Transportation Monitoring and Control

Maryland to Store License-plate Scanner Data at Intel Fusion Center

August 9, 2010

Center for Investigative Reporting - Authorities in Maryland plan to collect data on motorists using automated license-plate scanners and centrally store it at a police intelligence fusion center where law enforcement specialists analyze and share sensitive information about criminal and terrorist threats.

The initiative makes Maryland among the first nationally to establish a statewide network for data generated from license-plate readers. While the devices have not endured regular scrutiny and occasional opposition the way public surveillance cameras have historically, the technology in many respects is more powerful.

Privacy advocates warn that plate recognition enables police to document where drivers go – both guilty car thieves and innocent citizens alike – by registering their GPS locations when each license plate is scanned. Police need reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or will be committed for much of the contact officers have with the public, at least in theory. But laws that restrict data gathering by law enforcement don’t always keep up with the 21st century.

A statement by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on Aug. 4 says only that the data will be used for “legitimate law enforcement purposes” and “the privacy rights of Maryland’s citizens are protected using appropriate policies and procedures.”

The state plans to spend $4 million by next year for over 200 scanners and says so far they’ve alerted police to carjacking suspects, plates stolen from other cars, suspended registrations, drivers wanted on felony warrants and more.

After Elevated Risk pressed a spokesman in the governor’s office for additional answers, Shaun Adamec said in an e-mail that local agencies are being encouraged to develop privacy policies that limit how long data can be held. Maryland’s Coordination and Analysis Center, meanwhile, has internal rules for ensuring that information “is carefully maintained, responsibly stored, safely disseminated and routinely purged,” he said.

“Any information on license plates is used specifically for public safety purposes,” Adamec said. “It’s also important to note that license plates are state-issued and are not considered private property.”

The latest news comes just two years after civil liberties advocates exposed a spying program coordinated by the Maryland State Police and aimed at political activist groups not necessarily believed to have committed any crimes. State authorities infiltrated and monitored activist organizations and collected information about their members, in part by using fake e-mail addresses and screen names.

Targets of the spying included death penalty opponents, mainstream human rights groups and peace activists. One longtime anti-violence organizer ended up in a database used for storing information about high-level drug traffickers. There he was categorized under “terrorism – anti-government” and “terrorism – anti-war protesters.” Surveillance logs generated by police even described a meeting he had with a member of Congress to discuss withdrawing troops from Iraq.

The revelation led O’Malley to request an investigation of the state police, and he called on past-U.S. Attorney Stephen Sachs to conduct it. In a final report, the former prosecutor concluded that no one in the state police’s chain of command “gave any thought whatever” to the possibility that infiltrating such groups was inappropriate, nor were efforts made to establish reasonable suspicion that the activists were involved in criminal activity. According to the probe from Sachs:

Many of the [Maryland State Police] troopers and commanders whom we interviewed maintained, essentially, that it is better to be safe than sorry, and that even a remote risk to public safety justifies the infiltration of groups that plan lawful protests and demonstrations. Such a justification proves too much. It would justify government infiltration, without limitation, of any group of people who seek to exercise publicly their rights of free expression and association.

Shaun Adamec, the spokesman for O’Malley, said Maryland’s spy scandal occurred under a past governor.

“Such behavior may have been the policy of that administration,” he said. “It’s certainly not the practice of this one.”

By “that administration” he means former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich, who’s now locked in an election battle with O’Malley to regain his throne after losing it in 2006. Ehrlich has publicly expressed concern about plate readers, and he strongly opposes the use of traffic cameras, a very similar technology facing resistance in many corners of the country.

Police nationally are buying license-plate readers with greater frequency in part because of the availability of economic stimulus funds and advancements in the technology. Funding for Maryland’s plate-recognition program comes from a mix of federal criminal justice and homeland security grants.

The Illinois-based company Motorola Inc., which has made a small fortune since Sept. 11 from readiness grants by selling public safety radio systems to state and local governments, foresees patrol cars someday carrying four scanners aimed in different directions. Officers have to do virtually nothing when the devices are in operation. Motorola says the recognition technology allows police to check up to 5,000 plates during an eight-hour shift. The systems then compare plate information automatically against databases of outstanding warrants or vehicles reported stolen.

But Motorola’s product literature also emphasizes that the scanners can “quietly note the time and location” when a “vehicle of interest” is captured by the device. From there, a software program named BOSS turns the data into “useful intelligence,” which police can query by time, date, all or a portion of the plate’s numbers and location of the vehicle. This data can also be mapped to form a larger portrait of the driver’s activities.

Few states have distinct rules governing the scanners. The Kansas City Star did a story on them Aug. 2 and found this:

Police like the devices for their speed and efficiency but mostly for their ability to record thousands of plates and their locations each day. … Over time, as more information is collected, the database is more likely to reveal a particular vehicle’s movements, according to a privacy study released last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which supports police use of the license plate readers.

The study noted that residents may worry that cameras would collect their license plate numbers at places with which they may not prefer to be linked, such as addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices or staging areas for political protests.

Police agencies should adopt a policy that regulates the collection and use of the data, to reduce residents’ anxiety, according to the study. Area police departments, including Kansas City, don’t yet have such policies.

Video demonstration of automated license-plate scanners from NDI Recognition Systems, a vendor of the technology founded in the U.K.

States Eye License-plate Cameras as Source of Cash

August 12, 2010

Stateline - When Martin O’Malley became Maryland’s governor in 2007, one of his first moves was to double the number of cameras used to spy on cars. The cameras, stationed at toll booths and parking garages and mounted on police cars, scan license plate numbers and instantly match them with a database for tracking stolen cars.

The sort of “Big Brother” criticism one might expect of a program like this never materialized in a substantial way. There’s a good reason for that: The rate of vehicle theft in Maryland has plummeted to its lowest level since the state began collecting data in 1975. Last week, O’Malley pledged to add 100 more license-plate cameras to Maryland’s arsenal.

A very different story is unfolding in neighboring Pennsylvania. When Governor Ed Rendell recently proposed using the tag readers to crack down on a separate problem — uninsured and unregistered drivers — the plan sparked waves of protest. A key difference is that Rendell has been playing up the idea of using the cameras to raise revenue from fining drivers. Rendell says Pennsylvania stands to pocket $115 million a year.

The idea of using tag readers explicitly as a revenue-raising tool seems to have made many Pennsylvanians uncomfortable. The auto insurance industry has come out against the plan, saying the technology is not accurate enough to avoid levying erroneous fines on their insurance-carrying customers. Meanwhile, the civil liberties argument has come up much more in Pennsylvania than it ever did in Maryland.

“It is very Orwellian to think about putting cameras up all over the state and have them randomly or not randomly catch license-plate photos,” says state Senator John Gordnor, who sits on the Senate Transportation Committee.

License-plate readers have been used in Europe since the 1990s, but the technology, officially known as “automatic number plate recognition,” didn’t catch on in the United States until the early 2000s. They first came to toll booths, as a tool to catch toll cheats. Later, they became linked in to law enforcement databases. Local police departments began attaching the cameras to squad cars, giving officers the ability to scan thousands of license plates while in motion. Like cameras that catch drivers when they run red lights or drive over the speed limit, license-plate readers give law enforcement extra eyes on the street — and powerful eyes at that.

States are playing an important part in rolling out the technology. For one thing, they’ve been helping police departments pay for the cameras, which can cost as much as $20,000 per unit. Michigan and New York dipped into federal stimulus money to pay for the equipment last year. In Maryland, O’Malley is using federal grants and some existing state funds to pay the $2 million cost of his tag reader expansion.

States also have begun writing the rules for the readers’ use. For example, in Maine last fall, when the South Portland Police Department began using license-plate readers, privacy advocates grew wary of how quickly the cameras were able to capture and record license plate numbers. This year, the Maine Civil Liberties Union asked the state Legislature to completely ban the cameras. Lawmakers didn’t do that, but they did limit the timeframe that license plate readers store information on databases to 21 days. The law also requires that the information can be used only for law enforcement purposes.

Zachery Heiten, a legal director with the MCLU, hopes the restrictions will be enough to protect the public’s privacy while the technology moves forward.

“Having surveillance technology makes people feel uncomfortable,” he says. “It’s wrong to treat everybody as if they’re a criminal suspect.”

Not everybody is as wary of the cameras as Heiten is. Justin McNaull, a spokesman with AAA, says it really depends on what the readers are being used for.

“From a philosophical standpoint, technology is neither good nor bad,” McNaull says, adding that using readers to recover stolen cars is a “great use” of them. It’s when cameras are marketed as revenue enhancers that McNaull gets suspicious. “That’s not the reason you do law enforcement,” he says.

Profit motive

Much of the marketing McNaull complains about comes from InsureNet Inc., one of the leading American companies pushing for license-plate readers. Actually, the idea that cameras can raise revenue for states is one of InsureNet’s business models.

Recently, InsureNet bid on a proposal in Oklahoma, which like Pennsylvania, wants to use cameras to fine uninsured drivers. InsureNet proposed to spend $37 million in private money setting up the infrastructure, in exchange for the right to collect 30 percent of the fines. Oklahoma expects to earn $50 million per year from the program. (Update: Oklahoma has put this program on hold.)

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for them,” says Jonathan Miller, president of InsureNet. “We have to pay the state no matter what. Its government can’t afford to do these things.”

Miller says his company is speaking with seven states about adopting similar programs.

Miller dismisses the privacy concerns surrounding cameras, noting that the technology identifies and tracks only license plates — not actual people.

“It only verifies a hunk of metal,” he says. What’s more, the system won’t send out citations automatically. When a license plate fails to turn up in one of the insurance company databases the system uses, police still will have to verify the absence before issuing a notification. “This is not something done by a robot,” Miller says. “An officer has to physically look at it.”

But Jeramy Rich, an attorney with the American Insurance Association, says the Oklahoma proposal is likely to result in a lot of driver frustration. The insurance databases the system would use aren’t updated in realtime, so drivers who have recently paid their insurance bills may get wrongfully caught in the surveillance net.

Another likely source of false positives is fleet vehicles, whose insurance policies aren’t likely to show up in the system.

Miller responds that any drivers who feel they have been wrongfully billed would have 45 days to straighten out the situation, and that a help desk would operate 24 hours a day. But Rich is skeptical.

“We’re not aware of anywhere in the country that a system like this is up and running and successful,” he says.

Note: This story has been updated to note that Oklahoma has put its plans to use license plate readers to identify uninsured drivers on hold. It also has been corrected to clarify that InsureNet does not manufacture license plate readers. The company creates insurance databases.