There Is No Safety In Surveillance.

There Is No Safety In Surveillance.

A fully documented investigation into the surveillance grid running through Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and every neighborhood in America. The camera on your block. The database. The vendors who pay the watchdog. The national ID system. Your car. One story. All of it public record. None of it answered for.

THE CAMERA ON YOUR BLOCK

Townships in Montgomery County run rebate programs that push residents to register their home security cameras with local police. You hand over the camera location, field of view, serial number, and a signed release that lets police pull the footage for any criminal case. Montgomery Township, Upper Merion, Upper Providence, and Upper Moreland all run the program right now. You and your neighbors bought the cameras and you maintain them. The township builds nothing. It simply feeds the data into a map.

That map belongs to CrimeWatch Technologies, a private outfit based in Pennsylvania. Founder Matt Bloom started the company in 2009 with a print magazine that published photos and home addresses of registered sex offenders across south central Pennsylvania counties. When print hit its limit he pivoted to software. The same man now supplies the camera registry your township police use. His technical partner, Michael Grucz, built the platform with a background in big data, machine learning, security patents, and intelligence systems. Early money came from Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners, a state backed venture fund. Later expansion rode federal homeland security grants into Bucks County and twenty eight departments at once. Public money gets the platform in the door. Subscriptions keep it there forever.

CrimeWatch also runs a Special Needs Registry that logs residents with disabilities, cognitive issues, or medical conditions. Data entered in one jurisdiction flows to every agency hooked into the national network. The company privacy policy explicitly excludes arrest records and anything it labels public record. If your name lands on one of their posts and the charges drop, you pay twenty dollars by money order to their Mechanicsburg address and wait. No timeline, no guarantee.

THE DATABASE

The camera map is the part you see. Underneath sits JNET, the Pennsylvania Justice Network, one of the largest facial recognition systems in the country. Launched in 2006, it now holds thirty four to thirty six million driver license photos and millions of mug shots. Five hundred law enforcement agencies across the state can query it. Every department in Montgomery County has access.

JNET is not run by the state government. It is owned and operated by the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association, a private nonprofit. That status exempts it from the Right to Know Law. You cannot ask how many times your face has been searched, by whom, or why. The internal manual does not demand reasonable suspicion. It allows searches on witnesses or anyone who simply appears in a photo tied to an investigation. In Cheltenham Township officers photographed people in the courthouse parking lot during a public hearing and ran the images through JNET to flag supposed gang members. No warrant. No suspicion. No notice to anyone photographed.

The latest independent audit of the Chiefs of Police Association flagged material noncompliance with federal grant rules and serious weaknesses in internal controls. The organization that controls a statewide biometric database has been formally cited for breaking the rules attached to its own federal funding. No hearings. No statements from Harrisburg.

Pennsylvania has passed zero laws on facial recognition. No warrant requirement. No ban on witness searches. No duty to tell defendants. Fifteen other states have drawn lines. Pennsylvania has done nothing in twenty years.

WHO FUNDS THE WATCHDOG

The Chiefs of Police Association holds an annual conference. Its public sponsor list tells the story. Premier sponsor CODY Systems runs the statewide police data sharing backbone. DataWorks Plus, a biometric and facial recognition vendor, sits at the Five Shield level. Axon, maker of body cameras and camera sharing platforms, and CrimeWatch Technologies itself appear as well. The companies that sell the hardware and software also bankroll the private nonprofit that owns the database those tools feed.

When Josh Shapiro was Attorney General his office signed ten employees up for trial accounts on Clearview AI, the firm that scraped billions of internet photos for its own facial recognition engine. The sign ups resumed the Monday after the first major George Floyd protests in 2020. As governor Shapiro has introduced no legislation on JNET, CrimeWatch, or any of it.

YOUR IDENTITY

After September 11 politicians swore America would never get a national ID card. That promise died on May 7, 2025, when full federal enforcement of the REAL ID Act began. In Pennsylvania your REAL ID driver license is now required for domestic flights, military bases, and certain federal sites.

The system that moves the data is run by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a private nonprofit in Arlington, Virginia. It is not subject to public records laws. It operates the State to State Verification Service, linking every participating state database and handling more than two point four billion messages a year. Name, date of birth, license number, last five digits of your Social Security number. Once the data leaves PennDOT the state has almost no visibility into who else sees it or what they do with it. The same photo taken at PennDOT for your REAL ID is the one JNET searches. Pennsylvania is now rolling out mobile driver licenses that can update in real time. No state law yet governs how those live credentials interact with the existing facial recognition grid.

YOUR CAR

Automakers have already sold your driving data. General Motors sent names, addresses, VINs, trip logs, hard braking, acceleration, and speeding events from OnStar users to data brokers Verisk and LexisNexis. Many drivers never knew. In January 2026 the Federal Trade Commission called the practice an egregious betrayal and banned GM from selling sensitive driving and location data to brokers for five years. The business model stays intact. LexisNexis also sells its Accurint platform to the Department of Justice, ICE, Secret Service, and hundreds of local agencies. No warrant needed when police buy the profile from a private broker.

Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Act orders the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require advanced impaired driving prevention technology in every new passenger vehicle built from November 2026 onward. Driver facing cameras, steering analysis, alcohol sensors in the wheel. Rulemaking continues. No federal law yet limits what the automaker can do with the biometric data or stops it from selling that data to the same brokers that supply law enforcement.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

CrimeWatch Technologies began as a sex offender photo magazine, grew with state money, expanded on federal grants, and now sits inside your township police department running a special needs registry with no borders and a privacy policy that protects almost nothing.

JNET holds tens of millions of your driver license photos searchable without a warrant by five hundred agencies, owned by a private nonprofit formally cited for breaking federal grant rules, and still running after twenty years with zero state legislation.

The Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association takes sponsorship money from the very surveillance vendors whose tools it oversees, while its own audits go unaddressed.

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators runs the national REAL ID backbone as a private nonprofit shielded from public records laws, feeding the same photos straight into JNET.

LexisNexis bought your driving behavior from General Motors and sold it to insurers while simultaneously selling investigative intelligence to every level of law enforcement.

The 2026 vehicle mandate will install monitoring systems in every new car with no data protection rules attached.

These are not separate programs. They are one system built on the same choice repeated at every level of government: outsource the function to a private company, structure that company to dodge public records laws and constitutional limits, and let the legislature stay silent. The people whose faces, movements, and neighborhoods are being logged were never told.

All of it sits in public records: tax filings, audits, federal contracts, company websites, sponsor lists, agency documents. No leaks. No classified sources. Just the record. And still no elected official in Pennsylvania has answered for any of it.

There is no safety in surveillance.

Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
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