Erik Larsen

@Erik_Larsen

TOMS RIVER – Ocean County is conducting mass surveillance on the movements of motorists within its boundaries and plans this week to begin sharing its live and recorded data with the federal government.

The Board of Freeholders on Wednesday will vote whether to enter into a formal agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to share metadata it collects from automated license plate readers mounted on law enforcement vehicles and scanners permanently fixed to utility poles over its roadways.

The electronic eyes capture and record the plate numbers, times, dates and locations of all the vehicles they "see," and perform a search of law enforcement records to determine if the registered owner or operator is wanted for offenses that range from major crimes to unpaid parking tickets, according to officials familiar with the technology. If such a vehicle is detected, the computer alerts the officer supervising the scanning or, for the fixed readers, sends the data to the Ocean County Sheriff's 911 call center in Toms River.

The agreement would be specifically between the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, but would include license plate readers managed by the Sheriff's Department.

"This is undercover work (the prosecutor) is doing to resolve some really tough issues that he has in drug enforcement," said Freeholder Jack Kelly, director of law and public safety on the five-member, all-Republican board. "We're not supposed to talk about it."

The agreement comes at a time when drug deaths in Ocean County have been tripling since 2012, claiming the lives of adolescents to senior citizens in their 70s.

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"That's where the prosecutor wants it to go," said Freeholder Director Joseph H. Vicari, speaking after an agenda session of the board last Wednesday.

Saying he was uncertain about what he could talk about concerning the memorandum, Kelly referred all questions to the Prosecutor's Office, which did not respond to inquiries from the Asbury Park Press.

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The state Attorney General Office's also did not respond to questions about what law enforcement agencies in New Jersey could do or not do with the collection of such data, or what guidelines were in place to protect individual privacy.

The other freeholders said they were unaware of the proposed agreement, which has already been signed by Douglas W. Poole, assistant administrator for the chief of intelligence at the DEA, and Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph D. Coronato; but which requires additional signatures from Vicari and Betty Vasil, clerk of the freeholder board — following a vote of approval on Wednesday.

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Freeholder John C. Bartlett Jr. said he did not even know Ocean County was automatically scanning and collecting such license plate data at fixed points throughout the county.

"The idea of sharing this information is of great concern," said Ed Barocas, who has served as legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey since 2001. "It was already a concern with local police having this information."

Barocas said he wants to know how the data will be stored, how long it will be retained and who has access to it.

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"The information that is captured can create a picture of the routes we drive, the locations we frequent; entire dossiers can be created on people depending on how much data is input and how long it's kept," he said. "The idea that this information is being shared with other agencies has an additional layer of concern."

In the past, a law enforcement officer would have to check a license plate manually by typing the tag number of a vehicle into a laptop computer within his or her own patrol vehicle. Today, the automated readers — there are four separate scanners aimed outward in each direction atop a sheriff's car — automatically reads, processes and records all license plates a patrol vehicle scans, up to 1,800 plates per minute or up to 14,000 license plates in a single shift.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has reported in the past that municipal governments were contracting with private businesses with massive databases of people's driving history.

Under the terms of the contract, the Prosecutor’s Office would provide the DEA with access to the information in "near real-time" over a secure Internet connection.

In exchange, the Prosecutor’s Office would be permitted access to data collected from other license plate readers for which the DEA has access to, according to the five-page contract.

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“The Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office users shall access LPR information from DEA only for the investigation of a serious crime, to include an Amber Alert, carjacking, homicide, crime against children, violent crime against a person, illegal alien, terrorism, associate of a terrorist, principal target of an investigation, money launderer courier, drug trafficker, alien smuggler, kidnapper, wanted subject (extraditable to the jurisdiction requesting the alert), and fugitive (extraditable to the jurisdiction requesting the alert). The Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office users shall not take any operational action based solely on the LPR information from DEA,” the agreement reads.

The federal government and the Prosecutor’s Office would make data available going back at least three months, or for however long data are archived for whatever reason.

Erik Larsen: 732-682-9359 or elarsen@gannettnj.com