Time To Be Vigilant About Vigilant Solutions' Spying On Motorists?

You probably don’t know much about Vigilant Systems, but the company likely knows more about you than you know about them. That because Vigilant Systems is in the business of knowing. The company has so far collected about 2.8 billion license plate photos with its network of cameras, and every month it adds another 70-80 million photos, including a timestamp of the photo and geographic location of the plate, to Vigilant Solutions’ permanent storage. They sell that data to police departments and, depending on the jurisdiction, even some private sector institutions, such as insurance companies investigating fraud.

Vigilant Solutions’ deals with government agencies have raised concerns about civil liberties, freedom of movement, privacy and mass surveillance. As Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic describes Vigilant Solutions, “your diminished privacy is their product.”

When I saw the piece in The Atlantic, since we’ve covered automated license plate readers (ALPR) and their implications for motorists’ privacy here at TTAC before, I knew it would be of interest to our readers. Before I had a chance to write that piece though, I was alerted to a post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks blog describing a deal Vigilant Solutions is offering police agencies in Texas for free license plate readers, access to the company’s huge databases and LEARN-NVLS software tools to analyze that data. That post takes concerns about Vigilant Solutions to another level, hence this post.

As Mr. Heinlein taught us, TANSTAAFL, so how is it funded? Well, to begin with, Vigilant Solutions gets access to more data about you that they can sell to others, but what’s motivation for the police agencies, apart from free ALPR gear?

Where the real money, and potential to distort law enforcement, apparently comes in is due to a recent change in Texas law that allows police agencies to equip patrol vehicles with credit and debit card readers so they can take payment on the spot for capias warrants for unpaid court fines. While the law was described by its sponsors as making it easier for people to avoid getting hauled into jail for just owing money, critics say that cops will spend their time cherry picking bench warrant statistics, not enforcing traffic laws, because it’s an easier way to generate revenue.

The EFF says that’s pretty much what’s happened in Texas, with Vigilant Solutions’ active participation. The civil liberties group has examined contracts between between Vigilant Solutions and Guadalupe County, and with the cities of Orange and Kyle. The government agencies give the company data on all of their outstanding court fees, which Vigilant Solutions turns into a hot list supplied to the free ALPR systems. When a patrol car or motorcycle-mounted ALPR finds a plate on the hot list, the officer is pinged by the system.

Once pulled over, the driver has the choice of going to jail — or using their plastic. Using your credit or debit account as a get out of jail card, though, comes at a price, literally. There’s a 25-percent processing fee, all of which goes to Vigilant Solutions. Late last year, the firm issued a press release saying that Guadalupe County had collected the fees for more than 4,500 warrants using their system in 2015.

Unrelated to the use of ALPRs, the contracts also have Vigilant acting as a collection agency, sending out notices to drivers based on the data they receive from the agencies. The county’s contract with Vigilant has recently been upgraded to allow the company to use its own private contractors to collect on capias warrants.

While trumpeting the revenue enhancing aspects of their system, the company also had to announce that it had sent out several warrant notices to the wrong recipients in December as part of the Warrant Redemption Program. They issued a public apology to those people, and to their “law enforcement customers” just to make it clear whose interests they serve. So far, Vigilant hasn’t said how many people were mistakenly notified, how much money was collected in error, or even if anybody’s been refunded money they didn’t really owe. Vigilant is a private company, so they aren’t legally obligated to tell us anything, and their contracts with government bodies prohibit the agencies from talking about Vigilant with the press without the company’s permission. One wonders if that part of those contracts is consistent with transparency and freedom of information laws in Texas.

In addition to more general fears about tracking your movements and privacy, the EFF lists a number of non-trivial concerns about Vigilant Solutions’ program in Texas:

• It turns police into debt collectors, who have to keep swiping credit cards to keep the free equipment.
• It turns police into data miners, who use the privacy of local drivers as currency.
• It not-so-subtly shifts police priorities from responding to calls and traffic violations to responding to a computer’s instructions.
• Policy makers and the public are unable to effectively evaluate the technology since the contract prohibits police from speaking honestly and openly about the program.
• The model relies on debt: there’s no incentive for criminal justice leaders to work with the community to reduce the number of capias warrants, since that could result in losing the equipment.
• People who have committed no crimes whatsoever have their driving patterns uploaded into a private system and no opportunity to control or watchdog how that data is disseminated.

A technology that was first promoted as a way to apprehend actual criminals (the promotional video above, from Vigilant Solutions, hypes how they found three “real criminal locations” in their demonstration of the system to Dallas police), save kidnapped children, and recover stolen cars is now used in ways that could infringe on your privacy and distort the way police enforce the law. Discuss among yourselves.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site.