Every morning at around 2am a computer in the Winchester police
headquarters in Belconnen whirs to life. It sets up a secure connection
to the motor registry in Dickson where it begins downloading thousands
of records containing the names, dates of birth, addresses, licence and
registration details of every person who owns or drives a vehicle in the
ACT.
The motor registry data is then compared to the police's own
list of outstanding warrants, stolen vehicles, wanted sex offenders or
suspects in criminal investigations.
Armed with a hard drive
containing the combined dataset, specially equipped squad cars fitted
with licence plate scanners hit the streets and start hunting for hits –
pings against the data that could identify someone that might need to
be taken off the road.
Along Hindmarsh Drive and Athllon Drive in the city's south, fixed cameras are also watching.
Welcome to the world of Automatic Number Plate Recognition, or ANPR,
where sophisticated tools and software are making it easier than ever
for police to track the movement of members of the community.
Initially
sold to the public as road safety measures, the systems are
increasingly finding uses far beyond their initial design. And plans to
dramatically increase the number of cameras on Canberra's and the
nation's streets have some experts worried.
While still relatively
small in scale in the ACT, plate scanning is a booming industry
globally. In the last decade police forces have been able to triple or
quadruple their previous arrest rates for mostly road safety related
offences thanks to introducing the technology. Some of the most
extensive networks allow police to track vehicles in real time from one
side of a city to the other with pinpoint accuracy.
Cameras
mounted on a vehicle or fixed to a pole or building can capture six or
more images of licence plates every second, convert them into text using
optical character recognition software, and check them against data
stored in the system's memory.
In Canberra the systems have been a
huge success. In the first three months of operating the RAPID system
(now known as ANPR) police picked up 469 unregistered or uninsured
vehicles, 147 unlicensed drivers, 69 suspended drivers and 22
disqualified drivers.
ACT registration stickers have become largely unnecessary too in the age of ANPR.
On
their own photos of number plates stored in secure servers would seem
to represent few obvious privacy concerns. But it is when that data is
paired with other databases the technology starts to raise concerns.
Elsewhere, ANPR has been credited with helping to track terrorists, find
and capture violent criminals and dramatically reduce the number of
illegal vehicles on the roads. It has been wildly popular in a number of
countries, particularly in Britain, where the unconstrained growth of
closed circuit television camera networks has led to millions of licence
plates captured and tracked every single day.
In many cases,
systems that were sold to local communities for relatively benign
purposes such as parking security, toll roads or catching speeding
drivers, have since been incorporated into the British police's vast
surveillance network, and there are plans to do the same thing here.
Board
member of the Australian Privacy Foundation Roger Clarke, says the
trend has been growing rapidly under the noses of the general public,
and has already started in Canberra.
"CrimTrac has been trying to
co-ordinate state and territory police for quite some time to try and
get mass surveillance in any state they can get into so they can then
use that as a beachhead and say, 'well every other state uses it, why
don't you?' that's how it started in the UK.
"In Canberra the
Greens and the government accepted the nonsense put to them by police
(when point-to-point cameras were installed. [The government] wants to
get a massive surveillance database just like the UK, the likes of which
we've never had before."
ACT Policing says no location data is attached to images from its mobile ANPR systems.
"It
is important to note no location information is stored, and the data is
therefore not used for evidential or Intel gathering purposes," a
spokesman said.
But fixed cameras, be they private or otherwise, are a different story.
The
federal government certainly seems to think linking up camera networks
is a good idea, promising before the last federal election to set up a
voluntary registry of private CCTV cameras that law enforcement officers
would be able to tap into, vastly expanding their own surveillance
reach.
The ACT has been an enthusiastic adopter of plate reader
technology in Australia, first trialling it around the year 2000 at the
time large networks were being set up around London and Northern Island
to help police deal with the threat of Irish Republican Army bombings.
Canberra
currently has a small number of specific ANPR equipped cameras – 14
mounted in ANPR police vehicles and two point-to-point camera zones
along Hindmarsh and Athllon drives. It is also used on average speed
cameras on the Hume Highway just beyond the ACT border.
But the
ACT government is currently considering a report recommending the
installation of CCTV cameras placed every 1000 metres along most of the
territory's major roads, starting with Northbourne Avenue, potentially
within the next year.
Roads where traffic monitoring cameras are being considered
The report, prepared by AECOM for the ACT government in early
2013, found the ACT's current traffic management systems inadequate, and
suggested a staged rollout of a sophisticated integrated traffic
management system of 119 CCTV cameras, as well as variable speed signs
and monitoring stations.
School of Law assistant professor at the
University of Canberra Bruce Arnold has been studying the growth of
number plate scanning globally and says Canberrans should be concerned
about the plans, even if cameras are not initially equipped to scan
licence plates.
"There are obvious privacy concerns, because
potentially you're able to track everyone in the ACT who's using a car,
in most cases a simple software upgrade at a later date is all this is
required to add the capability," Mr Arnold says.
"Once it's in
place you are left with this fairly expensive network, and you have to
justify why it's there, so people come along and say, 'for an extra $5
million we can add functionality, we will be able to catch child
molesters or drug traffickers' and so it gets expanded and linked to
other data."
"There are votes in security so the temptation will
be to integrate the data from this with other sources such as face
recognition systems, from the sorts of cameras like we're already seeing
in Garema Place and East Row. You could for example track the car I'm
travelling in, and then using face recognition you could track me
walking around in Garema Place."
Evidence both locally and further
afield suggests that where data collection systems have the potential
to be used by police or other government agencies for surveillance,
sooner or later they will be.
In July 2014 police admitted they
had been using data from the ACT's MyWay electronic bus tickets to
monitor the movements of Canberrans. Since the MyWay system came into
place in 2010 the Australian Federal Police have requested information
on bus passengers 27 times, with 16 of those requests resulting in data
being handed over.
And members of the public might be surprised
just how far the cameras that police are already accessing can reach.
When two cars slammed into each other head-on in March 2013, killing an
84-year-old man in one of the vehicles, it was unclear from the scene
exactly what happened and who was at fault. But a camera on a passing
Action bus recorded the entire incident.
After a lengthy public
debate about privacy concerns ahead of the installation of
point-to-point speed cameras and assurances that they would not be used
for mass surveillance, a damning ACT Auditor-General's report released
in March last year found that since they began operating in 2012, police
had made 22 requests for images from the cameras, all of which were
approved.
Under ACT law, images captured by roadside cameras must
be deleted within 14 days if they are not linked to an offence while
those that might be are uploaded to a police database. But the auditor's
report found that around a quarter of images uploaded to the database
and subsequently dismissed were still being retained.
A separate
audit in 2010 by the Australian Information Commissioner of the ANPR
system found ACT Policing's publicity campaigns had not discussed the
system's ability to be used to track people of interest, and police were
reluctant to publicise those additional functions too widely, for fear
their effectiveness may be reduced.
Looking further afield gives in insight into where privacy issues can arise.
In
2011 in the United States a Northern Virginia man reported his wife
missing, prompting police to enter her plate number into their system.
The system detected her car at an apartment complex nearby and police
were sent to investigate. When they arrived they found the car parked
outside with a note on its windscreen that suggested she was in
apartment 3C, and asking that they not tow away her vehicle. When they
knocked on the door, the woman came out of the bedroom. They advised her
to call her husband.
But potentially even more concerning than
law enforcement use is the rise of data aggregators harvesting and
selling licence plate information to private investigators, debt
collectors or anyone else willing to pay.
Private company TLO has
begun selling access to its database of more than a billion vehicle
sightings in the US, allowing customers to request a report on a vehicle
showing where it went, when and its most recently detected location.
In
July 2013 the American Civil Liberties Union sent 587 requests for
information to police departments around the country asking how and why
they use ANPR technology. The resulting report, "You are Being Tracked",
found not only was police data leaking out and ending up in private
databases (no such breach has been reported in the ACT), but a plethora
of private businesses from parking garages to airports, toll roads and
security firms were also recording and storing vast databases of licence
plate data. One of the biggest users of this data is repossession
agents wanting to track down debtors. TLO's website claims the company
adds 50 million sightings to its database every month.
"If not
properly secured, license plate reader databases open the door to
abusive tracking, enabling anyone with access to pry into the lives of
his boss, his ex-wife, or his romantic, political, or workplace rivals,"
that report warned.
While there have been no suggestions that the
data is being used improperly in Canberra, a number of other businesses
around the city have begun recording the details of their visitors,
including the National Portrait Gallery, that scans the plates of every
vehicle that enters its carpark.
"It is standard technology used
in many new car parks in shopping centres and other public spaces … The
data is only used in relation to parking," a gallery spokeswoman said,
but noted the information could be passed to the police in the event of
an incident or accident.
Cameras have also been going in along the
Majura Parkway construction zone, and their success has encouraged the
government to look at installing more, according to Justice Minister
Shane Rattenbury.
"The ability to see the road network and
minimise congestion and maximise the efficiency of the network offers
real opportunity for commuters to get a better run across the city … but
unfettered access clearly is not an acceptable outcome," Mr Rattenbury
said.
"It is important that that data can be used, but that it be
used in a way that is consistent with privacy principles. Those concerns
(about mass surveillance) are fair enough, and this is not about having
mass surveillance, I'd expect those principles to be applied across any
further use of cameras."
But looking at where its financial
priorities lie provides an insight into how important the ACT government
views surveillance technology.
The strained 2013-14 budget
included big hits to some areas including ACT Policing, which had about
10 per cent or $15 million slashed from its total annual allocation of
$150 million over four years. At the same time the union was warning the
cuts would result in up to 45 job losses, an extra $5m was found to
expand the More Police Safer Roads initiative which included increasing
the number of ANPR equipped cars to four.
According to a police spokesman, there are now 14 ANPR equipped cars on the ACT's streets.
The
technology is already in use in a number of other states and
territories, and there have been several attempts to link up these
individual systems.
To see where the ACT's embryonic deployment of
the technology could lead to, the small land-locked county of Surrey in
the Britain provides a useful case study.
In 2001 Surrey Police
introduced one van and four ANPR cameras, staffed by six officers. Using
data on vehicles linked to terrorism or major crime, Surrey's ANPR
intercept team rapidly increased their number of arrests to 100 per
officer per year, four times the British national average. Additional
funds to the program began to flow.
By 2013 that number had grown
to 168 cameras at 38 sites reporting 3400 positive hits a day for
vehicles of interest. Last year Surrey Police also entered into a joint
project with the University of Surrey to develop sophisticated convoy
analysis software that allows officers to track not just an individual
vehicle, but to identify any others who may have been following a
similar route and could therefore have been travelling with them. Convoy
analysis is already in limited use in both Britain and the United
States.
While the US and British experiences may sound paranoid or
improbable in Australia, there is significant appetite to roll out
systems on a similar scale here.
In June 2008 CrimTrac began work
on a scoping study for a nationally connected licence plate scanning
network that would allow law enforcement, national security and road
transport authorities to track vehicles across the entire country. While
the study found implementing such a vast network would be expensive and
faced potential technical and legislative difficulties, ahead of the
last federal election the Coalition announced its intention to try
again.
In its policy to tackle crime, the now Abbott government
pledged to commission an urgent scoping study for the rollout of a
licence plate scanning network to be operated by CrimTrac for the
approaches to airsides and waterfronts.
"This will enable law
enforcement and criminal intelligence agencies to identify people and
organisations whose attendance at these locations may be unauthorised or
suspicious," the policy document claimed.
The document also
extolled the virtues of Britain's vast network of CCTV cameras in
solving murders and other crimes, and pledged an extra $50 million for
local Australian communities to follow British neighbourhoods and
install more cameras. According to a spokeswoman for Justice Minister
Michael Keenan's office, nearly $20 million of that money had already
been spent by the end of 2014.
CrimTrac's CEO Doug Smith told a
Senate estimates hearing in November 2013 that it would be relatively
simple to set-up a national database of vehicles of interest that could
be accessed by ANPR systems around the country, but said technology,
privacy and other issues had been found to be a serious concern when
considered in 2008.
"Probably the best example you could use as an
analogy is the one that is used in Britain, which is a single national
system. It is a very extensive and intrusive system, and the board did
not have the appetite at the time and did not approve that particular
request," Mr Smith said.
The Privacy Foundation's Roger Clarke remains skeptical.
"This
is now mature technology that has been around for a number of years and
there is plenty of forward compatibility built into this system. It's
quite ripe for function creep to occur because it's easily done, and for
governments and police, it's easy to see the attraction."
canberratimes.com.au 24 Jul 2015
This is an indication of how authorities are treating their residents - as inhabitants of a 'penal colony'.
You may have freedom of movement, but your EVERY move WILL be recorded.
Australian are still living the (legal) reality of a penal colony, but are blissfully unaware of this.
Bronwyn Bishop following her resignation as speaker. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
