Police use facial recognition databases to identify motorists and passengers

The leading suppler of automated license plate reader technology in the US is expanding its offerings to law enforcement. Vehicle owners have already had their movements tracked by the company
Vigilant Solutions, which boasts 2 billion entries in its nationwide database, with 70 million additional license plate photographs being added each month. Now passengers can also be tracked if they hitch a ride with a friend and are photographed by a camera aimed at the front of the car.

"The new Vigilant Mobile Companion app expands the benefits of license plate recognition and facial recognition technologies to all areas of the agency," a Vigilant Solutions press release claimed:

"Using many of the new analytic tools that Vigilant has released in its Learn product over the last couple of years, the app makes these tools even more easy to use and accessible on a mobile device. In addition to the license plate recognition capture and analytic tools, the app also features Vigilant’s powerful FaceSearch facial recognition which analyzes over 350 different vectors of the human face. The FaceSearch element of Mobile Companion allows officers in the field to snap a photo of a willing subject and have their face matched against a gallery of over 13 million pre-populated mugshot and registered sex offender images as well as any other images that the agency uploads into its own gallery.”

The app also includes a mobile device version of Vigilant’s exclusive feature known as Mobile Hit Hunter.

Click here to find out more about the app.

Though primarily intended for fixed security camera installations, the software could allow police to identify the occupants of vehicles when the system is supplied with a clear photograph of a car's interior. In states such as California and Arizona where red light cameras and speed cameras photograph the front of a car, the video stream can be analyzed in "near real time" to catalog and identify the driver and anyone in the passenger seat of passing vehicles, flagging any "person of interest."

A Virginia court recently acknowledged the ability of standard ANPR systems to track a vehicle using the Vigilant Solutions online database that goes by the name National Vehicle Location Service, which has been fed with license plate images from law enforcement and private sources since 2008.

"A subsequent investigation revealed that a 2012 black Range Rover is registered to Eduard," the court wrote on December 17 in the case United States v. Loz. "A search of the National Vehicle Location Service's database also showed that this Range Rover had been spotted eight times near the closest intersection to Eduard's Forest Hills residence."
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/46/4602.asp
http://vigilantsolutions.com/press/vigilant-mobile-companion-app-iacp

Boston police dept. refuses to release spying records:

The Boston Police Department embodies the surveillance age’s chilling twin principles: more power to spy on law-abiding citizens, and less accountability for doing it.

The BPD headquarters houses the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, an anti-terrorism spy agency supported by the state and federal governments. BRIC is one of many such centers around the country. A bipartisan U.S. Senate committee in 2012 criticized these centers as wasteful dangers to civil liberties that have failed to uncover any terrorist plots. In BRIC’s case, that has meant spying on lawful protesters while at the same time failing to collecting any information about the Boston Marathon bombers prior to the crime.

BRIC’s local spying was revealed in recent years by lawsuits and FOIA requests by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. These efforts forced BRIC to release spy files from certain years. In 2007, for example, BRIC filed a report on an anti-war rally inside a Jamaica Plain church, inexplicably labeling it a “criminal act” by “extremists.” Among the speakers were famed peace activist Cindy Sheehan and a Boston city councilor. Another was Mélida Arredondo, wife of prominent peace activist Carlos Arredondo, who later became a rescue hero at the marathon bombing.

A Gazette review of these BRIC documents found extensive spying on First Amendment-protected activities in 2011. BRIC tracked the Occupy Boston protests — spearheaded by Jamaica Plain residents — and documented anything it thought remotely connected to those protests, including yoga classes. (Among its sources were the Gazette’s calendar listings.) BRIC’s attention spread to unrelated activities, including Northeastern University academic events and anti-gentrification protests targeting a grocery store.

There is also reason to believe this spying triggered the curious arrests of peaceful local demonstrators whose cases were later dismissed or settled — including that of Carlos Arredondo. Local activists said BRIC’s spying scares them and creates a chilling effect. Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy put BRIC’s surveillance on his 2013 annual “Muzzle Awards” for free-speech violations.

To determine the full extent of BRIC’s local spying, the Gazettes this summer filed a public records request with BPD, the custodian of BRIC records. We sought all BRIC spy documents from 2005 to the present containing the names of our neighborhoods.

While state law requires a response within 10 days, BPD took 109 days to respond. Its response was a blanket refusal, claiming all such documents fall under an “investigative materials” exemption, despite the previous releases.

The Gazettes recently refiled the request at the advice of the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Office. BPD is again in violation of state law, having failed to respond for 17 days and counting as of this writing. We have asked the Secretary of State’s Office to demand BPD produce the documents.

Our neighborhoods have already seen BRIC and BPD encroach on four of the five First Amendment freedoms: religion, speech, assembly and petitioning. And now we see BPD violating state law to avoid further scrutiny from the fifth: our press.
http://nefirstamendment.org/boston-police-department-refuses-release-spying-records/