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Canyon County Sheriff | License plate readers on state highway structures

In 2021 the Board of County Commissioners bought multi-lane plate reader cameras from one vendor without competitive bidding and agreed to mount them on Idaho Transportation Department structures. Federal drug-task-force money paid for them, and the data went to a police server at the far north end of the state until a ransomware attack moved it to the vendor's cloud.

At a glance

Approved
1 April 2021, unanimously, in two votes at one meeting: the sole source notice and the agreement with the Idaho Transportation Department [1]
Price
$89,920.05, approved as a purchase order to Neology on 4 November 2021 [2]
Who paid
The Oregon/Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, a federal grant. The Board was told the purchase would not affect the county budget [1]
Where the cameras go
On Idaho Transportation Department structures at locations across the Treasure Valley, under agreement no. 21-013 [1]
Where the data goes
A server run by the Post Falls Police Department in Kootenai County until 2022, then cloud storage run by the vendor [3] [4]
Who else can see it
The data sharing agreement with Post Falls is referenced by number in the minutes and is not published. Nothing we read names the other agencies on the shared server [3]
How many cameras
The April 2021 minutes describe a first phase sized to the grant. The county publishes that month as scanned images, and the figure is not legible in them [1]
How long the data is kept
Not stated in any document we read [1] [3] [4]
A written plate reader policy
None is published on the county website, and none is named in the commissioners' minutes for 2017 through 2025 [5]
Public comment received
None. The Board held a noticed public comment meeting on 22 April 2021 and no one appeared [6]

How it happened

  1. Decision

    Two votes, one meeting

    The Board votes unanimously to sign a notice of sole source procurement for PIPS Technology IRIS multi-lane license plate reader cameras, and unanimously to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Idaho Transportation Department to install them on the department's structures. The Sheriff and five of his command staff are in the room. [1]

  2. Debate

    The public comment meeting nobody came to

    The Board holds the noticed public comment meeting on the Idaho Transportation Department agreement. The minutes record that no one appeared to offer comment and that no other comments were received. [6]

  3. Procurement

    The purchase order

    The Board approves a purchase order to Neology for $89,920.05 for the Canyon County Sheriff. It appears in the day's list of approved purchase orders with no separate discussion recorded. [2]

  4. Decision

    The data sharing agreement

    The Board votes unanimously to sign an agreement with the Post Falls Police Department for maintenance and data sharing of a license plate recognition database, agreement no. 21-121. A captain tells the Board the agreement covers data sharing and maintenance of the server. [3]

  5. Incident

    The server is attacked, and the data moves to a cloud

    The Board is told that the Post Falls Police Department was the victim of a ransomware attack affecting the server that stored the data, that the vendor provided a temporary solution, that the county will continue with the vendor's cloud storage, and that the federal program will fund three years at $5,000 a year. The item is informational and no vote is taken. [4]

A multi-lane plate reader is a camera built to read every plate in several lanes of moving traffic at once. It is a different thing from a camera on a residential street corner, and it is usually mounted where the traffic is: on the gantries and signal poles that carry highway equipment. Those structures belong to the Idaho Transportation Department, which is why a county sheriff’s camera project needed a state agency’s permission.

Two votes on one April morning

On 1 April 2021 the Board of County Commissioners met with the county attorneys for a legal staff update. The Sheriff was there with his chief deputy, two captains and two lieutenants. Two of the action items that morning were the plate reader system: a notice of sole source procurement for PIPS Technology IRIS multi-lane license plate reader cameras, and a memorandum of understanding with the Idaho Transportation Department to install those cameras on the department’s structures. The Board voted unanimously on both.[1]

Sole source procurement means buying from one vendor without competitive bidding, and it requires a public reason. The reason given was not that the cameras were better. It was that the data had to land somewhere specific. A captain told the Board that the county is part of the Oregon/Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federal program, that cameras would go in at various locations across the Treasure Valley, and that information from vehicles passing those locations would feed into a server hosted by the Post Falls Police Department. The server, he said, required these particular cameras, and the goal was for Post Falls to become the northwest hub for license plate readers.[1]

Post Falls is in Kootenai County, at the top of the Idaho panhandle, about as far from Caldwell as it is possible to get and stay in the state. It is where the record of every vehicle passing a Canyon County camera was going to be kept.

The Sheriff told the Board that the most crucial use of the cameras was aiding the search for exploited and missing children, and that as the program went on the office would look to acquire more cameras in this part of the state.[1]

The county publishes April 2021 as scanned images rather than text. The first phase was sized to the grant, and the number of cameras is not legible in the scan.

The comment meeting nobody came to

Because the purchase was sole source, the county published a notice and set a date to hear from the public. That meeting was held on 22 April 2021. The minutes record that no one appeared to offer comment and that no other comments were received. A commissioner moved to approve the agreement and was told a motion was not necessary: the meeting existed to make a record that the notice had been legally published and that the public had been given the chance to speak.[6]

That is the whole of the public participation in this decision. The notice ran in the newspaper, the meeting was held, and the room was empty.

The price, and the agreement that followed it

On 4 November 2021 the Board approved a purchase order: “Neology in the amount of $89,920.05 for Canyon County Sheriff”.[2] It sits in a list of approved purchase orders alongside routine county spending, with no discussion recorded. Neology is the company behind the PIPS Technology brand named in April.

Three weeks later, on 29 November, the Board took the second agreement the captain had promised in April. It voted unanimously to sign an agreement with the Post Falls Police Department for maintenance and data sharing of the license plate recognition database, recorded as agreement no. 21-121. The chief deputy prosecuting attorney told the Board it had been reviewed by legal and by the Sheriff’s Office and there was no legal reason not to sign. On where the data would live, the minutes are direct: “Post Falls holds the data as they host the server that the data feeds into”.[3]

Then the server was attacked

On 12 May 2022 the Board was briefed on Sheriff’s Office data storage. The item was informational. Nobody voted on anything.

A deputy prosecuting attorney explained that there was an existing agreement with Post Falls for data sharing of the plate recognition database. A captain then told the Board that “the Post Falls Police Department was the victim of a ransomware attack which affected the server that stored the data”.[4] Neology had provided a temporary solution while a permanent one was decided, and in that time the county had decided to stay with Neology and move to cloud storage. The Oregon/Idaho region of the federal drug program would fund the first three years at $5,000 a year. There was no commitment past those three years, though the captain said the program was supportive and there could be more funding later.[4]

Three years from May 2022 ran out in 2025. Nothing we read says who pays for the storage now.

What this record does and does not settle

It settles the decision. The county bought multi-lane plate readers, put them on state highway structures, paid for them with federal drug task force money, and sent the data out of the county. Every step is in the minutes, and every step was public.

It settles almost nothing about the system as it runs today. The two agreements are referred to by number and are not published. How many cameras went up, where they stand, how long a plate read is kept in the vendor’s cloud, which agencies can query the database and whether those queries are logged: none of that is in any document we read. Neither is a policy. The Caldwell Police Department, in the same county, publishes its plate reader rules on a public web page. The Sheriff’s Office publishes none that we could find, and the commissioners’ minutes from 2017 through 2025 name none.[5]

On the map

The community has mapped 120 devices of this type in the county on OpenStreetMap. These are community reports: the vendor and operator of each point are unverified, and none is confirmed to belong to this system. See them on the map →

Street names from reverse geocoding — © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

What we do not know

What you can do

Show up

Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have confirmed where each of them meets in Canyon County and how public comment works there.

How to show up in Canyon County →

Protect yourself

Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.

Surveillance Self-Defense →

Sources

  1. 1.
    Canyon County Board of County Commissioners, business proceedings 2021, April 2021 term, 1 April 2021 · Meeting record · · accessed
  2. 2.
    Canyon County Board of County Commissioners, business proceedings 2021, November 2021 term, 4 November 2021, approved purchase orders · Meeting record · · accessed
  3. 3.
    Canyon County Board of County Commissioners, business proceedings 2021, November 2021 term, 29 November 2021 · Meeting record · · accessed
  4. 4.
    Canyon County Board of County Commissioners, business proceedings 2022, May 2022 term, 12 May 2022, discussion regarding Sheriff's Office data storage · Meeting record · · accessed
  5. 5.
    Canyon County Sheriff's Office, department pages · Primary document · accessed
  6. 6.
    Canyon County Board of County Commissioners, business proceedings 2021, April 2021 term, 22 April 2021 · Meeting record · · accessed

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