CellHawk. We’ve written about this one before. CellHawk is an app for analyzing location data sourced from cell tower records and data brokers. Pittsburgh police were found to be using CellHawk by Councilwoman Deb Gross in February, but except for our bare bones piece there has been no followup from the media or City Council. The app is disturbing for a couple of reasons – one because it gives technicians the ability to track multiple devices at once within a precisely delineated area, and two because the police have been keeping its use a secret for nearly a decade. Supposedly CellHawk’s cell tower data can’t be accessed without a warrant, but we don’t know how strictly the vendor enforces that requirement. In addition, CellHawk can work with GPS-based location data purchased from data brokers without a warrant.
Countering CellHawk involves some inconvenience. For starters, users should remove the advertising ID from their phones. This won’t keep data brokers from collecting your GPS location data, but it will prevent them from identifying that data as yours, making it useless for tracking purposes. Avoiding tracking via cell tower records is more difficult. All phones leave a record of tower pings regardless of what apps they have installed – this is how the device decides which tower to connect with to send messages. The only defenses are to either leave your phone at home and treat it like a landline, or make sure service is not in your name. To do the latter, find a cellular dealer that doesn’t require ID and accepts cash, put a fake name on the account, get a new phone number instead of porting your old one (told you it was inconvenient!), and always pay the bill with cash or prepaid cards bought with cash. Avoid AT&T dealers, as they require customers to show ID.
License Plate Readers. LPRs sold by Flock Safety have been in the news lately, both for their exploitation by ICE and for the comically porous security of the cameras themselves. Pittsburgh doesn’t use Flock, however. Instead they have contracted with a competing LPR vendor called PlateSmart, a software-only company whose apps can run on most models of camera. It is not known which other police forces Pittsburgh shares LPR data with. Nor do we know for how long the data is stored, or what is done to secure it.
PlateSmart’s bring-your-own-cameras approach presents some problems for anyone hoping to avoid having their license plate scanned wherever they travel. PlateSmart cameras are harder to recognize, since they don’t use a standard model. In addition, since they’re installed by the city the devices tend to be harder to reach than Flock’s, who does their own installations using their own (very short) poles.
The county is in on the LPR act as well. Back in 2019, Lancaster Online reported on DA Stephen Zappala’s buildout of an LPR network in Pittsburgh and the surrounding boroughs. Like Pittsburgh’s use of CellHawk, the county made no announcement of the cameras, forcing the Lancaster Online reporter to base his story on documents obtained through an RTK request. Even more disturbing is that there are apparently no restrictions on who the county is allowed to share footage with. A followup piece by The Appeal revealed that in 2019 the DA’s office was already salivating over the potential for facial recognition to geofence minors on probation. Seven years later, it is still unknown if this capability has been implemented. The Pittsburgh city ordinance prohibiting the use of facial recognition does not apply to the county. It is also unknown whether or not data from county LPRs is shared with ICE.
The best way to defeat LPRs of any model is to avoid traveling by car. If this is infeasible for a particular trip, you can try to follow a route that avoids cameras. Deflock.me has a crowd-sourced map of LPR locations, but it is incomplete. More ambitious travelers can obscure their license plates with rear-mounted bike racks or racks attached to trailer hitches.
Red light cameras. The city will be rolling out traffic light cameras sometime this summer. These devices photograph your license plate and send you a ticket in the mail if you enter an intersection even a split second after the light has turned red. While the locations of the first six cameras to be installed have been made public, another 24 of the devices are planned, and there is no guarantee some of them won’t be in secret locations. Red light cameras are a particularly insidious form of surveillance because they generate revenue for the city. There is always a financial incentive to install more of them, especially now that the city government is facing a revenue crunch. Worse, officials might be tempted to shorten yellow light durations to lure drivers into running lights more often, as happened in Chicago beginning in 2007. The boost in revenue comes at the expense of more rear-end accidents, as drivers slam on the brakes at yellow lights instead of continuing on and getting a ticket. Vendors of red light cameras claim that the devices reduce t-bone collisions enough to improve traffic safety overall, but numerous studies show either no decrease or even an increase in injuries arising from traffic light accidents.
Parking cameras. Pittsburgh has been shifting its parking enforcement from human meter maids to automated plate scanners, both attached to vehicles and stationary. The stationary cameras enforce former mayor Ed Gainey’s loathed purple curb program, in which the 30 minute loading zones in front of businesses were changed to minute-by-minute charging, so that anyone parking in front of a purple curb will be charged a small amount even if they are only there momentarily. Similar cameras automatically ticket drivers who park in a bike lane for more than 90 seconds. This system disproportionately affects rideshare and delivery drivers, the folks most in need of a few free minutes at a curb. A pizza delivery driver who just has to park at the restaurant long enough to run in and grab his next orders may well find that the tip from his last delivery is wiped out by the parking charge incurred while picking up his next one. A disabled Uber passenger who takes 91 seconds to make it into the car can end up costing the driver more than the amount of the fare.
The mobile, car-mounted parking cameras, while not enforcing any new restrictions, have problems of their own. WPXI, in an uncharacteristic fit of investigative fervor, uncovered an incident in which one such device couldn’t even figure out which side of the street a car was parked on. Many more such glitches have undoubtedly avoided media scrutiny.
The same measures that can defeat license plate readers are also effective against parking and red light cameras – but suffer from the same inconveniences. In addition, continuous use of a bike rack to obscure a license plate will eventually draw the attention of a human cop or meter maid. In New York City, which recently instituted congestion pricing, a cottage industry in so-called ghost plates has sprung up, featuring shady car dealers selling temporary paper license plates linked to false names and addresses. These things can save drivers money in tickets and tolls, but they have to be renewed every month or two, and using them can get you arrested if you get caught. Various mechanical devices that obscure a car’s plates are available on the internet, but these too can get you in bigger trouble if a cop pulls you over. The take-home lesson is that anonymous driving is feasible for occasional trips, but risky and expensive if done regularly.
Good old fashioned surveillance cameras. Pittsburgh opened its so-called Real Time Crime Center in early 2020 to monitor feeds from Shotspotter, LPRs, police body cams, and its own network of high resolution cameras. These last devices can be spotted in ever greater numbers on light and telephone poles around the city. Most are found along heavily trafficked streets, but some are inexplicably positioned in quiet residential neighborhoods (hello Chautauqua Street!). More elaborate stand-alone versions featuring their own solar panels, battery packs, and flashing blue police lights have recently popped up in the parking lots of local retailers like Home Depot. Footage is normally retained for ten days according to city ordinance, but will preserved for longer if the cops need it for anything. Another city ordinance says this about sharing footage: Access to data from City Public Security Cameras shall be available upon written request only as set forth herein or in regulations and procedures promulgated by the Director of the Department of Public Safety and the Chief of Police. In short, the cops can give the data to anyone they want.
It is clear from the above compendium that our beloved city is swiftly turning into a dystopian police state. The hoops an ordinary person has to jump through to maintain the same privacy while traveling we enjoyed in 2015 make normal life nearly impossible. Even the PRT buses have surveillance cameras now. Individualized approaches to resistance have slowly tightening limits that make getting from one place to another without leaving a digital trail more and more time-consuming, expensive, and inconvenient. At some point somebody’s going to have to start going on offense. We hope to explore what that might look like in a future post.