Global Courant
Artificial intelligence scanned a database of 1.6 billion New York license plates over a two-year period and located a car traveling along a drug-trafficking route that “showed patterns of drug-trafficking.”
The car driven by David Zayas, a convicted Massachusetts drug dealer, made nine trips between his home state and New York City and adjacent suburbs in Westchester County, which were tracked by hundreds of license plate readers (LPRs), according to federal court documents reviewed by Fox News Digital.
Westchester County Police pulled over Zayas on March 10, 2022 for minor traffic violations, including changing lanes without a signal and exceeding the 15 mph speed limit.
The seemingly ordinary traffic stop became a federal drug trafficking case that highlighted a police force’s reliance on an AI-powered surveillance program, which Zayas’ attorney seemingly denounced and questioned its legality “without any judicial oversight.”
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According to federal court documents, Zayas drove the same route from Massachusetts to New York between August 2020 and March 2022.
Police found 112 grams of crack cocaine, a semi-automatic pistol and $34,000 in cash hidden in the car after he was apprehended, court documents say.
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The case revealed the use of the AI-powered analytic software dubbed “Rekor Scout,” according to a motion to suppress evidence filed by Zayas’ attorney, Ben Gold.
Rekor Scout “improves public safety with AI-powered LPR (license plate readers) and vehicle recognition,” said his website, including demo videos and explanation of how it works.
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The original indictment and indictment made no mention of the use of LPRs or AI by law enforcement. Gold dug up this information through a public records request.
He found that Westchester County Police’s Real Time Crime Center maintains “(one) of the largest ALPR (automatic license plate recognition) databases in the country,” he wrote in a March 10, 2023 motion to suppress evidence.
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The monitoring program includes at least 480 LPRs that scan and record about 16.2 million vehicles per week and store that data for two years, he wrote in the lawsuit.
“During this two-year period, as has been done in this case, the government can obtain, without a warrant, the precise location histories of virtually anyone traveling on major roads in Westchester County,” Gold wrote in a Feb. 15, 2023, lawsuit.
“The breadth of this LPR system is spectacular and amounts to a warrantless search.”
READ FULL MARCH 10, 2023, COURT
“(Police) conducted these searches without any judicial oversight and without any reason to believe that a specific crime had occurred — much less any reason to suspect Mr. Zayas of committing a crime,” Gold wrote.
“This search was conducted using a surveillance system built on automatic license plate readers (ALPR). ALPR systems combine high-speed cameras with analytical imaging software to collect each vehicle’s license plate numbers, images, date, time and GPS location as it passes a camera.”
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The combination of the powerful technology, the ability to scan through it quickly with AI, and the two-year storage is an invasion of privacy, Gold argued.
“Surveillance networks based on ALPR technology can retroactively track people’s movements with a simple search,” he wrote.
“The breadth and detail of that search is only limited by the number of cameras entering information into the database and the length of time the data is retained.”
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Gold wanted to know where these cameras are located, but that part of his request for public records was denied, though the county admitted that “they change frequently.”
“The scope of this surveillance network is likely even greater than reported, as the RTC (Real Time Crime Center) participates in data sharing with other local chapters and has access to a national database of an unknown number of records,” Gold wrote.
“The search for Mr. Zayas’ location history over a two-year period represents a search of previously unimaginable proportions that threatens to destroy the ‘degree of anti-government privacy that existed when the Fourth Amendment was passed’.”
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About two weeks after Gold’s filing on March 10, 2023, federal prosecutor Damian Williams wrote that the two sides are “close to entering a plea deal.”
Zayas officially pleaded guilty last month and is awaiting sentencing.
Chris Eberhart is a crime and American news reporter for Fox News Digital. Email tips to chris.eberhart@fox.com or on Twitter @ChrisEberhart48.
