the EFF Monitoring Atlas is one of the most useful resources for those interested in understanding the use of police surveillance by local law enforcement in the United States. This year, as the police surveillance industry has evolved, grown and redoubled its efforts to win new police customers, our team has been busy adding new spyware and hardware to that database. data. We’ve also seen many interesting uses of the Atlas by journalists, students and researchers, as well as a growing number of contributors. The Surveillance Atlas currently captures more than 11,700 surveillance technology deployments and remains the most comprehensive database of its kind. To learn more about each technology, please see our Street Level Monitoring Centerof which an updated and extended version has been released early 2024.
Removing the Amazon Ring
We started with a big change: the removing our batch from Amazon Ring relations with the local police. In January, Amazon announcement that it would no longer facilitate warrantless requests for doorbell camera footage through the company’s Neighbors app – an EFF movement and other organizations had been appealing for years. Although police can still access Ring camera footage by obtaining a warrant – or through other legal means – we decided that tracking Ring relationships in the Atlas no longer served its purpose, so we removed this set of information. People should keep in mind that law enforcement can still connect to individual Ring cameras directly via access facilitated by Fusus and other platforms.
Adding third-party platforms
In 2024, we added an important and growing category of police technology: Third-Party Investigation Platform (TPIP). This is a designation we created for the growing group of software platforms that extract data from other sources and share it with law enforcement, making it easier to analyze police and other data through artificial intelligence and other tools. Common examples include LexisNexis Accurint, Thomson Reuters ClearAnd
New Fusus data
404 Media published a report last January on the use of Fusus, an Axon system that facilitates access to live camera footage for police and helps deliver those feeds to crime centers in real time. Their investigation revealed that more than 200,000 cameras across the country are part of the Fusus system, and we were able to add dozens of new entries to the Atlas.
New and updated ALPR data
The EFF has been investigating the use of automated license plate readers (LPRs) throughout California for years, and we have filed hundreds of requests under the California Public Records Act with state departments as part of our Data-driven project. This year we were able to update all of our California entries related to ALPR data.
Additionally, we were able to add over 300 new law enforcement agencies nationally using Flock Safety ALPRs, thanks to a data journalism scraping project from the Raleigh News & Observer.
Redo drone data
This year, we reviewed and cleaned up much of the data we had on police use of drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs). Some of our drone data was based on research done by the Bard College Drone Centerwhich became inactive in 2020, so we reviewed and updated all entries that depended on this resource.
We also added new drone data from Illinois, MinnesotaAnd Texas.
We’ve been following the Drone as First Responder programs since their inception in Chula Vista, California, and this year we’ve seen vendors like Axon, Skydio, and Brinc make a big push to get more police departments to adopt these programs. We have updated the Atlas to contain the cities that we know such programs were deployed.
Other Interesting Uses of the Atlas
The Surveillance Atlas is intended for journalistsacademics, activists and policymakers, and it was another year where people made great use of data.
TThe Surveillance Atlas is regularly featured in media outlets across the country, including in the MIT Technology Review reports on drones, and news from the Auburn reporter on the use of ALPR in Washington. It has also become the subject of podcasts and is presented in the book “Resisting Data Colonialism – A Practical Intervention.”
Educators and students around the world have cited the Monitoring Atlas as an important source in their research. One of our favorite projects came from a senior at Northwestern University, who used the data to create a cool visualization on the surveillance technologies used. To a January 2024 conference at the IT University of Copenhagen, Bjarke Freiburg of the project Critical understanding of predictive policing (CUPP) introduced the Surveillance Atlas in its presentation, “Engage civil society.” The Atlas has also been cited in several academic articles, including the Annual review of criminologyand is also cited in a forthcoming article by Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson of the American University Washington College of Law entitled “Video analysis and vision of the Fourth Amendment.»
Thank you to our volunteers
The Surveillance Atlas would not be possible without our partners at the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism, where hundreds of students collect data each semester that we add to the Atlas. This year we also worked with students from California State University Channel Islands and Harvard University.
The Surveillance Atlas will continue to track the growth of surveillance technologies. We look forward to working with even more people who want to bring transparency and community oversight to police use of technology. If you are interested in joining us, get in touch.
This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles on the fight for digital rights in 2024.