But within two days, police had located the man in the Boston area, alive and well.
The behind-the-scenes story of their search offers a prime example of how Massachusetts’ all-electronic tollbooths can be used in a surveillance capacity to help police locate someone in an emergency.
As a search began for the missing Florida man, authorities suspected he may have been confused and traveling to Boston or Cape Cod, where he had recently lived.
Alerted to the investigation, the Massachusetts State Police asked for the man’s car to be added to a Massachusetts Department of Transportation “hot list,” public records show. That enabled troopers to receive an alert when the vehicle was next identified by the automatic license plate readers MassDOT uses to collect tolls.
Within a day, the man’s sedan passed under a series of Massachusetts Turnpike tollbooths, headed eastbound toward Boston. Hours later, with their search area greatly narrowed, police had found the missing man.
The hot list system “has been a useful public safety tool,” Executive Office of Public Safety and Security spokesperson Elaine Driscoll said in a statement. Most frequently used in coordination with public alerts for missing people, the hot list “has also been used occasionally where an imminent threat of harm exists to an individual or the public. For example, a suicidal individual or an individual suspected of committing a felony and fleeing the crime scene,” Driscoll said.
Massachusetts demolished its staffed toll plazas in 2016, replacing them with electronic tolling arches, where cameras read license plates as vehicles speed by and drivers are automatically billed. With the new technology, present at the tolling gantries on the Massachusetts Turnpike and certain other sections of highway, police could learn in real-time when certain vehicles were spotted during emergencies.
The hot list system, regulated and maintained by MassDOT, requires the approval of the department — but not a judge’s sign-off — for state police to access. Only during public safety emergencies, authorities said, would police be able to track the past and future movements of specific vehicles using the system.
Even in 2016, the warrantless surveillance capability of the new technology piqued the concern of data privacy advocates. It still does today.
“The system was created to process tolls, not as a police surveillance system,” said Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Use for missing persons
The hot list system was first deployed on New Year’s Day, 2017, in the search for an escaped prisoner from a Rhode Island detention center just across the state border.
In the years since, missing person investigations have represented many of the instances where state police put the system to use, a MassLive review of public records found.
Troopers added a car to the hot list in September 2021, after a man disappeared from his home, leaving his phone and a suicide note behind. They did the same in August 2022, when a man was discharged from a hospital against his medical provider’s advice and subsequently went missing. In other cases, troopers used the hot list after parents disappeared with their children.
Many hot list searches were due to Silver Alerts — public notifications often used for missing senior citizens or people with mental disabilities. In one case, on Christmas Eve 2022, a Connecticut man with a history of memory impairment disappeared after telling his family he was traveling to Hawaii. His license plate was added to the MassDOT hot list, and a tollbooth in the Boston area soon identified the man’s vehicle. Later that night, a state police trooper found the man safe, records said.
Each day, tens of thousands of vehicles pass under MassDOT’s highway tolling arches, where automatic license plate readers electronically photograph and record each plate. MassDOT keeps the images for up to three years and E-ZPass toll data for up to 10 years, a department spokesperson said.
If an emergency arises, police can draw on a deep pool of data collected at the tollbooths to locate people at risk to themselves or others.
Police use of the MassDOT hot list is increasing, records show. The state police asked for vehicles to be added to the list more than 40 times in 2022, up nearly three-fold from 2019.
In total, state police used the hot list about 100 times over the last five years, about 80% of the time for missing person investigations. Criminal investigations accounted for roughly 10% of hot list searches. The remaining cases were unable to be identified, mainly due to redactions of public records.
Use in criminal cases
Among the criminal investigations to involve the hot list were a July 2020 search for a suspect in a stabbing at the Auburn Mall, homicide investigations in March and December of 2021, an apparent investigation into a threat of mass violence at Gillette Stadium in 2019, and a search for a person involved in a domestic incident this past January.
Using the MassDOT toll cameras and other state police license plate readers “to query information about vehicles connected to serious crimes ... is a valuable tool to assist in capturing dangerous offenders, securing justice for their victims, and protecting public safety and homeland security,” state police spokesperson David Procopio said in a statement.
For organizations dedicated to the fierce protection of civil liberties, the hot list and similar surveillance technologies carry the potential for misuse and represent the erosion of personal privacy.
“Their use often starts out limited but ends up expanding over time because of their convenience for law enforcement — increasing the likelihood of abuse,” said Jeramie D. Scott, senior counsel and director of the Project on Surveillance Oversight for the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Ongoing concerns
The hot list system is reserved for imminent and immediate threats to the safety of a person or the public, including terrorist threats, kidnappings, missing people and “felons actively traveling to or from a crime scene,” MassDOT regulations say.
Crockford, the director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the ACLU of Massachusetts, believes some uses of the hot list in criminal investigation did not meet the standard for a warrantless search permitted under state guidelines.
Frequently, records show, state troopers seeking future notifications of a vehicle’s travel during an emergency have also asked for historical data on where on the highway that vehicle was recently spotted. In some instances, troopers troopers asked for multiple weeks of past tolling data at once.
Crockford pointed to the hot list search requested after the 2020 Auburn Mall stabbing, in which police not only asked for an alert when the suspect’s vehicle next appeared at a highway tollbooth but also sought a month of data on when and where that car had been tolled.
“It certainly seems to be a stretch to the regulations to say there’s an emergency happening now, so we need data from a month ago,” Crockford said, adding: “If they used that information in a criminal prosecution, I’d recommend their defense attorney challenge it as unconstitutional.”
Adam Bookbinder, a former assistant U.S. attorney and now a lawyer at the Boston firm Choate, Hall & Stewart, said instances like this had not necessarily breached state regulations or constitutional protections. If the hot list search sought historical data for evidence-gathering purposes and was not to stop a present threat, he thought there would be a stronger argument to challenge the material in court.
But “if the request for the data is relevant to resolving a public emergency, an imminent threat to health and safety, I think it’d be much more difficult to challenge it,” Bookbinder said.
“If someone committed a violent crime or you have reason to believe they did, and you’re trying to find them, I think law enforcement would have a pretty good argument that they’re an imminent danger to other people,” he added.
The tollbooth hot list data is under the control of MassDOT, and only available to state troopers upon request and approval.
It is used by police “in very limited circumstances where a serious, imminent public safety threat exists,” Driscoll said. Not “to further general criminal investigations.”
The state police also operates its own automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, a technology increasingly used by police across the country.
The devices can continuously monitor a section of road from a stationary position or be placed atop a police cruiser, scanning passing license plates and collecting data as an officer drives about.
Police say ALPRs are an important investigatory tool, though the mass surveillance capability of the technology makes it a frequent target of concerned civil liberties advocates.
In an internal policy for the use of the technology, the state police allows ALPRs to be used to resolve imminent emergencies such as kidnappings or missing people, prevent terror attacks and protect public events. It also says ALPRs can target stolen cars or wanted fugitives and help with the investigation and prosecution of suspected criminals.
The state police also prohibits using ALPRs in other cases: to locate someone solely because of their immigration status, to track someone because of their political or social activities, and similar other identity-based searches.
© 2023 Advance Local Media LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
