Motorola, known for cellphones, is fast becoming a major player in government surveillance
Motorola,
known for cellphones, is fast becoming a major player in government
surveillance
Motorola Solutions is among
the tech firms racing to deliver new ways of monitoring the public.
Motorola Solutions has
invested in powerful surveillance tools, including automated license plate
readers, police body cameras equipped with appearance-detection technology and
security cameras that can find people.
By Jon Schuppe Oct. 2, 2019,
1:30 AM PDT
The surveillance tools have
been installed in schools and public housing,
deployed on roads and public transit, and worn by police officers.
They’ve been developed by an array of technology firms
competing for government business.
And many are now owned by a company seeking to grab a
bigger piece of a booming market.
Motorola, a brand typically
associated with cellphones and police radios, has joined the race among tech
firms to deliver new ways of monitoring the public.
Since 2017, the Chicago-based tech company — now known as
Motorola Solutions, after Motorola Inc. spun off its mobile phone business
— has invested $1.7 billion to support or acquire companies that build police
body cameras; train cameras to spot certain faces or behavior; sift through
video for suspicious people; and track the movement of cars by their license
plates. By consolidating these tools within a single corporation, and
potentially combining them into a single product, Motorola Solutions is
boosting its stature in the surveillance industry ─ and amplifying concerns
about the government’s growing power to watch people almost anywhere they go.
“Your privacy is more protected when information about
you is scattered among agencies and entities. When all that is unified under
one roof, that sharpens the privacy issues,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy
analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, where he researches
technology’s impact on privacy. “I don’t know exactly what kind of synergies a
company like Motorola Solutions might get from assembling all these pieces, but
in general it’s a scary prospect.”
A Vigilant Solutions camera
that scans license plates. Motorola Solutions now owns the company. Vigilant
Solutions
Motorola Solutions did not make executives available to
answer questions about its acquisitions or plans for them. The company provided
a statement that described its plan to add artificial intelligence products,
including object detection and “unusual motion detection,” to a package it
sells to public safety agencies. The systems can help flag a potential
trespasser or the appearance of smoke, the company said. The company emphasized
that the new tools are not meant to make automatic policing decisions but to
help officers decide how to act.
Stanley first noticed signs of Motorola Solutions’ new
direction while walking through the exhibition hall at the International
Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference two years ago. In a blog post about his visit, he included a photo of
a Motorola Solutions booth promoting its new line of police body cameras
alongside new ways of analyzing video.
Motorola Solutions’ move into high-tech surveillance
hasn’t attracted much scrutiny from privacy researchers. But that is changing
as the company continues to assemble powerful surveillance tools.
They include:
- Police body cameras that learn what people look like: In 2017, Motorola Solutions invested in — and partnered with — a Boston artificial
intelligence startup called Neurala to develop police body cameras that
can search in real time for people or objects based on their appearances.
Motorola Solutions says the partnership was limited to "early
technology feasibility studies, prototypes and customer research." In
July 2019, Motorola Solutions acquired WatchGuard, a Texas body-camera maker, which
will help it add to its existing line of body cameras.
- Surveillance cameras that can track people's
movements: In March
2018, Motorola Solutions acquired Avigilon, a Canadian company that
sells surveillance cameras along with software to scan footage for a particular person or vehicle. Avigilon has
contracts to provide these artificial intelligence-driven applications to
several school districts, including Wilson County, Tennessee; Fulton
County, Georgia; and Broward County, Florida. Clients also include the New
Bedford Housing Authority in Massachusetts, the Elk Grove Police
Department in California and the city of Berkeley, California, according
to Avigilon’s promotional materials, public contract documents and
interviews with local government officials.
- Automated license plate readers: In January, Motorola Solutions bought VaaS International
Holdings, owner of California-based Vigilant Solutions, which works with
government agencies, including hundreds of police departments in the United
States and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to
collect and share data on the location of cars captured by its automated
license plate readers. VaaS also owns Digital Recognition Network, which
shares license plate reader data with private companies, including
car-repossession agents.
In an Aug. 1 conference call with stock market analysts,
Motorola Solutions Chairman and CEO Greg Brown described how his company has
combined these technologies into suites of products, with a particular focus on
police and schools.
“We’re about building platforms,” Brown said. “It’s not
just video. … It’s the storage, it’s the management, it’s the analytics, it’s
the machine learning and the AI that take all of that end-to-end experience and
provide use cases around specific verticals to differentiate. This is a hot
market.”
This strategy isn’t unique to Motorola Solutions. Much
bigger players in the surveillance market, including Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, have expanded their
holdings in artificial intelligence companies. So have rising competitors like Axon, formerly known as Taser, which has
become the nation’s largest provider of police body cameras and is exploring
new uses of artificial intelligence. (It established an ethics board for advice on how to develop
these technologies.)
Using artificial intelligence to analyze footage from the
nation’s ever-growing networks of surveillance cameras helps police agencies do
their jobs more efficiently — it saves time sifting for evidence, and allows
easy redaction of people’s faces from footage that is released to the public.
Authorities now use facial recognition to identify suspects in all kinds of
crimes, from murder to shoplifting. License plate readers have been
used to recover stolen cars, solve drive-by shootings and track down serial
burglars, police say.
Among the fastest growing surveillance markets are public
schools. Motorola Solutions has taken advantage of that trend, with Avigilon
winning about a dozen contracts over the last two years to install
state-of-the-art video networks. Buyers include Wilson County Schools in
Tennessee, which outfitted two of its newest schools with cameras that can
automatically track people through rooms and hallways based on their
appearance.
Avigilon Appearance Search
technology allows users to search for a person by selecting physical
descriptions, including hair and clothing color, gender and age.Avigilon
“Whatever tools are available to provide a safe
environment for our students and staff I think it’s our obligation to explore,”
said Mickey Hall, Wilson County Schools’ deputy director.
The next time the district builds a school, Hall said, it
may include systems that read the license plates of all cars that drive past,
and that identify visitors by their faces.
But the technology also raises the risk of the government
and private corporations amassing too much power to peer into people’s lives,
Stanley, of the ACLU, said. Once a person is targeted for this kind of
surveillance, whether they are suspected in a crime, hold unpopular political
views or have been mistaken for someone else, authorities can examine where
they’ve been and may find something incriminating, Stanley said.
“It turns scattered cameras into mass surveillance
machines that allow companies and agencies to use them to rewind someone’s
life,” he said.
Keith Housum, an analyst who follows Motorola Solutions
at the equity research firm Northcoast Research, said its recent
surveillance-related acquisitions comprise a small fraction of the company’s
operations but have helped boost its stock price, as investors see it as
pursuing new revenue sources.
“AI is very important to their product portfolio because
so much information is being gathered, so much video is being recorded, that
there’s no way you can go through it with the naked eye,” Housum said, adding,
“It’s where the new future is going to be.”
Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for
limits on government surveillance and has
documented law enforcement’s widespread sharing of data collected by
Vigilant Solutions’ license plate readers, said he’d like to see more local
governments pass ordinances requiring deeper public scrutiny of the technology.
He also said Motorola Solutions should follow other
companies, including Axon and Microsoft, in seeking ways to make sure their
products are used responsibility by their customers. Axon has pledged not to
outfit its body cameras with facial recognition technology, and Microsoft
President Brad Smith has said his company won’t sell facial
recognition to governments for use in mass surveillance.
“There's a potential for positive change if Motorola
decides to reform Vigilant as it incorporates it into its other business.
However, the merging of all these technologies underlines that surveillance is
big business,” Maass said in an email. “And it's important to ensure that
decisions about surveillance in our society aren’t driven by sales and profit,
but by what the community actually wants and needs.”
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