by JetPuffed

Government corruption.  Corporate greed.  Public safety.  Misuse of technology.

These phrases often conjure up images of the NSA combing through records of private citizens or of Facebook tweaking algorithms to suck more data out of its users.  But for Long Island resident Stephen Ruth, who has come to be known as the "Red Light Robin Hood," these phrases have a more localized, immediate significance.

I stumbled across Ruth's story in November 2019 when a post about him went viral on Reddit.  Ruth's years long struggle with his local Suffolk County government over an automated red light camera ticketing system made the news due to Ruth potentially facing at least seven years in prison.  My curiosity was piqued.  Who was this man smiling in his mugshot, and what could he have done to warrant such a sentence?

I did some digging and found a video which Ruth had uploaded in August 2015.  In it, we see Ruth, wearing a dress shirt and tie, walking down the sidewalk carrying a paint roller extension pole as he speaks directly into the camera.  "In order to do this successfully you only need a pair of balls and a painter's extension rod," he proclaims.  "I'm gonna show you how easy it is to take the power back."  Ruth walks up to a public utility pole, raises the extension rod, and disables a red light camera by shoving it upwards.  "This is government taking advantage and it's gonna stop."  Ruth went on to disable at least 16 other cameras and, if convicted, could be in prison for years.

To find out more about why Ruth was taking this fight against technology into his own hands, I left Ruth a voicemail asking for an interview.  Ironically, Ruth returned my call while I was painting.  He gave me a generous hour of his time and got right into it by asking in his Long Island accent, "You want from the beginning of everything that happened?"

It all started after church one day in the summer of 2015 when Ruth was having a conversation with his priest.  His priest talked about how at one Suffolk County intersection he had received multiple tickets despite having done nothing wrong.  Ruth knew the intersection and checked it out.  "I went to this intersection... and I noticed that everyone was getting ticketed on the right on red.  Every car."  Around town, he saw the same situation at other intersections.  The most troubling thing, however, was that wherever there was a surveilled intersection, there also seemed to be roadside memorials.  "I started noticing where there were cameras at intersections, there were flowers on the side of the road."  Could the red light camera systems be causing deaths?  He did more research.

What he found was a complex web of corruption and greed, with the area's citizens trapped in the center.  After his infamous vandalistic video, he was approached by the police.  Surprisingly, the cops acknowledged the red light camera issue and agreed with Ruth that they caused accidents.  They went on to say that not only was the right-on-red situation a problem, but the yellow light times had also been reduced in order to increase ticket revenue.  The police complained about this in the past but got nowhere.  Ruth then spoke to his congressman's office, which initially seemed open to working with him because they were aware of the police complaints.  But shortly after this, the congressman's office was told not to have any further contact with him.  Someone in the government didn't want the situation to gain more attention.  That's when people started watching him.

"I started getting surveilled.... [People were] driving around my neighborhood, tailing me, parking near my house and sitting in the car."  Cameras were even installed to monitor his property from across the street.  Then his homebuilding business was targeted by government officials who showed up on job sites and issued code infractions for anything and everything they could to complicate his life, even if there was no real infraction.  He was once arrested over the alleged expiration of a solar panel permit.  All of this caused endless headaches and revenue loss for Ruth.

He took to the Internet, making another video to drum up enough attention that presidential hopefuls of the 2016 election, particularly Republican candidates (Marco Rubio had spoken about the camera systems in the past), would take notice and speak on the subject.  But due to the more conservative lean of the video, he experienced firsthand how technology can be used to silence people and was shadow banned.  "They won't admit to it... but I've made [videos] before that don't get the traction that they should."

The social media corporations working against Ruth's message made it difficult to communicate, but Ruth chose to focus instead on the corporation that was responsible for the red light camera systems: Xerox.

To the average person, Xerox is synonymous with copy machines.  But in 2010, Xerox purchased Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a company that specialized in red light cameras, for $6.4 billion.  Around the time that Ruth began speaking out against the camera systems and pointing the finger at Xerox, they spun their camera support functions into a company called Conduent.  Although the timing of this move is suspicious and Ruth himself would tell you that his actions had a hand in Xerox's decision, Xerox claims that this move was simply a necessary business decision.  In any case, it created another layer of tape to get through to monitor the monitors.

Xerox's strategy seems to stem from old-fashioned corporate greed.  They paint the camera systems as safety measures (despite independent studies that have suggested they actually increase danger), approach governmental bodies to implement the program (often in low-income areas where people can't fight back), and then manage the systems for the county - all while collecting money from tickets and doling out a cut to the government.  At least in and around Suffolk County, the cameras have specific ticketing quotas of 25 tickets per camera per day that must be met, or the county government faces fines.  So how does the government ensure that they avoid these fines?  They manipulate the traffic light systems in their favor.

"It's racketeering, extortion, and enterprise corruption," Ruth says.  The government sent an order via email to reduce the yellow light times at intersections, as well as the time between when one set of lights turns red and the other turns green.  Less time to get through the intersection as the light turns yellow means more people who will be caught in the open when the light turns red, which means more tickets.  But this also means a higher risk of accidents as people who are aware of the red light systems accelerate through intersections hoping to avoid tickets.

New York law (Article 145) states that engineering projects (traffic light systems included) must be signed off on by professional engineers.  However, Ruth says that this law was not followed.  As a result, an unsafe situation was created which a professional engineer would never have approved, and people lost their lives because of it.  Ruth's earlier hunch that these cameras caused deaths was correct.  At one such intersection where a boy had been killed crossing the street, Ruth predicted that more would die because of the light configuration and brought this to the government's attention.  His voice went ignored and, unfortunately, he was proven right again when another person was killed.

As stated before, the cameras are controlled by Conduent (Xerox).  Through court order, Ruth obtained the video footage of the recent victim's death.  Then he discovered another issue.  Even though the cameras were constantly recording, the video footage he received had been edited to cut out the events leading up to the victim's death.  The footage jumped straight from a regular day at the intersection to the aftermath of an accident with cops everywhere.  Not only was Conduent making money from managing the cameras for the government, they were also altering footage to fit their agenda.

This led to yet another discovery.  After reducing the traffic light times, the government minimized quota fines and maximized ticket revenue.  What incentive did they have to care at all about Conduent's behavior or the unsafe conditions?  They were making buckets of money.  "Thirty million dollars greases a lot of palms," Ruth mused, referring to the county revenue the cameras had generated.  On top of the ticket cost, they also added fees that caused the ticket total to be greater than the infraction amount, which is itself a felony known as overstepping the enabling statute.  This crime was committed by the government each time a ticket was issued, resulting in more felonies than you could shake a stick at.  But nobody seemed to be doing anything about it.  Ruth even attended a county government meeting where he called out these crimes (and others) and demanded the police make arrests of government officials.  But the police were nowhere to be found.

With all that being said about safety and corruption, there is another, perhaps more insidious possibility due to the presence of these cameras: Tracking people.  Now that Suffolk (and many other areas around the nation) have constantly-recording camera networks under the guise of safety, it's easy to see how those in power could leverage these assets for further invasions of our privacy and questionable expansions of police or government powers.  I asked Ruth about this, and although he was not aware of any current efforts to use the cameras to expand public surveillance or police investigations apart from the traffic law side of things, Suffolk County has the means in place.  The movements of its citizens, however benign, can now be tracked all around the county by any person in power with a desire to do so.  It would not be surprising to learn that these systems are being used, in conjunction with other surveillance methods, to build more detailed profiles on people to be sold for marketing or other purposes.

Despite the dangers caused by the ticket cameras, the corruption of the local government, the shadiness of Conduent, and the potential for privacy invasions, it doesn't seem likely that anything will be done anytime soon about these issues.  Ruth sincerely doubted that Suffolk's cameras would ever be removed.  Nevertheless, Ruth is committed to continuing the fight.  He has created allies in the community by building awareness.  He has attended meetings of his local government - something we should all do more often.  He has risked his freedom.  He has even run for office, though unsuccessfully.

If you have any concerns about your locality's use or potential use of red light cameras, you should follow Ruth's example (maybe with the exception of vandalism) and get involved in your local political scene.

Your privacy, wallet, and perhaps even your life depend on it.

References
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