EFFecting Digital Freedom

by Jason Kelley

EFF's Atlas of Surveillance Brings Police Spy Tech Into the Light

From cell-site simulators and drones to body-worn cameras and face recognition, police deploy a range of technologies to surveil innocent people at protests, during daily patrols, or 24/7 depending on their placement.  However, police often only release information about their tech caches when it suits their interests, rather than the public interest.  But the purchase of these technologies does leave a paper trail, and citizen sleuths can discover a great deal through examining government meeting agendas, company press releases, social media posts, archived news articles, and public records requests.

Government transparency over surveillance tech should not require every member of the community to become an open-source intelligence expert.  Unfortunately, there has never been a nationwide central resource that reveals what cops are using what tech - until now.

EFF's new Atlas of Surveillance (atlasofsurveillance.org) project collects, maps, and presents to the public a repository of information on which law enforcement agencies are using what surveillance technologies, based on this available data.  The interactive, searchable site is a collaborative project between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism.  The data is collected through a combination of crowd-sourcing and data journalism.  Our goal is to offer this data to journalists, academics, and, most importantly, members of the public, so anyone can learn what's been purchased locally by law enforcement and how these technologies are spreading across the country.

The project focuses on the most pervasive technologies: drones, body-worn cameras, face recognition, cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, predictive policing, camera registries, and gunshot detection.  It also maps out two different kinds of high-tech policing facilities that combine these technologies: real-time crime centers and fusion centers.  At the moment, the Atlas contains more than 7,500 datapoints in 3,500 jurisdictions, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.  Increased transparency is essential to ensuring everyone knows exactly what technologies are being used by law enforcement.

Anyone can quickly search the data by entering a location (city, county, state, or agency in the U.S.) and choosing which technologies they'd like to learn about.  The results are viewable in a map or in a table, and all of the dataset is downloadable via a CSV file.

Alongside the Atlas we've also released several detailed reports based on the data.  Have questions about Real-Time Crime Centers (RTCCs), the high-tech hubs filled with walls of TV monitors and computer workstations that police use to mine historical data and make decisions about the future through "predictive policing" strategies?  Our report, "Surveillance Compounded: Real-Time Crime Centers in the U.S.," maps the locations and details the capabilities of many of these RTCCs.  From surveillance camera networks of over 12,000 cameras (in Atlanta) to face recognition (in Detroit), the technologies that police access via RTCCs are often used to justify not only increased surveillance, but increased spending, despite the technologies' often-questionable results.

Another special report we released in conjunction with the Atlas focuses on six counties along the U.S.-Mexico border.  In addition to detailed data for those counties, we found 36 local government agencies using Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR), 45 outfitting officers with body-worn cameras, and 20 flying drones (as well as sensor towers and surveillance blimps).

Much of the surveillance technology along the border is a consequence of the federal government's push to conduct persistent surveillance there, which has accelerated the adoption of this technology by police and sheriff departments in border towns and communities.

Our third report was released in March.  "Scholars Under Surveillance" uncovers the surveillance technology that administrators and campus police have added to schools.  Many campuses now have sophisticated surveillance systems that go far beyond run-of-the-mill security camera networks to include drones, gunshot detection sensors, and automated license plate readers.  Often this data feeds into the criminal justice system.  We documented more than 250 technology purchases, ranging from body-worn cameras to face recognition, adopted by more than 200 universities in 37 states.  As big as these numbers are, they are only a sliver of what is happening on college campuses around the world.  All of this data is available for searching and analysis at the Atlas of Surveillance, which is the largest ever repository of data of this kind.  The Atlas also includes a library of more than 20 external datasets related to surveillance technology that researchers can use and remix for their own projects.

We hope that the site - which won the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Electronic Access - will enable more detailed research and reporting, as well as inform the public of the vast, often unknown quantities of surveillance technology police are using across the country.  A special thanks is owed to the more than 600 students and volunteers who assisted in the research.  As the use of surveillance tech grows, we must build more resources like this to offer insight into its use - even if we can only shed light on a bit at a time.  We'll continue adding to the Atlas, and hope you'll join us in shining a spotlight on the police tech that far too often flies under the radar.