Last week, University of Pennsylvania computer and information science professor Matt Blaze noticed something strange while passing through the Philadelphia Convention Center’s tunnel. A white SUV parked in the tunnel was clearly loaded with license plate–reader technology—and one window of the vehicle prominently featured a Google Maps decal.
As Motherboard’s Dustin Slaughter reported, the story was all the more peculiar because a registration document on the vehicle’s dashboard clearly indicated that it belonged to the Philadelphia Office of Fleet Management. It was little surprise, then, when a representative for the Philadelphia Police Department later confirmed to Motherboard that the vehicle was theirs.
Why, then, the half-hearted disguise, assuming that’s what it was? Writing for Consumerist, Chris Morran points out that the bulky SUV looks nothing like Google’s dopey Street View cars, not least of all because their branding is so much more excessive. If the police really wanted to pass their vehicle off as something more innocuous, they were doing it in the laziest way possible. In fact, the Google logo may have called attention to a car that might have gone mostly unnoticed under ordinary circumstances.
As it happens, however, the police may not have applied the Google logo in the first place. The department representative quoted by Motherboard suggests as much, writing, that “the placing of any particular decal on the vehicle was not approved through any chain of command,” and adding “it was ordered that the decals be removed immediately.” (The Washington Post received a similar statement from the department.) Indeed, in Blaze’s photograph, the sticker does appear to adhere to the outside of the window, which means that almost anyone (anyone with access to large Google Maps stickers, that is) could have put it there.
To be sure, there’s something evasive about the awkward spokesspeak of the department’s official disavowal—nominalizations and passive constructions often serve to elide agency. But it’s entirely possible that these graceless constructions indicate a very real befuddlement. In any case, whatever else the Philadelphia Police are admitting to—and as one of Motherboard’s sources notes, they are all but acknowledging that they’re running a mass surveillance operation—it’s important to recognize that they’re not admitting to decorating it.
Despite that, some who’ve reported on the story continue to discuss it as if the police had placed the sticker. Morran, for one, writes, that Motherboard “confirmed … officers had indeed gussied up the vehicle to disguise it as a Google camera car, but that these particular cops had done so without approval.” Lee Matthews of Geek takes a similar approach, writing, “Apparently someone at the police department figured that it’d be a good idea to slap Google’s branding on the truck to keep possible targets from getting too suspicious when a big, white SUV came creeping down their street.”
While it’s possible that rogue officers placed the sticker, no one—the department least of all—appears to have definitively confirmed that they did so. Ultimately, the story is probably appealing in part because it suggests that the Philadelphia police are charmingly incompetent, Keystone Cops fumbling their way into the digital age. But the fact of the matter is that this is an organization backed by powerful technology running a sophisticated, warrantless surveillance operation. We shouldn’t let a clumsily placed sticker distract from that, no matter who put it there.
Blaze, for his own part, seems puzzled by the affair. On Twitter, he too noted that the police had acknowledged that the vehicle was theirs but wondered how his initial observation had become national news. Later, a receptionist at the dentist recognized him from coverage of the incident. “What is so damn interesting about this story?” he asked.
