Delaware State Police showcased at artificial intelligence conference

Three months ago, the biggest players in the artificial intelligence industry checked out a Delaware State Police cruiser parked conspicuously on a convention floor in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.

On the roof of the taxpayer-owned vehicle sat a drone. Flanking it on one side was a large flat screen, which showed what officers would see on the monitor of a company's latest in-car video system – an augmented reality dash-camera feed of a distant vehicle with its license plate information superimposed onto the screen.

The exhibitor, Houston-based Coban Technologies, proclaimed on a sign next to the cruiser, “AI (artificial intelligence) for public protection and safety.”

“We’ve been working with (Delaware State Police) for a long time, so they let us borrow the car and then, of course, we used it for the show” in Washington, D.C., said David Hinojosa, the company's head of marketing and business development.

Two Delaware State Police officers also attended the conference with Coban, Hinojosa said, though he declined to identify them.

The exact nature of the Delaware State Police's work with Coban Technologies is unclear. What is known is that the company used the state police vehicle to market what it calls an artificially-intelligent camera system that alerts officers in real-time to the identities of vehicles and even people caught by the gaze of cameras attached to a vehicle dash, an officer's body or even a drone.

Initially, Hinojosa described the relationship between Coban and the state police as a partnership – one in which officers advise developers about the needs of those on patrol, and how smart camera systems could accommodate them.

The Los Angeles Police Department also consults with the company for its product development, Hinojosa said.

A company official also told a Texas reporter from KPRC news in Houston, that Delaware and Los Angeles police are actively testing the latest incarnation of the artificial intelligence system in a “controlled environment."

Yet during a second conversation with The News Journal, Hinojosa said the KPRC report was false. He was not aware of who within his company gave the reporter such specific, yet allegedly inaccurate, information.

Hinojosa also revised his previous statement, saying his company does not, in fact, have a partnership with Delaware. Instead, the state police informally, and infrequently, offers expertise to Coban developers, he said.

"We just went to them and said, 'Hey, will you help us?' They said, 'Sure, we'll give you input," Hinojosa said. "Every single vendor ... they're always going back to clients and say, 'Hey, is this going to work or is this not going to work?"

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Since 2013, the state police has purchased $1.9 million worth of standard dash camera and other assorted multimedia equipment from Coban. The News Journal requested an interview with Col. Nathaniel McQueen Jr., or an agency official who oversees the use of police video systems, but that request was declined.

In an email, state police Sgt. Richard Bratz explained that the department "provides feedback to vendors to ensure they meet (Delaware State Police) specific needs."

"We will be testing the new (artificial intelligence) system when it becomes available," Bratz said.

A FOIA request with the Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security for documents and emails related to Coban Technologies is pending.

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The adoption of gadgets that use augmented reality or computer facial analysis is accelerating across industries as advances in image recognition prove lucrative for companies –– and advantageous to government agencies.

Pokemon Go, a video game that attracted more than 100 million users last year, superimposes colorful fighting monsters onto the camera feed of the player's smart phone.

Google recently added a lighthearted feature to its Arts & Culture App that analyzes photos to determine which famous museum portrait the user most resembles. The app also links to a user's personal Gmail account.

Apple customers can unlock its latest smart phone, the iPhone X, by simply staring at it. Face recognition is "already becoming incredibly pervasive in ways we don't see," says Clare Garvie, an associate with Georgetown University's Center on Privacy & Technology.

With the release of the new iPhone X, "far more people will experience face recognition" in a public setting.

In the public sector, the FBI maintains a database of at least 30 million photos linked to identities. It uses them to find suspects who are captured by surveillance cameras elsewhere.

The Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles in 2012 signed an agreement with the FBI to provide state license photos for the federal facial recognition database, making the First State one of 13 to support the system. Though there are less than one million people in the state, the DMV has provided four million photos to the federal program, according to a Government Accountability Office report from 2016.

The facial recognition database will "advance active FBI investigations, apprehend wanted fugitives or known or suspected terrorists, and locate missing persons nationwide," stated a memorandum of understanding signed by the Delaware DMV and FBI.

The state police do not have direct access to the database, Bratz said.

"However, DSP can make inquiries through our law enforcement partners," he said.

Many experts and civil libertarians say Chinese businesses and government are at the forefront of real-time facial recognition technology. In December, police in a city within the country's western Xinjiang region told an Associated Press reporter, “there are tens of thousands of cameras here."

"The moment you took your first step in this city, we knew," the officer reportedly said.

Dash cam on steroids

Coban Technologies envisions a future when police can use its in-car video system to identify people near the vehicle and any threats they may pose. It would be "a dash cam on steroids," Hinojosa told an AFP reporter at the Washington, D.C., conference.

The company advertises that its gear is the most advanced model on the market, able to link multiple cameras to a single screen in a police car. It then acts as a hub where artificially-intelligent applications can be downloaded to allow the system to identify “a wide range of objects” in real time on a screen inside a police vehicle.

Those objects include bumper stickers, license plates, vehicle models, weapons, and even faces, according to the company's website.

“Coban is leveraging the most advanced and proven real-time video streaming and edge analytics applications for facial recognition," Coban’s product management director David Kirsch said in a company statement last October.

Hinojosa acknowledged that all of the advertised capabilities, notably facial recognition, are not reliably functional, yet.

Real-time facial recognition technology incorporated onto augmented reality screens still is "in its infancy," he said. Though researchers in China likely have more advanced technology than their counterparts elsewhere, he said.

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Yet in a promotional video produced by computer chip Nvidia, Hinojosa said Coban's video system “is constantly learning.”

The guts of the hardware, he said, are made up of the latest robotic circuitry developed by Nvidia, which also was a sponsor of the Washington, D.C., conference.

“The more information that we feed, the better this system gets. If you look at it from a law enforcement perspective, (it is) strength in numbers,” Hinojosa told Nvidia as he stood alongside the Delaware State Police cruiser on the convention floor.

“At the end of the day, it’s officer safety and efficiency,” he said.

Other attendees at the Nvidia conference included Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, the Department of Defense's research division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Office of the Vice President.

Coban is racing with other tech firms, such as the Taser manufacturer, Axon, to win lucrative contracts as police departments across the country adopt smart, predictive policing gadgets.

In the race, many surveillance technology companies have bombarded police departments with promotions for products that may not even provide benefit to officers on patrol, said David Maass, an investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization that focuses on technology.

“A lot of this is just snake oil," he said. "A lot of this is just police being dazzled by this stuff."

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License plate reading and more

Since 2013, Delaware State Police has purchased nearly $1.9 million worth of products from Coban.

Hinojosa said Delaware's police car video system is a base model, with cameras that shoot only “evidentiary video,” without any attached AI-based applications.

Listed on the state of Delaware's open checkbook website, the purchases are described as multimedia equipment, communications equipment, multimedia supplies, equipment repair, computer services, or freight.

The state police executive staff, which includes the office of Col.

Nathaniel McQueen Jr., purchased more than $700,000 worth of products, the most of all divisions within the department.

Asked about the department's interest in Coban's artificial intelligence camera system, Hinojosa said, “that’s something that they’ll have to figure out, whether or not they want to utilize those types of technologies."

"I know that they’ve made it very clear to us that they want to be mindful of how the information is used, and so forth,” he said.

State police already use license-plate-reading cameras that can identify vehicle tags in real-time. The so-called automated license plate readers were not purchased from Coban, Bratz said.

"We have ALPR technology as part of our commercial vehicle enforcement program," he said.

New Castle County police also have purchased automated license plate readers.

Too cozy of a relationship?

The relationship between the state police and Coban could become troubling in the future, said Ryan Tack-Hooper, attorney at the ACLU of Delaware.

“I'm worried about sweetheart deals that are happening between companies and the state police," he said. "They don’t seem to think that they are an agency like any other agency in the state."

He said state police a decade ago gave a no-bid contract to Harris Corp., the developers of the Stingray cell phone tracking device. The ACLU learned of the contract after it had brought a lawsuit against the state in an attempt to force the disclosure of details about how officers use Stingrays.

"In our litigation over the Stingrays, one of the things that came out of that was that they had this no-bid contract, and there was no evidence that they followed state guidelines for purchasing this technology," Tack-Hooper said.

The News Journal in 2016 reported that state police had spent nearly $1 million for the boxy mobile devices, called Stingrays, which mimic cellular towers in order to covertly scoop up cell phone information from people within a few-mile proximity.

Stingray maker Harris Corp also was an attendee at the artificial intelligence conference in Washington, D.C.

Hinojosa said categorically that there is no quid-pro-quo with state police, nor any favorable clauses included in its Delaware contracts.

"They're not endorsing anything, and they have made that very clear," he said.

Prior to Coban's contract, the state police had received bids from 16 companies.

Tack-Hooper also expressed a concern over whether the state is effectively safeguarding data it collects from mass surveillance systems and rigorously tracking how it gets access to it.

He said ACLU research has shown that the state police are keeping data collected by their automated license plate readers for five years, "whereas New Castle County was keeping it for less than a year."

"The privacy threat is you have a database of where everyone has been, all vehicle locations for five years," he said.

The database could become problematic, he said, if an unethical officer were to use it to track an ex-spouse, for example, or target the actions of protesters.

"Location data is very sensitive. You can figure out what church someone goes to. What reporters they meet with, what protests they attend," Tack-Hooper said.

The U.S. Supreme Court should settle a pending legal question of whether mass data collection – even of information that is publicly available – is constitutional, he added.

"It's fine to check license plates, but we believe it's problematic to have lists of where everyone has visited in the last five years," he said.

Hinojosa said it is up to police and lawmakers to set clear rules about the use of camera technology that log identities through reading license plates or even individuals' faces. However fears of police collecting identities of every protester at a demonstration through facial recognition cameras are "crazy," he said, at least with today's technology.

Instead, the public should be wary about the use of mass surveillance in the private sector, he said, noting that Coban does not sell its systems to private firms.

“Those companies that are doing the big surveillance now, if anyone needs to worry about anything, it’s those cameras that are mounted all over the city," Hinojosa said.

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