Cashless tolls: Welcome to the dark future

Editor's note: This story is part of a months-long investigation into cashless tolls to find out why drivers are getting escalating fines, who's running the system and where the system is breaking down.

Piermont's main drag — a mix of restaurants, bars and light retail — sees its busiest days on the weekends when cyclists pass through on their trek from the big city.

Yet the village's eight-officer Police Department recently bought a high-tech surveillance system used by major departments and U.S. military special-operations units.

"(License-plate readers), those are awesome," said Mayor Bruce Tucker.

For about $26,000, village police are tapping into a vast network of automated license-plate readers run by for-profit corporations.

That network can allow its officers to track every person passing through town: moms on their way to drop off kids at school, patient trips to the doctor and the faithfuls' visits to religious services get thrown into databases that police may retain for up to five years.

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READING AND WATCHING LIST: Dark future

Residents like Frank Comito support tracking criminals, but worry about the potential misuse.

"It's scary; Technology has taken us over," he said. "There is so much we can't control."

The limited use in Piermont worries Comito, but it is just part of a larger system — one in which the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the state Thruway Authority are tracking drivers at toll-collection sites and in between.

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He likely did not know about their corporate contractor, Conduent, which wants to use similar data for its own new ticketing systems — a system that would allow travelers to move from buses to subways with a scan of a smartphone.

These tracking technologies stem from the cashless tolling apparatus growing in the Lower Hudson Valley.

Cashless-tolling gantries, along with license-plate readers and mobile-ticketing apps, are slithering into every crevice of a person's travel data. Privacy advocates worry that companies could know the exact location and movements of everyone.

Private companies boast of their Big Brother capabilities. Take the comments by Carol Kline, Conduent’s chief information officer:

Companies could use plate-travel data to track drivers' daily commutes from Piermont to Pasadena. That capability worries some of Piermont's visitors.

"It's 1984, but 34 years late," said Tim Doran of Mahwah, New Jersey.

Welcome to the dark future.

The idea of technology growing beyond its masters' control has been the staple of science fiction writers.

A future of machines controlling the lives of helpless humans filled pages of books and lit film screens for the better part of the last century. Unblinking eyes would follow everyone at all times.

Civil-liberties and data-privacy advocates say that future is already here. Look no further than the news of recent weeks. Facebook faces criticism that the company is mining members' personal data and selling it to private corporations. Shortly after that news broke, additional reports surfaced on how hackers accessed the data of 150 million users of Under Armour's MyFitnessPal app and that 5 million credit and debit cards were breached from Lord & Taylor and Saks

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An investigation by The Journal News/lohud has found that:

Private companies are collecting data and selling it to police departments and other agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Cashless-tolling gantries do more than just catch toll evaders and scofflaws. New York state agencies are turning scans into data.

Systems can quickly know people's exact locations and more applications to use the data are in the works

Nowhere is that Orwellian reality playing out more than in the Lower Hudson Valley, where public surveillance for private profit is spreading into communities under the cover of promises of convenience and increased safety.

As early as 2008, some police departments in Westchester County, and the New York City Police Department, began using automated license plate reader technology.

By 2014 multiple police departments in Westchester had 33 plate readers funded with special grants from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. In fact, Westchester had more plate readers than any other county — outside of New York City — in the state, according to DCJS funding documents.

Privacy-advocate groups and legislators are concerned that these new technologies associated with the growing cashless-tolling system threaten personal privacy in ways that were unimaginable just a couple of years ago.

Rashida Richardson, legislative counsel for the New York Civil Liberties Union, thinks the system has blatant problems with how it operates between corporate and government spheres.

“I think there is inherently something wrong with business models with third-party vendors that are creating these databases that can be accessed by different types of law enforcement with no requirements or limitations on the sharing of information,” Richardson said.

In addition, indications are that this data, gleaned off millions of vehicles traveling across the region's bridges, tunnels and highways, could be sold for profit.

One of the key architects of the cashless-tolling legislation is worried by the growing threat. State Sen. David Carlucci, D-Clarkstown, said he crafted legislation to protect data that he hopes will help stop unnecessary intrusions into people's personal lives.

“We need a safeguard for our personal data,” Carlucci said.

Dave Maass, an investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said there’s almost no limit to what could happen when private companies get their hands on data.

EFF is a non-profit based in California focused on digital rights and protecting privacy. Made up of attorneys and technologists and formed in 1990, it has been in the middle of many of the nation's high-profile privacy-rights cases.

“They’re collecting an intense amount of data on people’s comings and goings. You have to wonder where that data is going,” Maass said.

A small police department, such as Piermont, won’t generate enough data to provide good tracking. More accurate databases would require that agencies share data between their systems.

But that solution lies with multiple departments that can interlink their databases, as well as pull from shared law enforcement databases around the county. Westchester County’s 42 police departments, along with federal agencies, have designed a way to share some of that data with one another.

That data gets fed into a little-known law enforcement agency called the Westchester Intelligence Center.

Police departments rely on several companies to store this data. Two private companies control most of the license-plate reading market in the United States: Vigilant Solutions and ELSAG.

ELSAG, is actively used the in collection of data as part of New York's cashless-tolling apparatus.

PlateSmart Technologies, had been tapped by the MTA, to help with plate reading at its crossings. But the MTA decided use the PlateSmart system for different purporse.

Some agencies, like the New York state police, tap Vigilant Solutions for extra plate-tracking data.

At $13,000 per system for each squad car, according to Nate Maloney, vice president of marketing at ELSAG, some departments use federal grant money to buy the plate readers. Other departments in Texas — another state with cashless-tolling issues — used another way to pay for the system.

Vigilant gave credit-card readers to the police, along with the plate readers, according to contracts between the entities.

When police stopped someone who had outstanding fines or warrants, they would give drivers two options: pay the fine on the spot — with a 25 percent up-charge — or go to jail, according to Maass and the contracts.

Police in Texas faced pressure from the system, too. Contracts with Vigilant included vague references to quotas for how many cars the agencies needed to pull over. Failing to meet that quota would mean losing the system for the department.

Guadalupe County, next to the city of San Antonio, has a contract that states that while no exact quota exists, Vigilant says failing to meet a "minimal metric" would result in the company reclaiming the system.

Maass finds problems with that system, and questions the reasons for stops under a quota system.

“Is law enforcement using license-plate readers because it's good for public safety, or are they doing that because Vigilant has them over a barrel,” he said.

Vigilant declined to comment on its practices in Texas.

Piermont chose a different route. It paid for the service and equipment with money from auctioning confiscated property, Police Chief Michael O’Shae said at a meet-the-chief event in February.

Automatic license plate readers have two main parts: cameras capture the data and computers save it.

People in Piermont can see police cars with the plate readers sitting on Route 9W and in front of Village Hall.

On Feb. 16, one equipped police car idled across the street from Village Hall. From 9 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. it sat empty, its cameras pointed at passing vehicles.

It then was moved to the other side of the street. The data it collected can be used to track location.

License-plate reader location tracking concerns groups like the NYCLU because it provides information about personal habits.

The NYCLU's Richardson says database tracking goes too far.

“It is a questionable practice when it's used in coordination with a larger database, that allows for real-time vehicle searching,” Richardson said.

The cameras attached to gantries and police cars represent only part of the tracking network. To collect as much data as possible, police departments place plate readers in speed signs, variable message boards and even orange highway barrels.

A manufacturer's brochure touts the hidden cameras as “becoming best practices across the country.”

Vigilant dominates the market with 5 billion scans in its database and adds another 150 million each month, according to its website. With more than 263 million cars in the country, Vigilant casts a wide net.

To collect all this data, Vigilant tapped into its sister company, DRN, which provides plate readers to civilians. Scans from DRN data equipment get fed into the law enforcement database, according to DRN's website.

“Vigilant Solutions outsources their scans to repo men and other private entities to do scanning in addition to the police departments that are signed up,” Richardson said.

DRN's scans end up in for-profit databases like TLO, according to its website. TLO offers plate tracking for a price to private investigators and attorneys, for example.

Both Vigilant and ELSAG claim to keep the data gathered by their law enforcement partners out of civilian hands, but nobody denies the capability exists.

"There’s nothing stopping some of them from putting personal travel data on the internet and charging $10 for it," Maass said.

He thinks the future could grow darker when self-driving cars hit the streets.

"This is a problem that is going to keep getting worse,” Maass said. “If they are able to get autonomous vehicles on the road equipped with ALPRs, they will have surveillance vehicles driving around all the time, collecting data on people.”

PlateSmart Technologies, one of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's plate-reader providers, wrote a report in which it suggested putting ALPRs on buses. Buses could transmit the plates and location of cars to authorities, further enhancing tracking capabilities.

As cashless tolling spreads across New York, plate readers grow with it.

The technology is allowing police to know immediately what kinds of violations people have with a quick scan.

Maass sees another side to the technology.

"What if there was a person following you all the time, everywhere you went, constantly following you in public and standing outside your house at night," he said. "There still is a public element to that, but it's starting to get really creepy and offensive."

Those scans, meanwhile, are checked against a database of vehicles on which the police want to keep tabs. A computer also checks the plate number against state Department of Mothor Vehicle records, creating a record of where and when the car was spotted.

Cashless-tolling failures and the plate readers have combined to create a series of horror stories for some residents in Rockland and Westchester counties.

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REVEALED: The company behind the camera

Other stories outside the Lower Hudson Valley show flaws in ALPR systems and the legal ramifications of those shortcomings.

Denise Green found herself on the wrong side of an ALPR scan on a Monday night in March of 2009.

That's when San Fransisco police pulled her over, four to six officers pointed guns and ordered her to leave the car. Police forced Green to her knees and handcuffed her. They'd confused her 1992 burgundy Lexus with a stolen gray GMC truck because the plate reader confused a 3 and a 7, according to court documents.

Companies developing facial-recognition and traffic-violation tracking technology enjoy limited public exposure about their involvement in public systems. Dave Amoriell, president of Conduent's public sector division, spoke about its relatively low public profile at a company event in December.

“I always say in this sector we’re well known in the industry, we’re probably the best-kept secret outside our industry,” Amoriell said.

E-ZPasses and cashless tolling operated by Conduent create similar data as a license-plate reader scan when a car goes through a toll. Location, speed and time get logged and sent to Conduent's governmental partners. But those partners create data when drivers aren't going through tolls, too.

New York transportation authorities have placed antennae throughout New York’s roadway system, according to official responses to Freedom of Information Law requests made by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Jennifer Givner, a Thruway Authority spokeswoman, said it only uses the E-ZPass data from those additional antennae to generate estimates for travel time.

They track any E-ZPass that goes by them. They pick up other signals as well. Even if drivers place their E-ZPass transponders in their protective foil bags, other signals from their cars can give away their location.

For example, cars' tire-pressure sensors also send a signal that gets picked up by some antennae. A research paper from Rutgers University highlighted this vulnerability in 2010.

Privacy advocates say they are gaining ground in their fight against these systems.

Green, the San Francisco victim, won a federal lawsuit against the police. It ended with a ruling that plate readers aren't enough on their own to warrant a traffic stop. However, that ruling doesn't apply to New York. It only applies to the 9th U.S. Circuit, a West Coast jurisdiction.

Carlucci's data-protection act is currently in committee, and he hopes it can help.

"This goes a long way to protect us from Conduent," he said.

Both the ACLU and EFF continue to investigate what they see as problems with public surveillance, like ALPRs and other methods of surveillance.

The EFF helped send nearly 1,000 FOIL requests to agencies that contract with Vigilant. That prompted Vigilant to send a letter to its customers offering "support" from the "onslaught" of requests.

Some drivers are already taking the fight to public surveillance systems themselves. In Washington, D.C., one person jumped from a car to destroy a surveillance camera.

Reporters at The Journal News/lohud have spent five months investigating cashless tolls to find out why drivers are getting fees and escalating fines for tolls for which many say they were never billed, who's running the system and where the system is breaking down.

The reporting so far has prompted changes, including:

an amnesty program forgiving thousands of dollars from individual bills

a bill introduced in Albany to help toll payers

a new web page for the amnesty program instead of using the faulty Tolls By Mail site

more distinct envelopes so drivers know they've received a bill

new toll signs on the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge

more responsiveness from state Thruway officials, two of whom attended a lohud forum on cashless tolling and personally helped drivers with their individual cases

legislation drafting a tollpayer’s bill of rights

an apology from the lieutenant governor

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