American police are testing a new technology that can scan moving vehicles for anything that emits a signal, including phones, smartwatches, cat and dog tracking chips and even library books, according to its creator, Rome, Italy-based surveillance, defense and aerospace company Leonardo.
The nascent technology, called Elsag EOC Plus, is typically incorporated into one of Leonardo’s Elsag license plate readers, though can be deployed as a standalone surveillance device, and is designed to help police monitor suspects as they move. But privacy advocates told Forbes the new technology could be abused to warrantlessly track people across large tranches of the country, learning more about them by identifying their belongings without their knowledge.
Leonardo claims the tool can identify specific models of devices like iPhones and Bose headphones inside moving vehicles, according to a marketing brochure from the Milipol conference in Paris last year. It can also identify unique signals emitted by pet chips, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, wearable tech like fitness trackers, in-car infotainment systems and tire pressure sensors, and can even detect the RFID of a library book, according to the brochure. For law enforcement, all that data can be linked to a car’s license plate number, becoming a unique “fingerprint.” As a person travels through other license plate scanners, their fingerprint can be followed around a given area, even when the driver or passenger switches vehicles.
“It’s ripe for abuse not just because of how it could be used to track people, but it gives a cheat sheet of all electronic devices on a person.”
“As an example, while 30 cars in 100 may contain iPhones, only one will have an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder and the license plate ABC-1234. The collection of data represented by these specific things is an electronic signature,” Leonardo explained in its brochure.
Customers of the new technology may not be limited to police departments or public roads. Leonardo wrote in its brochure it could be useful in “off-road areas such as rail stations and shopping centers.” As Forbes reported earlier this month, malls across the U.S. are already equipped with AI-powered car surveillance technologies from Leonardo rival Flock Safety, and are feeding data straight to police agencies in a bid to catch shoplifters. Flock’s AI cameras similarly create “fingerprints” for different cars, but rather than scanning for devices inside, it looks at identifying features on a car beyond the license plate number, such as color, make, model, bumper stickers or wheel rims.
A Leonardo brochure marketing its new car surveillance technology.
Forbes
Leonardo spokesperson Nate Maloney told Forbes the company recently obtained a patent for the technology so it was “going full steam ahead” in trying to sell the product across the world. It currently has no paying customers, though confirmed at least one of its current license plate detection customers was trialing the tech in a test environment, Maloney said. He didn’t say which American police department was assisting in trials, but said they were not currently being used to surveil the public. The company claims to have over 4,000 customers for its Elsag license plate readers across the U.S.
Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he couldn’t see how the police “would justify spending taxpayer money on this.”
“I have a hard time seeing a use case for a tech like this when police already have license plate readers,” he added. “It’s ripe for abuse not just because of how it could be used to track people, but it gives a cheat sheet of all electronic devices on a person.” Police could use this information to determine what devices to seize when stopping and searching an individual – especially concerning for activists and journalists at a protest, Guariglia said.
Maloney said that Leonardo would work with police agencies so they stayed within the bounds of the law. If an agency was not permitted to identify any devices within a car without a warrant, for instance, features could be turned off in the surveillance tool to prevent excessive data collection, he said. He noted the tool would not collect content from people’s devices. “We’re not going in and decrypting anything, these are just the signals in the air,” he added.
Last month, Byron Tau, reporter at Allbritton Journalism Institute’s nonprofit publication NOTUS, revealed that similar technology made by a German company called Jenoptik had been trialed by U.S. law enforcement in two Texas counties, though it’s unclear how widely it was deployed. (Jenoptik hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.)
Guariglia said the new technologies were “Stingrays by another name.” Stingrays are surveillance tools also known as cell-site simulators, which pose as mobile cell towers to collect information about all phones in a given area. As Forbes previously reported, they’ve also been used to find cars. Because of their potential to harvest information on innocent citizens, they have proven highly contentious, leading some states to require warrants before they’re used.
The Leonardo tool also “tricks your device into pinging against it and uses it to track you wherever you go,” Guariglia said, adding, “Just because it’s pinging a different kind of signal doesn’t mean it’s any more innocuous.”
