RFID, GPS Technology and Electronic Surveillance

Electronic Monitoring Went Down Across U.S.

October 6, 2010

Channel 3000 - Wisconsin prison officials said a global positioning system that tracks sex offenders, parolees and others shut down Tuesday for about 12 hours, leaving authorities in several states blind to offenders' real-time movements.

A spokesman for the system's manufacturer, Boulder, Colo.-based BI Incorporated, said Wednesday that its system's data storage hit its capacity Tuesday morning. That blocked notifications to prisons and other corrections agencies on about 16,000 people being tracked.

BI spokesman Jock Waldo said tracking devices continued to record movement, but corrections agencies couldn't immediately view the data. He said people being monitored were unaware of any problems.

Wisconsin uses GPS to monitor about 300 sex offenders, WISC-TV reported.

Tim Le Monds, a Wisconsin Corrections Department spokesman, said the state has been working with BI Incorporated since 2003 and this is the first time they have had any type of outage.

The Wisconsin Corrections Department said the outage was from about 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Le Monds said the company notified the corrections department that the system was having trouble at about 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.

"What we lost was real-time monitoring. So we weren't able to tell where they were at that given time, but when the system came back online, the system was still recording their movements, so we can go back and check," Le Monds said.

Le Monds said Wisconsin prison officials had local police and probation agents detain about 140 offenders until the system was back up and their whereabouts during the outage could be confirmed. He said the offenders didn't know about the problem.

Le Monds said officials are in the process of checking the records to make sure the sex offenders they are monitoring were where they were supposed to be.

Waldo said the company has substantially increased its data storage capacity and hasn't heard of any safety issues.