NCCo police keep watch for 'likely' terror attack

Imagine if police had the power to see through the security cameras at every convenience store, every ATM, every mall and every apartment complex in New Castle County.

That's the vision of County Executive Tom Gordon.

Live cameras across the county would help police better respond to a terrorist attack that Gordon believes is likely. A former police officer, Gordon is pushing to link private security cameras into the county's emergency command center, which would make northern Delaware among the first metro areas in the nation to adopt such a real-time emergency system.

"Terrorist attack threats were what made me move [up] the schedule date" of fully implementing the system by this fall, Gordon said. "I'm not allowed to talk about any threat level, but I can tell you if you've read the [news]papers, there's an attack imminent."

James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said earlier this year federal officials are investigating members of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in every state. Gordon said that's why he wants police to see what's happening in real-time – adding the cameras also would help law enforcement respond to emergencies other than terrorist attacks.

The vision is to link every private surveillance camera in the county into a single network. After an emergency call is made, police will be able to access cameras from the building and sound an alarm. The county is pushing to first secure live feeds from malls, college campuses and religious centers before widening the web to other establishments.

In September, the county intends to offer an app to property owners, which would instantly send images from their cameras to police during emergency situations, Gordon said. A county official would review the feed and decide how emergency personnel should respond, similar to the way 911 call centers work. The program will be available to any businesses in the county, Gordon said, including those in Wilmington.

"It's going to be hundreds of thousands [of cameras], but it's very easy to do because we've programmed it into our equipment," Gordon said. "You just need to know the IP addresses."

Only a few police departments in the country – including Atlanta and Washington, D.C. – have launched similar systems. Others are in various stages of planning for their own private camera-linked networks, including the Delaware State Police.

Richard Bratz, spokesman for DSP, said access to surveillance feeds during a school shooting, for example, would give responders critical details of the situation and allow them to respond accordingly.

We can "develop real-time intelligence, such as type of weapons, number and description of suspects involved," he said. "We are in the process of building out [this] capability."

The Austin Police Department in Texas is getting ready to launch its own camera program later this year. Officers there will be able to monitor the surveillance systems of participating businesses at any time, said Ely Reyes, technology commander for the Austin Police Department.

"Once they give us access, we have access," Reyes said. "Any time we can get additional information, then the safety of the officers is increased."

Civil libertarian fears

Civil libertarians fear these burgeoning camera programs are the first step to a wider surveillance state.

Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prominent digital civil liberties group, said New Castle County's system could eventually grow beyond its emergency-only mandate.

"A lot of local law enforcement agencies are saying, 'trust us,' and I don't think that's an appropriate check [on their power]," Lynch said. "It often becomes a situation where the cameras are always on."

Steve Newton, New Castle County chair of the Libertarian Party of Delaware, and Lynch worry the emergency-only rule for the security camera program could morph into everyday use by law enforcement.

"I believe this is a clear drift toward a police state mentality," Newton said.

He contends Gordon's camera program would give police more digital eyes that could be used to watch political activists. There have been cases where police departments in the United States "have used such information to infiltrate, harass and even arrest members of peaceful protest groups," said Newton, who's also a professor of political science at Delaware State University.

Kathleen MacRae, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, doesn't believe the camera program will infringe on civil liberties as long as the county links only to cameras that are in public locations.

"If it's only being used during a general emergency, then we don't have an issue with it," she said.

Dr. James Magee, a professor of American constitutional law at the University of Delaware, echoes MacRae. In a mall walkway or parking lot, he said, an individual expects to be seen, and therefore it would be constitutional for the state to view what is happening there.

An issue could arise, he said, in places such as a restroom where it might be legal for a private company to have a camera, but not the government.

"The basic rule of the Fourth Amendment is you have rights only where society expects there would be a general expectation of privacy," he said.

Newton also said county police have already overreached with technology in tracking Delawareans, citing a license plate-scanning program that, until early 2014, read the tags of vehicles on county roads and maintained a database of those scans for 360 days. The scanners were mounted on patrol vehicles.

In 2012, the county system scanned an average of 448 license plates per day, and the database held information from 164,431 scans, according to county documents provided to the ACLU for its nationwide investigation into license plate-scanning technology in 2013.

The system stopped being used over a year ago, said Tracey Duffy, spokeswoman for the New Castle County Police Department, because it is 10-year-old technology and out of date. Duffy said the county has explored purchasing another system, but has yet to purchase it.

License plate scanners help police find stolen vehicles from other states, Duffy said, because officers are often not always alerted to thefts outside of their jurisdiction.

"The automated license plate readers would hit on those vehicles," Duffy said. "The department does not use this information to track citizens."

Acquiring live feeds

While the goal is to link to every live feed in the county, officials are initially trying to recruit the biggest, or most vulnerable, businesses and organizations into the program.

Gordon met with members of the Islamic Society of Delaware twice earlier this year and described his plan to them, said Qamar Ahmad, president of the religious center.

Ahmad recognized that some people in Delaware might be suspicious of Muslims and report them to police, but he doesn't believe the county will unfairly persecute them.

He did acknowledge that a threat exists from individuals who justify violence in the name of Islam.

"Whatever the level of threat, there is some threat," he said. "We like to work with law enforcement agencies."

Ahmad noted that cameras at his religious center couldn't actually link to the county's new system because they are not wireless. If the center did have the technology, Ahmad said, some might not be comfortable gathering and worshiping under the eye of the law.

"We have a board of 21 members, and you can imagine that there can be 21 different perspectives," Ahmad said.

The University of Delaware has one of the largest surveillance systems in the state. It also requires its security officers to go through a rigid training program in order to monitor the campus's 380 cameras, said Mark Seifert, emergency management coordinator at the university.

Seifert met with county officials in the spring to learn about the camera program. The university hasn't decided, Seifert said, whether to link the campus's cameras with the county. If it were to join, Seifert said, he would want a signed contract ensuring that the county would access the footage during emergencies only.

"We want to make sure that the cameras are only used for public safety," Seifert said.

The county hopes the Christiana Mall, which sees 20 million visitors a year, will be another early adopter. Steve Chambliss, general manager at the 1.2-million-square-foot shopping center, was intrigued when he met with county officials.

Chambliss said he needs to know more about the program's financial requirements before signing on.

"We don't have enough information to know yet," he said.

Making residents feel safe

The only business that has agreed to the camera program thus far is Arbor Management, an apartment holding company that owns 14 complexes in New Castle County.

In the administrative office of Arbor Management's Wilton Club apartments near New Castle, Jim Fitzgerald, director of security and a former New Castle police officer, pointed to a screen that showed four landscapes of the outside grounds. Because the images can be accessed by police, he said, his residents feel safe – and that makes the apartments more desirable.

"If an incident occurs, we're in the know, they're in the know," Fitzgerald said. "The ultimate goal is to keep our properties safe."

Police can monitor emergencies at Wilton Club from New Castle County's new J. William Bell Fusion Center. The center is equipped with a $250,000 security screen that is the brain center for emergency response agencies in the area. It's also a place where police can link with federal authorities, like the FBI.

"In the event of a terrorist attack, it's the federal authorities that are going to take the lead," Gordon said. "We rely on them because they have a great amount of intelligence."

Unlike other facilities that share the name "fusion center," however, the Bell Fusion Center is not federally funded or federally directed.

Panic button

Although authorities will not comment on specific threats, the Islamic State has had ties to Delaware in the past, according to a federal indictment issued in February. Prosecutors said that in 2014, a Dover man who ran a cellphone repair kiosk at the Dover Mall attempted to finance the travel of two individuals to the Middle East to join ISIS. On the flight across the Atlantic, they planned to hijack the airplane and turn it over that terrorist organization.

And on July 9, FBI Director Comey said federal law enforcement officers had arrested 10 people during the previous month for their association with ISIS. Some of those, he said, planned to "kill people in the United States" during the Fourth of July weekend.

The objective of the county's camera program is to respond to, not to prevent, terrorist attacks or everyday violence, Gordon said.

The county's app will essentially be a panic button for people in camera-connected buildings to push when there's an emergency, Gordon said.

"I think businesses will sign on when we get the app working," Gordon said.

It could launch as early as September, said Jeffrey Miller, chief of New Castle County's Emergency Communication's Division. When a faculty member at a public school would call 911, for example, its information will light up at the fusion center – including its camera footage, Miller said.

Until that app is developed, though, the county can manually link to private cameras through their Internet protocol addresses – as they currently do with the surveillance systems at Arbor Management's apartments.

"They've given us carte blanche to look at their outside cameras whenever we'd like," said Col. Elmer Setting, chief of the New Castle County Police Department.

Though the county has anytime-access at those apartments, Gordon contends that it wouldn't be financially feasible to monitor them for suspicious activity. The county doesn't have the resources or the manpower, he said.

"We're not going to sit here and watch their communities," he said. "We're not looking to be Big Brother."

Contact Karl Baker at kbaker@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2329. Follow him on Twitter @kbaker6.

ON BOARD WITH THE COUNTY CAMERA PROGRAM

Arbor Management, which owns 14 complexes in New Castle County

The county hopes to connect with:

UD's campus, which is home to 380 cameras

Christiana Mall, which has 20 million visitors a year