They Built a Net Around You. You Paid For It. Nobody Asked
How Montgomery County Pennsylvania became part of a statewide facial recognition network funded by the vendors who profit from it and why Harrisburg has done nothing for twenty years
They Built a Net Around You. You Paid For It. Nobody Asked. How Montgomery County Pennsylvania became part of a statewide facial recognition network funded by the vendors who profit from it — and why Harrisburg has done nothing for twenty years.
THE NETWORK IN YOUR BACKYARD The CrimeWatch camera registry program is running right now across Montgomery County. Montgomery Township Police asks residents to register their security cameras with the stated goal of deterring crime. Upper Merion runs the same program. Upper Providence. Upper Moreland. Township by township the same system spreading quietly like AIDS in the ‘80s. Registrants agree that any footage related to criminal activity may be collected and used by police as evidence during any stage of a criminal proceeding. You don’t have to participate. That’s what they’ll tell you. But your neighbor across the street might. And the camera he registered is pointed at your fucking house.
“The government built the database. A private nonprofit runs it. You get nothing but intrusion and a bill.”
THE DATABASE NOBODY MENTIONS Pennsylvania runs one of the largest facial recognition systems in the country. It’s called JNET, the Pennsylvania Justice Network. Launched in 2006. By 2014 it could search over 34 million driver’s license photos and four million mug shots. That number has only grown. Over 500 law enforcement agencies across Pennsylvania use it. Every police department in Montgomery County. Every township with a patrol car and a badge. All of them have access to your face, grabbed from your driver’s license photo the last time you sat under those fluorescent lights at PennDOT. Nobody asked. It just happened and you went on paying your taxes.
THE PART THAT SHOULD PISS YOU OFF JNET is not run by the government. It is owned by a private nonprofit called the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association. As a nonprofit it is not subject to Pennsylvania’s public records law. You cannot find out how many times your face has been searched. You cannot find out if you have been flagged. You cannot find out who asked. The government built the database. A private nonprofit runs it. You get nothing but intrusion and a bill. JNET has not made its facial recognition policy public. Its own internal manual does not require reasonable suspicion before running a search. It permits searches of witnesses. Not suspects. WITNESSES. Auditors flagged the PCPA for material noncompliance with the laws and grant agreements governing their federal money. Significant deficiency in internal controls. Let that sink in. The people running a statewide biometric database can’t account for their federal grant money. This isn’t some insider tip. It’s sitting in the ProPublica nonprofit database. Public record. Go look it up yourself. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231340051
Any hearings in Harrisburg? Anyone asking questions? Nope. Nothing. Silence.
THIS ALREADY HAPPENED. RIGHT HERE. In Cheltenham Township, a sounder of officers photographed attendees in a parking lot at a public court hearing and ran their faces through JNET to identify people these pigs described as gang members. Cheltenham Township. Montgomery County Pennsylvania. People showed up to exercise a constitutional right and police photographed them without warning, without suspicion, without any obligation to tell them it happened. Were some of those people innocent family members just showing up for somebody they loved? We don’t know. Nobody has to tell us a damn thing.
“The vendors fund the association. The association runs the database. The database searches your face. Nobody in Harrisburg has said a word.”
NOW LOOK AT WHO’S FUNDING THE WATCHDOG The Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association hosts an annual conference. Corporate sponsors listed right on their public website. At the top tier sits CODY Systems, the company whose technology runs the statewide police data sharing backbone. At the next level sits DataWorks Plus, a company that sells facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies nationwide. Below that sits Axon. Billion dollar corporation. Makes TASER devices, body cameras, and the Fusus platform now running camera networks across the country. And listed as a Business Partner is CrimeWatch. The exact camera registry system running right now in Montgomery Township, Upper Merion, Upper Providence, and Upper Moreland. Asking your neighbors to hand over their camera footage. The vendors who profit from surveillance technology fund the nonprofit that runs the surveillance database. The nonprofit operates free of any state regulation. The legislature that could change this has done nothing for two decades.
PENNSYLVANIA HAS NO RULES. ZERO. By the end of 2024 fifteen states had enacted facial recognition laws. Montana and Utah require a warrant. Maryland requires prosecutors to notify defendants when it was used against them. Pennsylvania is not on that list. No laws. No pending bills. No study commission. The state data breach law does not even cover biometric data. No warrant. No notification. No oversight. Nothing. Governor Shapiro grew up in Montgomery County. His Attorney General office ran trial accounts on Clearview AI in 2020 while Pennsylvanians were exercising their First Amendment rights in the streets. As Governor he has proposed nothing. Signed nothing. Said nearly nothing. He is not an uninformed man. Which is exactly why the silence is so loud.
WHAT THIS IS I am not saying anyone in Harrisburg took money in a brown envelope. What I am saying is that the structure they have allowed to exist produces exactly the same outcome as if they had. The vendors profit from the absence of regulation. The nonprofit operates without scrutiny. The legislature does not act. The people whose faces are being searched have not been told any of this by the people elected to represent them. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a description of how things work.
WHAT YOU CAN DO The fix is not complicated. Require a warrant. Notify defendants when their face was searched. Make the PCPA subject to public records law. Ban vendors selling surveillance technology from funding the associations overseeing its use. Other states did it. Call your state rep. Ask directly. Does our township use facial recognition through JNET? What oversight exists? What is my recourse when the system makes a mistake about me? Show up at a Montgomery County Commissioners meeting. Ask out loud. Make them answer on the record. Ask your neighbor before he registers that next camera. Do you actually know what you signed? Share this. On Nostr. On Signal. Printed out at the diner counter. They are counting on you not paying attention. Because a government that lets vendors fund the watchdog, runs the database through a nonprofit to dodge accountability, and has passed zero laws to protect you is not interested in your safety. It knows exactly where you are. That is the point.
This has happened in my town. This is probably happening in your town too. AI help write and research
#privacy #surveillance #Pennsylvania #facialrecognition #MontgomeryCounty #JNET #CrimeWatch #Axon #Harrisburg #sovereignty #governmentaccountability
