Pittsburgh Police invoice prompts citywide surveillance census

Pittsburgh City Council unanimously passed a resolution April 7 that directs the Department of Innovation & Performance to produce a report on surveillance technologies “acquired, funded, or used by the City,” with a public hearing to follow.

“We shouldn't have to do these things piece by piece,” Councilperson Deb Gross, the bill's sponsor, said in an interview with Pittsburgh Manifold. “Instead of a staffer and a city councilperson's office looking for and catching these things, hey, administration, you look through all of the technology contracts that you have ongoing, and you tell us and the public, what are the capabilities? What guardrails do you have in place? What guardrails aren't in place that need to be in place?”

A few days before a February 11 Finance and Law committee hearing,  one of Gross’s staffers flagged an invoice of $2,754 from the Bureau of Police for “LeadsOnline LLC – CellHawk software renewal.” 

At the hearing, Gross said she was concerned after reading reporting from investigative news outlet The Intercept that CellHawk could effectively provide "automated continuous surveillance" of an individual based off of cell tower data, so she reached out to the administration for more information. She said they responded quickly and told her that CellHawk has been in use by Pittsburgh Police for seven years and is only used when a suspect has an active judicial warrant against them. 

In an email to Pittsburgh Manifold, City Public Information Officer Emily Bourne confirmed that the information Councilperson Gross received and shared about the Bureau of Police’s CellHawk usage was “true to our use.”

Gross said there has been an uptick of instances over the past five years where various surveillance technologies suddenly and unexpectly come before City Council and CellHawk is just the most recent example. She see the report as the “start of a conversation” between council, the mayor’s office, and the public over surveillance technology in use by the city, and notes that in 2020, she voted “yes” on an ordinance introduced by Corey O’Connor, then a councilperson, to regulate facial recognition and predictive policing technology in Pittsburgh. 

Mayor O’Connor’s office confirmed to Pittsburgh Manifold in an email that the mayor signed the present legislation into law but did not comment further.

In 2021, Gross was the lone dissenting voice against the renewal of Zencity software, which the Peduto administration procured under the COVID-19 emergency declaration and used to measure social media sentiment on politically sensitive topics and have briefing reports prepared for Peduto by an analyst based in Tel Aviv.

And last year, she raised concerns over HDR, the company that received a $1.8 million contract to create a master plan for a public safety training facility in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar, after reporting found that HDR used a program named STRATA to monitor people opposed to some of their projects, such as private prisons. 

City Council approved HDR’s contract unanimously, with a clause that specifies the contract winner cannot “surveille or utilize counter-operation measures such as monitoring of Pittsburgh residents’ online or in-person activities [...] to manipulate public opinion of the project.”

The upcoming report, co-sponsored by Councilperson Barb Warwick, was introduced alongside two ICE noncooperation bills, one of which was also passed by City Council Tuesday. Gross believes it’s important to ensure the city isn’t inadvertently sharing information about people who live here.

“The information flow that we're worried about is going both ways,” she said. “We want the public to know that we are not surveilling them, and we want to make sure [these companies] aren’t actively selling off our residents' data.”

The report is due to City Council and the mayor by July 1. It specifies 18 technologies to be included:

(i)                     international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers and other cell site simulators;

(ii)                     automatic license plate readers;

(iii)                     electronic toll readers;

(iv)                     closed-circuit television cameras;

(v)                     biometric surveillance technology, including voice, iris, and gait-recognition software and databases;

(vi)                     mobile DNA capture technology;

(vii)                     gunshot detection and location hardware and services;

(viii)                     x-ray vans;

(ix)                     video and audio monitoring or recording technology, such as surveillance cameras, wide-angle cameras, and wearable body cameras;

(x)                     surveillance enabled or capable lightbulbs or light fixtures;

(xi)                     tools, including software and hardware, used to gain unauthorized access to a computer, computer service, or computer network;

(xii)                     social media monitoring software;

(xiii)                     through-the-wall radar or similar imaging technology;

(xiv)                     passive scanners of radio networks;

(xv)                     long-range Bluetooth and other wireless-scanning devices;

(xvi)                     radio-frequency I.D. (RFID) scanners;

(xvii)                     software designed to integrate or analyze data from surveillance technology, including surveillance target tracking and predictive policing software; and

(xviii)                     facial recognition technology.