Public Safety Committee on May 15th, 2012

[Steve Chapin]

If an offender is separated from the device after a very short period of time—and that time period is adjustable—the device sends out an alert. We call it a “bracelet gone” alert, both to the agency and also to the offender. The bracelet vibrates, alerting him to the fact he is out of range of his device. If he's out of range of that device, at that point in time we're no longer tracking the offender. We know where this device is, but we don't know where the offender is.

However, that is a very severe violation. Typically, if an offender walks out of range of his device, he fixes that situation quickly because he doesn't want to suffer the consequences.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Consequently, the BlackBerry device is really the GPS. Does the thing on the leg transmit signals between the two? I don't understand exactly.

[Steve Chapin]

This is actually a transceiver. The ankle bracelet sends out an encrypted RF signal once every 25 seconds and waits for a reply from the device, so it tethers him to the device. The BlackBerry device does all of the tracking, all of the communication, all of the processing of rules. This is merely a tether to prevent the offender from walking away from his device.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move back to the government to Mr. Rathgeber, please, for seven minutes.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to both witnesses.

I want to follow up on some of Ms. Hoeppner's questions regarding the business model of how this operates.

You lease out both of those pieces of hardware, the bracelet and the GPS device that looks like a BlackBerry, for $1 a day?

[Steve Chapin]

If I said $1 a day, I misspoke. I thought I said roughly $5 to $10 a day. If I said $1 a day, I apologize to the committee. I certainly didn't mean to mislead you.

The charge, again, depends on the level of service you want, but it's roughly $5 a day and from there additional services go on, and then that's the price. That's what we charge. There are no additional charges.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

When you passed those devices around they had branding on them but I didn't see 3M anywhere. Does 3M manufacture the device? You have brand names there I saw.

[Steve Chapin]

Yes, 3M does manufacture the device. The Pro Tech logo that you see on the device is my old company, and we're still in the process of transitioning the branding over from Pro Tech to 3M, but this is a 3M device and 3M is now the original equipment manufacturer of this device. They own all the IP, all the design, and 3M does all of the manufacturing, all of the support development, and what not.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

3M manufactures it, does support, and they are also in the business of leasing it to probation officers or police services that are in the market for this type of device. You're also the leasing agent.

[Steve Chapin]

That's correct.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Does 3M do monitoring or is monitoring farmed out to some other agency? Obviously, somebody has to follow where the offenders are going or not going and alert the police if they're out of range. Does 3M do that or is that farmed out to another organization?

[Steve Chapin]

Our preferred model is to lease all of the equipment systems to the agency and the agency actually does the monitoring. However, we do monitoring services for some of our customer agencies, including Florida and California, where all the alerts are processed automatically but instead of the text message alert being sent to an officer, it's sent to our monitoring centre and we follow a series of protocols defined by the agency in clearing out those alarms. Those protocols might include calling the offender or even calling the police.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

What kind of equipment is required to monitor this process in terms of hardware. Who manufactures it and what does it cost?

[Steve Chapin]

The equipment is all off-the-shelf computer equipment. You can access this data from any Internet-capable computer. Then, of course, it's data lines and phone lines.

If you had your laptop and an Internet connection and you were an officer and you were at home, you could access all of that data.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

What kind of security is provided? It appears to me that you don't want people other than law enforcement tracking the movement of people who are part of these programs. Is this done on secured lines somehow?

[Steve Chapin]

It's all done on secure lines, and we use secure sockets layer. We follow NIST standards. It is password-protected. We force the officers—they don't like us for it—to change their password every 90 days, and we shut down idle accounts.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

You have a certain amount of technical expertise. Do you ever find that other equipment interferes with the operation of the tracking, whether it be satellite systems, garage door openers, or any other electronic devices that can cause the operation of the monitoring of these individuals to go sideways for whatever reason?

[Steve Chapin]

There is no legal electronic device that interferes with our product.

There has been a lot of talk about illegal GPS jammers recently. While we can't prevent the jamming of our device, we can detect and report the jamming of our device. If we suspect there is intentional jamming, we give that bit of information to the officer. Other than that, there's no legal means to jam it.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

In the United States, is there a black market for GPS jamming?

[Steve Chapin]

We've not seen a significant problem. In fact, most of the problems we have seen have been officers who have gone out and acquired a jammer, simply to show us they can jam the device. But we haven't seen offenders routinely jamming the devices.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Is there a way to monitor a jamming device?

[Steve Chapin]

Yes. The jamming device is only a transmitter and one could monitor that. What we do is monitor the presence of jamming and we report that.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

So if law enforcement were so inclined, the technology exists for them to pinpoint the location of a jamming device.

[Steve Chapin]

Yes.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you. That was very helpful.