Hidden Cact-Eye: Paradise Valley installs cameras in cactus
May 07, 2015
By Jill Monier, FOX 10 News
PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. -The City of Paradise Valley has added cactus with cameras in them over the past few days, but residents have no idea why, and the city doesn’t want to talk about them.
About two dozen fake cactus already serve as cover for cell towers, but some people were alarmed to see cameras being place in cactus around town.
While town leaders didn’t initially want to talk with us about the cameras, we did end up getting some explanation.
If you look close enough at the cactus as you drive through Paradise Valley and you might see some “cact-eyes” looking back.
“I’ve lived here for 30 years, and I’ve never seen cameras in a saguaro before,” said Randy Evans.
One cactus camera was installed at the roundabout near 40th Street and Standford on Tuesday.
“There were these guys on ladders, these were 3 1/2 foot ladders, and they work working on the top of the cactus, putting the cactus together, a fake cactus,” said Susanne Chamberlain.
Residents are now curious what the cameras will be used for.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Evans.
“I thought maybe y’all knew what it was,” said Chamberlain.
FOX 10 asked Paradise Valley Police about the cameras, but they said they were not prepared to make a statement at this time. At City Hall people were also hesitant to talk with FOX 10 about the cameras, saying they wanted to wait until all the cameras were installed, but eventually the Town Manager answered some of the questions.
“The town is embarking on the installation of license plate readers,” said Kevin Burke, Paradise Valley Town Manager.
Burke says the cameras run license plates of cars against a hot list database. If the car is stolen, or the subject of an amber alert, the police will be notified.
FOX 10 did a story in February about the same technology being installed on traffic lights, the city also declined to talk publicly then too.
So why is the city not being public about this?
“Again, not trying to hide anything, the police department, this was my request of before we get going at these one at a time, lets get them all together and make sure we understand and everybody is on the same page,” he said.
Burke said the cameras are not active at this point.
“We want to make sure we’re answering everybody’s questions about data retention, how the things will be used, we want to make sure that is vetted before we turn these things up,” said Burke.
Some would say they should have been vetted before they went up.
“It probably is fair, this is technology, we’re always learning about it, and so every time you think you’ve got it covered someone brings up a new idea,” he said.
Burke said the cameras are not being put in fake cactus to be secretive, but because there are no light poles in the area to put them on. He says they’re trying to make the cameras aesthetically pleasing. It’s all part of a $2 million police technology upgrade the council passed last year.
Arizona Town Secretly Installs Plate Scanning Cameras in Fake Cactuses
07.05.2015
Residents of Paradise Valley, Arizona, were being denied answers on why decoy cacti containing surveillance cameras have been installed all over their town. After persistent questioning, town leaders finally admitted that the cameras are license plate readers which will cross check license plates against a hotlist database.
Town Manager Kevin Burke spoke to the local Fox affiliate and claimed that the spying cacti will not be activated until privacy and data retention concerns have been addressed.
“Shouldn’t that have been vetted before they even went up?” a reporter from Fox asked, which Burke responded to by saying, “It probably is fair. I think this is a technology that we’re always learning about, so every time you think we ‘okay, have everything covered’, somebody else brings up a new idea.”
“It’s appropriate to use license plate scanners to check for wanted vehicles, but the technology should never be used to store up databases of the movements of vehicles that are not on any hot lists,” American Civil Liberties Union senior policy analyst Jay Stanley and ACLU legal assistant Bennett Stein wrote in a blog entry. “It violates the longstanding tenet that the government not monitor citizens unless it has individualized suspicion of involvement in wrongdoing,” they added.
The city claims that the cameras are not being embedded in the cacti to be secretive, but rather to be aesthetically pleasing. The town currently had the same technology installed on traffic lights in February, and were secretive about it then as well.
The cameras are being funded by a $2 million “technology upgrade” that passed through city council last year. It is unclear is Department of Homeland Security is helping to fund these readers as they have in other cities.
It is also currently unclear what agencies will have access to the data collected by these scanners, but the Department of Homeland Security has been working on a database aimed at tracking “known license plate numbers associated with the aliens who are immigration enforcement priorities” and monitor “where and when the vehicle has traveled within a specified period of time,” in “at least 25 states” according to government officials speaking to NextGov.
As we learned from investigative reporters who have attempted to obtain data on license plate readers from Los Angeles and Philadelphia, each and every car owner whose vehicle’s license plate has had the misfortune of being scanned by license plate readers is under investigation.
Any reporter who puts in a public records request is immediately denied citing that every scan is part of an active investigation, while maintaining that they are not violating the rights of American citizens as a license plate has no expectation of privacy.
“There’s nothing in this for citizens. If license plate data has ‘no expectation of privacy,’ the police should have no problem with turning over anonymized data, much less records pertaining directly to the requester. But the law enforcement community continues to use a double-standard that allows it to circumvent the annoyance of limiting itself to pertinent data while maintaining a wall of opacity to further distance the public from all the data it’s gathering on them.” Tim Cushing wrote in Tech Dirt last year.
Read and see the photos
