HOULTON, Maine — Houlton employees made regular use of the controversial security cameras that the town installed last year, searching them thousands of times for details about people and vehicles, according to data obtained by the Bangor Daily News through a Freedom of Access Act request.
The data reveal that a handful of staff from various town departments — including police, public works, recreation, code enforcement and civic center — used the 25-plus cameras, often turning them on or searching them outside traditional work hours and even in the middle of the night.
Collected between Jan. 1, 2024, and Dec. 31, 2024, the data from the cameras’ digital access logs also raise new questions about whether the town’s use of them violated a Maine law that sharply limits the use of facial surveillance technology, as some residents and online privacy experts have alleged.
It has been the town’s contention all along that officials used the cameras — which were temporarily shut down earlier this year so they could review their legality — to protect town property and buildings.
But despite many questions from the BDN as well as two lawsuits from a local citizen seeking more information about the cameras, officials have publicly shared few other details about their use of the advanced, AI-powered devices, which are made by the company Verkada and were bought with funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.
Late last year, town officials said that they were actively using 25 of the cameras, with five for the police department, three for the fire department, five at public works, three at the town hall, three at the recreation center and six at the civic center. Thirteen others were installed at that point but not activated — five at the airport, two at Cary Library, three at Just for Kids and three at park maintenance. The remaining 16 cameras were in inventory and not installed.
It took officials until February of this year to make the first public admission that the cameras were equipped with facial recognition tools, although they have not said whether they used them.
The newly released data from the camera’s access logs provide more of a glimpse of how they were used. That included more than 56,000 entries indicating that officials turned on a live video feed, allowing them to watch footage captured by the cameras in real time.
The most live footage came from cameras at public works, the recreation department and the civic center, according to the access logs. Staff turned on the feeds at all hours of the day, including after normal work hours until 3 a.m. They were most frequently used by the recreation department, often viewing the cameras at the civic center.
In recent weeks, a reporter observed at least four cameras at the civic center pointed in the direction of the Community Park and the entrance off Elm Street. The access logs list other camera locations including the ice rink, lobby, north mezzanine, entrances and parking lot.
Non-police town employees gave out more than 30 login passwords, and unidentified users accessed the system at least twice, according to the access logs.
Employees also apparently used the cameras’ more advanced functions to search for specific people and vehicles, the access logs show. That included 4,867 searches for vehicles, according to the data.
And the access logs list some 5,266 cases of “Profiles Searched” or “Profile Searched with Details,” which means employees may have been searching for records of people who had previously been captured in the surveillance system and assigned a digital profile.
According to Verkada, its cameras are equipped with powerful facial recognition software that can match the faces of people caught in new camera footage to images already logged into the system. But the access logs obtained by the BDN do not specifically indicate whether employees used those features.
If they had, the town may have violated Maine’s strict facial surveillance law.
Under the law, municipalities and their employees are barred from indiscriminately obtaining, retaining, possessing, accessing, requesting or using a facial surveillance system or information derived from one, which would include creating and searching its own database of facial profiles.
The state law defines facial surveillance “as any automated or semi-automated process that assists in identifying or verifying an individual, or in capturing information about an individual, based on the physical characteristics of an individual’s face.”
State law only allows police to take a single digital image of a person’s face and send it to the state Department of Motor Vehicles, or in some cases the Maine State Police, to run it against the state ID database, according to Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union focused on speech, privacy and technology. The search is only allowed when police have probable cause related to a serious crime investigation.
A police department may also send a facial image to the state to help identify a missing person or an unidentified body.
Houlton officials did not request any state database searches in 2024, according to FOAA requests the BDN previously made to both agencies.
While local officials have acknowledged the cameras contain facial recognition software, they have not said whether they actively used it.
Houlton Town Manager Cameron Clark declined in early August to answer questions about how the town used data from the cameras and whether employees were complying with Maine law.
“Following further internal and legal review, I look forward to providing any appropriate information relevant to the months of reporting that has been done on this topic,” he said.
Some software and online privacy experts argued that the town’s use of the cameras does appear to have violated Maine’s law.
“Any time the Verkada access log says ‘profile searched’ or ‘profile searched with details,’ it was facial recognition,” said Mark Lipscombe, the owner of a local IT business who is familiar with the Verkada systems.
“They are not allowed this real-time monitoring,” Wessler said after a BDN reporter described the data from the access logs.
While the state’s surveillance law has not yet been tested in court, any information illegally obtained through facial recognition would be not admissible in government proceedings, Wessler said. He said that the town would be obliged to delete any facial recognition data as soon as it was discovered, if any was collected.
Additionally, if town employees collected that data in violation of the law, they could face disciplinary action, including retraining, suspension or termination, and residents or visitors who were tracked by the cameras could have a right to bring a lawsuit against the town, experts said.
The surveillance camera saga began in January 2024, when Houlton Police Chief Tim DeLuca first announced to the Town Council that officials were preparing to have 50 Verkada cameras installed. These cameras were purchased in 2022 with American Rescue Plan Act funds for $130,000.
Residents quickly expressed concerns about privacy and cost.
Houlton resident Craig Harriman, who was trying to get answers about camera use, locations, data storage, privacy protections and cost, sued the town twice for alleged FOAA violations regarding requests for information.
Houlton entrepreneur Patrick Bruce, who works with Verkada technology, accused town councilors in January of breaking Maine’s 2021 facial recognition law.
In early February, Clark, who had just been appointed interim town manager, temporarily disconnected the cameras to give town officials time to evaluate the legality of their use. In June, the Town Council passed a camera use policy banning facial surveillance technology.
In July, the cameras were turned back on.
