San Francisco Police Are Using Driverless Cars as Mobile Surveillance Cameras
“As companies continue to make public roadways their testing grounds for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are—rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies,” said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. “Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, Ring Doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance.”
SFPD’s use of AVs as mobile surveillance cameras follows the practices of the Chandler Police Department in Arizona, where Waymo has been testing AVs since 2017. But previous reports indicated these were rare instances involving traffic crimes like hit and runs. SPFD did not respond to a Motherboard email asking for more details on when and how often it sought footage from AVs.
The use of AVs as an investigative tool echoes how Ring, a doorbell and home security company owned by Amazon, became a key partner with law enforcement around the country by turning individual consumer products into a network of cameras with comprehensive coverage of American neighborhoods easily accessible to police. Police departments around the country use automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to track the movements of vehicles. The EFF has sued the SFPD for accessing business improvement district live cameras to spy on protestors.
Privacy advocates and researchers have long warned about the implications of increasingly sophisticated cars, but many of these warnings are essentially extensions of the privacy concerns of smartphones, where consumer technology tracks your movements and behavior, anonymizes it, and sells it to third parties in a manner that can be reverse-engineered to identify individuals. They rarely imagine a scenario where cars on the road are constantly recording the world around them for later use by police departments.
It is the combination of using fixed location camera networks with rolling networks of autonomous vehicle cameras and data that scares privacy advocates most. “The holistic outcome of these combined moving and fixed networks is a threat that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Schwartz said. “Working together, [they can] more effectively turn our lives into open books.”
At some point, evidence gathered by autonomous vehicles may be challenged in court. If and when that happens, we may get even more answers. But it seems like this isn’t a problem capable of being quantified with this minimum amount of information. That doesn’t mean it should be ignored. It just means more data is needed to draw any solid conclusions.
San Francisco Cops Are Accessing Autonomous Vehicle Recordings To Collect Evidence
from the another-source-of-always-on-surveillance dept
"This report, by Aaron Gordon for Motherboard, looks like a hypothetical dreamed up by a particularly cruel constitutional law professor:
For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while laden with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.
While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may one day offer, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.
It’s not quite as cut-and-dried as that last sentence. As far as we know, police departments do not have unfettered, real-time access to the recordings created constantly by autonomous vehicles. But they do have access to the recordings. That much is clear from the public records obtained by Motherboard.
The San Francisco PD has been using this footage to aid in investigations, apparently frequently. The training document says two things, neither of which address the particularly thorny constitutional questions they raise:
Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads.
There’s nothing untrue about this assertion and yet it says nothing about the processes used to obtain these recordings. That might have been a hypothetical if not for the following bullet point:
Information will be sent in how to access this potential evidence (Investigations has already done this several times)
Yikes.
That is problematic, as an EFF rep points out:
“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”
So many questions
An AV will not have a human driver, which lowers the expectation of privacy. That expectation reverts to the company deploying it, which makes it somewhat comparable to a third-party record: data obtained by an automatic process that belongs to the company deploying the data-gathering device (in this case, a car).
Since there’s no driver to challenge searches, the responsibility lies with the company deploying the vehicle. And, since the recordings presumably cover public areas where the privacy expectation is further lowered, it might be possible to obtain recordings with nothing more than a subpoena (or a friendly sounding email!)
That’s where things get even thornier, in terms of the Fourth Amendment. The document does not describe the process the SFPD investigations team uses to obtain recordings.
>First of all, how does the SFPD even know if AV recordings might be useful in ongoing investigations? ...
> Moving on from there, how does the PD approach these companies? Private searches (which may be how these recordings are viewed by courts) are legal provided law enforcement does nothing to encourage searches companies (or their employees) may not otherwise engage in...
AV testing is AV testing. It really doesn’t matter much where it’s happening, so some companies may engage in test runs in neighborhoods investigators think might provide more evidence or intel. If this is happening, that’s a real problem.
Unfortunately, we only know what the SFPD has released so far: a training document that says AV cars capture footage and that investigators have utilized that footage in the past. Future public records requests may shed more light on the matter, but for now, this is all we have.
RELATED CONTENT
National Security Implications of Leadership in Autonomous Vehicles
June 28, 2021
". . .The Military Applications of Autonomous Vehicles
As much of the innovation and work on AVs is now happening in the private sector, it is reasonable to ask how much carryover there will be from commercial to military uses. In the early stages of developing AV technology, there was considerable overlap. As development progressed, there has been divergence, and the direct application of commercial autonomy will be smaller (the same way a combat aircraft and a passenger aircraft that share certain technologies can jointly benefit from research and development but are ultimately designed for fundamentally different purposes and requirements).
Autonomous devices that operate without human control are deeply attractive to militaries and are already deployed in aerospace and undersea vehicles by leading military powers. Autonomous ground vehicles are more challenging to develop, given the much more complex and varied terrain in which operations take place, but innovation in the commercial self-driving sector could improve military vehicles’ operations. This will be seen first in logistics and support vehicles (e.g., autonomous trucks), where the transition from commercial to military is simpler, and perhaps later in combat vehicles.
It is not an accident that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was the government agency that began work on autonomous driving in 1984 with its Autonomous Land Vehicle program. . ."
Source: https://www.csis.org/analysis/national-security-implications-leadership-autonomous-vehicles
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Utah Cops Used ‘Reverse Warrants’ To Track Down A Bunch Of Petty Criminals
from the hey-whatever-gets-the-job-done-I-guess dept
Whenever cops discover a new means or method of tracking people that seems to run afoul of the letter (if not the spirit) of the Fourth Amendment, they’re quick to defend these actions by claiming they’re necessary to hunt down the most dangerous of criminals: terrorists, sexual exploiters of children, kidnappers, homicide suspects, etc.
When pressed for details, it usually turns out Fourth Amendment eluding by law enforcement tends to focus on the same sort of bog standard crime cops could be using regular stuff to handle, rather than seeking “national security” exceptions for their rights violations.
Cops are terrible at tracking down and punishing the worst criminals. And, like anyone employed pretty much anywhere, they’re far more interested in easy wins and easy busywork. So, when cops started acquiring designed-for-the-military phone tracking gear (Stingrays, etc.), they claimed these purchases that they kept hidden from the public were essential to ensure the annual Mule Day parade remained free of terrorist activity. The heinous criminal acts cited in acquisition forms materialized as the deployment of cell site simulators to track down threats to the fabric of society like… fast food thieves.
Cops are frequently turning to Google to shortcut the investigative work of criminal investigations. When cops can’t find a suspect, they send subpoenas (or “reverse” warrants) to Google, demanding information on every device found in the area of a crime scene during the time the crime occurred. Depending on the size of the geofence erected around the request, hundreds to thousands of innocent people are subjected to searches while cops figured out who might actually be a likely suspect.
Again, cops (and their published advocates) argue the use of reverse warrants is a net good for society — something that allows cops to track down suspects without troubling the rights of people who don’t care about their rights.
Few assurances have been offered about the use of reverse warrants. The lack of “but serious crimes” assurances may have factored into the handful of court rejections of these warrants. But cops continue to run to Google for location data. And they rely on the (sometimes unspoken) implication that serious criminal investigations would dead end without this information, further separating probable cause from its expected definition to engage in dragnet acquisitions of cell location data and identifying info that can link devices to people.
This report from Utah’s KUTV shows what cops are actually utilizing this option to accomplish. And it certainly isn’t the sort of crimes most people would associate with dragnet surveillance via third party data.
A review of warrants by KUTV found Layton Police are routinely obtaining geo-fence warrants to investigate property crimes. Court records show that since last fall, Layton Police have used geo-fence warrants for cases including a stolen wallet at Layton Hospital, a theft at Layton Hills Mall, a car break-in at a gym, and a stolen vehicle from a car dealership, among other crimes.
These are the sorts of crimes people expect cops to solve without a bunch of fancy technical tools. This are small-time property crimes — the sort that make up the bulk of police work. Why a geofence warrant was considered necessary is unclear. The most obvious explanation is “because it’s there.” If it’s an option that will see little pushback from third parties and courts, then why bother doing any actual police work using means and methods that have proven capable of handling low-level crap like this for years?
Until the pushback arrives, we can expect Utah cops to keep using a questionable tool to investigate regular property crimes they often couldn’t be bothered to investigate otherwise. When time is of the essence, cops are always available to write things down and shrug about the possibility of property recovery. But when Google can be made to do cops’ work for them, then Google it is.
And, of course, certain residents are cool with cops lazily turning dozens or hundreds of people into criminal suspects because someone else is doing most of the work. KUTV interviewed Randy Lavine, one of several residents living in the area where multiple cars were broken into and thieves made off with [rereads news report] $350 in property. Lavine indicated some discomfort at being (however briefly) considered a suspect due to his residence in the neighborhood where the thefts took place, but otherwise gave his blessing to the dragnet surveillance.
“I would like to have a heads up to say ‘hey, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I would have said ‘fine, hey, knock yourself out’,” Lavine said.
This is a pretty easy thing to say when you haven’t been hauled out of your home, dragged down to the precinct, and aggressively questioned about a crime you didn’t commit. That didn’t happen to Lavine, so that probably explains his blase attitude towards this use of reverse warrants.
Then again, Lavine was never going to “fit the description,” even if the theft had been committed by someone described as a “white, mustachioed, hat-wearing, AARP member.” Here’s Lavine, as captured by KUTV’s cameras:
Lavine isn’t the sort of person who’s going to get picked up and threatened by detectives who’ve done nothing more than run a proxy Google search before searching for suspects. That’s not how the system works anywhere in this country, least of all primarily white states like Utah. Lavine can shrug this off because even if the cops are wrong, it’s never going to affect him personally. This is not to condemn Lavine for his reaction. This is just to point out how easy it is to not be too bothered by apparent Fourth Amendment violations when they have little chance of affecting you personally.
The courts are pretty much the only thing pushing back against law enforcement overreach when it comes to methods and means that haven’t been subjected to a lot of precedent or judicial examination. The court will always trail tech advances because that’s the way the system operates: nothing is an issue until somebody raises it in court. The problem is courts are often hesitant to weigh in on these issues. The (irrational) fear that limiting cops might give criminals an advantage is only one of the problems. The other is the deference shown by courts to law enforcement officers who have somehow maintained their reputation as good people despite years of constitutional violations, lying, and inexplicably violent reactions to everyday occurrences.
Cops may have legitimate uses for geofence warrants. But those uses should be the exception, not the rule. But what’s shown here is that cops are using new tools that have not been fully examined by courts to track down the most petty of criminals, even when less intrusive options would accomplish the same ends. This needs to stop. And it’s up to the courts to stop it."
Filed Under: 4th amendment, petty crime, police, reverse warrants, utah
Companies: google
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