TACOMA, Wash. (AP) - Vehicles using the new Tacoma Narrows bridge will leave an electronic record that will be open to criminal investigators and by court order for 8½ years, program officials have confirmed.

Each time an eastbound vehicle equipped with a Good to Go automatic toll transponder uses the new span that opens next month on State Route 16, a series of cameras will snap 24 photographs and a record will be entered by computer of the date and time.

The images will be deleted once an automatic computer check shows there is enough money in a prepaid account to cover the toll - $1.75 for cars using the automated system, compared with $3 at tollbooths - but the state Transportation Department will save information on each individual crossing, program spokeswoman Janet Lynn Matkin said.

Under state law, the data may be released only to motorists seeking their own toll and crossing records and to law enforcement investigators and lawyers in civil cases who obtain a court order, Matkin said.

For Washington state, it's "completely new territory," said William E. Covington, an assistant professor who teaches technology law and public policy at the University of Washington School of Law. "There are a huge number of unknowns."

For example, he said, detectives could use toll information to track people under investigation in criminal cases, employers could obtain information to use against an employee in a lawsuit and one spouse could get data to use against the other in a divorce or custody battle.

"It's another tool if the need arises, which would be very rarely," Pierce County sheriff's Detective Ed Troyer said.

Similar restrictions apply to the FasTrak program in use on eight bridges used by millions of motorists in the San Francisco Bay area, and individual motorist information has been released 17 times in the past two years, mostly to law enforcement agencies, said Rod McMillan, the program's director of bridge operations and oversight.

In one case, an Oakland lawyer told the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times he used toll data to "refute claims by a client's wife that she worked often from home - an issue in a dispute over visitation rights."

FasTrak drivers are notified when their information is requested, McMillan said.

"That customer can then go to court himself or herself and try to quash that subpoena," McMillan said. "We want to give that customer an opportunity to protect his or her privacy."

Drivers can avoid being tracked through the Good to Go program by obtaining an unregistered pass, paying with cash rather than with a credit card or using a numbered bank account to avoid having the transponder linked to a name, license plate or financial information, Matkin said.

Vehicles quipped with those transponders will still be photographed but the information would be untraceable for lack of any link to ownership, license number or bank account, she explained.

To date only a handful of drivers have obtained an unregistered transponder, Matkin said.