorded 12.06 million plates, leading to the recovery of 99 stolen vehicles, 52 felony arrests and 69 misdemeanor arrests, according to the department’s response to an ACLU records request.
During 2013 and 2014, by comparison, the agency ran its plate cameras for a total of 4,976 hours, according to records provided in response to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette right-to-know request. The system recorded 2.08 million license plates during those two years, but the department attributes only 26 arrests to license plate recognition. That’s one arrest per 80,000 plate reads.
Asked for its policy regarding the use of the plate cameras and the retention of the data, the State Police indicated that they had no record of any policy.
The Pennsylvania Auto Theft Prevention Authority bought around 60 plate cameras from 2006 through 2009, said its executive director Steven Wheeler. He estimated that more than half are still in use.
The authority loaned out the cameras - which cost $17,000 to $19,000 per year - to departments statewide. The authority gives the plate cameras credit for 42 arrests and 231 vehicles recovered in 2013, and 33 arrests and 283 vehicles recovered last year.
The Drug Enforcement Administration launched a plate camera system in 2008, according to documents the ACLU got through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The DEA boasted in the documents that the system has “verified defendant statements, tracked fugitives, solved a gang related homicide, identified vehicles involved in vehicular homicide … identified the routes and methods used to transport drugs and weapons” and in 2010 alone led to $80.6 million in cash seizures.
The DEA lets other law enforcement query the database, which can include “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos,” according to an email obtained by the ACLU.
Private plate data
The plate camera industry is now eyeing the private sector.
License plate recognition “is definitely a growth market,” said Jean-Pierre Picard, product marketing manager at Montreal-based Genetec Inc., a maker of the cameras. Malls can use them to get educated guesses about the geographic spread of their shoppers. Casinos can detect the vehicles of self-identified problem gamblers.
The problem with that, according to the ACLU’s Stanley, is that private data troves aren’t subject to public sector accountability, but are ultimately within the government’s grasp.
“When private companies build up big databases of personal information, the government can demand or buy that information,” he said.
Catron of Homeland Security said safeguards were in place in potential government use of data.
“Among other protections designed to guard against potential misuse, access would be strictly limited to those ICE employees properly trained and authorized to use the database and will include internal controls, like an audit trail, to ensure the database is only used for official, sanctioned, law enforcement activity. Accountability, including potential disciplinary measures, will also exist for personnel who abuse or violate the rules associated with access to license plate reader data. These restrictions will provide essential privacy and civil liberty protections, while enhancing our agents’ and officers’ ability to locate and apprehend suspects who could pose a threat to national security and public safety.”
But some privacy advocates were doubtful about protections. “If this goes forward, DHS will have warrantless access to location information going back at least five years about virtually every adult driver in the U.S., and sometimes, to their image as well,” Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democarcy & Technology told The Washington Post.
Dogged pursuit
Technology enthusiasts in local law enforcement counter that the safety improvements enabled by plate data outweigh vague privacy concerns.
“If you’ve got a plate (number), and a robbery, or God forbid a child abduction, wouldn’t it be useful to have that information?” asked Washington County District Attorney Eugene Vittone.
Officer Wybranowski said that Washington County departments used the database to nab a dog thief. The victims “were able to get a partial plate,” he said. “They described it as a green Jeep.”
The department ran it through the plate read database. “OK, here’s a green jeep that matched. We were able to, at that point, figure out that this is the person who owns (the Jeep).” Crime solved, dog returned.
Castle Shannon’s small department leased a plate camera and later bought a used one. Two of its vehicles carry roof racks with infrared cameras pointing from all four corners, feeding photos and plate data into the North Strabane database, said police Chief Kenneth M. Truver.
As he demonstrated it one morning, one vehicle’s plate cameras logged 569 plate numbers - none of which were associated with any violations - in under 90 minutes.
“There’s rarely a shift that goes by that those don’t activate for a suspended, stolen or expired” plate or license, Chief Truver said. In 2013, he said, his officers initiated around 100 stops based on the plate cameras, and that number roughly doubled last year.
“If you’re not a criminal,” he said, “then you have nothing to fear.”
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Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, https://www.post-gazette.com
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