East Bay firm keeps log of private cars' locations TECHNOLOGY

Security guards at the Arden Fair mall in Sacramento see this visual interface after digitally scanning a license plate. Security guards at the Arden Fair mall in Sacramento see this visual interface after digitally scanning a license plate. Photo: Courtesy Of Steve Reed, Arden Fair Mall Security Photo: Courtesy Of Steve Reed, Arden Fair Mall Security Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close East Bay firm keeps log of private cars' locations 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Capitalizing on one of the fastest-growing trends in law enforcement, a private company in Livermore has compiled a database bulging with more than 550 million bits of information that let police know when and where specific license plates of both innocent and criminal drivers were spotted.

The technology has raised alarms among civil libertarians, who say it threatens the privacy of drivers. It's also evidence that 21st century technology may be evolving too quickly for the courts and public opinion to keep up. The U.S. Supreme Court is only now addressing whether investigators can secretly attach a GPS monitoring device to cars without a warrant.

A ruling in that case has yet to be handed down, but a telling exchange occurred during oral arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts asked lawyers for the government if even he and other members of the court could feasibly be tracked by GPS without a warrant. Yes, came the answer.

At the same time, police around the country have been affixing high-tech scanners to the exterior of their patrol cars, snapping a picture of every passing license plate and automatically comparing them to databases of outstanding warrants, stolen cars and wanted bank robbers.

The units work by sounding an in-car alert if the scanner comes across a license plate of interest to police, whereas before, patrol officers generally needed some reason to take an interest in the vehicle, like a traffic violation.

But when a license plate is scanned, the driver's geographic location is also recorded and saved, along with the date and time, each of which amounts to a record or data point. Such data collection occurs regardless of whether the driver is a wanted criminal, and the vast majority are not.

While privacy rules restrict what police can do with their own databases, Vigilant Video, headquartered in Livermore, offers a loophole. It's a private business that is not required to operate by those same rules.

The company sells its own brand of license plate readers and has customers around the nation, including the cities of Springfield, Ill.; Kings Point, N.Y.; and Orange, Conn. But Vigilant distinguished itself from competitors by going one step further and collecting hundreds of millions of scans to create what is known as the National Vehicle Location Service.

Helping the good guys

A West Coast sales manager for the company, Randy Robinson, said the scanners - as well as data from them compiled in the location system - do far more than simply help identify stolen vehicles by possibly stopping criminals.

"I just sit back and think, 'Who would want to thwart officers from doing their jobs more effectively, faster, more efficiently?' If it was your son or daughter" who was missing, he added, "what would you say?"

Robinson isn't troubled by the thought of his own data being compiled, and he said others shouldn't worry either if they haven't violated the law. After all, he said, police could even use the technology to track him down. He also pointed out that there's nothing wrong with Vigilant taking what amounts to public photographs.

Security vs. privacy

While some technology makes it safer for police to perform their jobs or enables them to more easily share information, license plate recognition has the potential to both transform public safety for the better and undermine rules designed to protect law-abiding Americans from police overreach.

"It's no different than if you have an officer that manually enters tags," argued Capt. Johnny Jennings of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina. "They've automated this ability to where (the scanner) actually runs the tag for you and compares it to a variety of databases. ... We were able to come through with some significant reductions in stolen vehicles."

Just one patrol officer can log information for thousands of cars in a single shift. Multiply that by an ever-growing number of police departments adopting the technology - often with help from Homeland Security grants and funds from President Obama's 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - and the result is an extraordinary volume of data on motorists.

With enough scans, a portrait of a person's habits begins to emerge.

"We think once those snapshots become sufficiently dense, it rises to the level of the equivalent of GPS tracking," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Each snapshot of a license plate is a pixel. How many pixels do you need before you have a photograph?"

Lee Tien agrees. He's a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and said the ability of police to identify perpetrators in real time is less worrisome than the stockpiling of historic driver data.

"Any time you're talking about movements in public which you can archive, or any data you can archive over time, then it's like a way-back machine. 'Gee, we'll be able to reconstruct the movements of your car or your cell phone,' " Tien said. "... It's incredibly revealing, so I think it's pretty clear this is a big issue."

But the potential value of this new law enforcement tool is undeniable.

Auto thefts at Sacramento's Arden Fair mall have dropped from 77 in 2006, before private security installed license plate scanners there, to just eight in 2011. Steve Reed, a retired police officer serving as the mall's security chief, used $50,000 in federal Homeland Security grants to purchase four scanners.

Through a partnership with the Sacramento Police Department, Reed said, 68 stolen vehicles were recovered at the mall and 46 arrests have been made since early 2009.

"If a child was abducted here - which hasn't happened - and they only had a partial plate and knew it was a yellow car, (police) have the capability to go in there and put in the partial plate and go through all the pictures of cars we've seen and then actually find the car," Reed said.

Crimes solved

One man sits in an Arkansas federal correctional facility after he was linked to a stolen car at the mall, and authorities also found in his possession multiple credit cards, ATM cards, Social Security cards and altered checks belonging to victims of mail theft. In another case, authorities broke up a retail theft ring after an in-car alert at the mall led them to a group of people shoplifting inside. A later search of the trunk revealed thousands more in stolen goods.

Arden Fair officials get rid of the records they generate after 30 days, simply because Reed can't store them all. His guards also do not search across historical data. The watchers can merely wait to be alerted if they've happened upon a license plate of interest.

Jennings of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said that four of his cruisers have scanners and that the department began using them about five years ago during a surge in stolen vehicles. One of his detectives managed to collar an auto-burglary suspect with just a partial plate. But the technology isn't a catchall. The department simultaneously launched a public information campaign teaching drivers how to prevent auto theft from occurring in the first place, Jennings said.

His department also destroys irrelevant records after 180 days and does not have the ability to search data nationwide through the National Vehicle Location Service.

Roving scanners

Roughly 1,200 new users working in law enforcement are signed up to search the location system every month, and agencies don't have to be a customer of Vigilant, nor do they have to contribute their own data, company sales manager Robinson said. It's free to law enforcement agencies and amounts to a spectacular form of advertising for Vigilant.

Police aren't the only ones contributing to the database's size.

Additional records are flowing in from private auto repossession companies that specialize in tracking down debtors no longer making payments on their cars. Imagine tow trucks armed with scanners cruising through apartment complexes and along residential streets, simultaneously searching for delinquent borrowers and generating new leads if a motorist in the future stops paying his or her note.

Some people argue that such a practice is not unlike Google's Street View, except that far fewer people have heard of Vigilant Video and its participating fleet of 2,000 "scout" cars. Robinson is quick to emphasize that only authorized law enforcement agencies can search data generated by private scout cars and patrol vehicles.

"What's extraordinary to me are the types of cases that are being solved," Robinson said. Police "can go back and say, 'Who was in the area? Who was in the neighborhood?' They can call that person up and question them and say, 'Look, I've got a rape victim. You're a known serial rapist or a rapist who just got out on parole. Why were you two blocks away on that night?' "