The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created a new database that reveals how and where police use surveillance technologies. The map, called the “Atlas of Surveillance,” was launched earlier this week, a collaboration between the EFF and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The “Atlas of Surveillance” is described as the largest searchable collection of data on police use of surveillance technologies.
The organization of political rights and privacy states that this database was developed with the aim of informing people about the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by the police.
The map aggregates thousands of data points from over 3,000 police departments across the U.S.Users can zoom in on different locations and find summaries of what surveillance technologies are being used by a police department. They will also be able to see how the adoption of various technologies is spreading geographically.
Additionally, the “Atlas of Surveillance” highlights specific surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition, wearable cameras, drones , and automatic license plate recognition, which are used to “predict” where and how crimes are likely to be committed.
You can also directly search the data to investigate local police services, including those that have been approved in your area, as well as any grants or awards these services have received in the past for surveillance.
The “Atlas of Surveillance” documents the alarming rise in the use of unregulated, high-tech tools that collect biometrics, photos , and videos of people without their knowledge, as well as track and monitor them through their cell phones in an attempt to predict potential crimes. For example, according to the EFF datasets, the “ShotSpotter” is popular in many states. It uses a combination of sensors, algorithms, and machine learning (ML) to alert police to gunshots in urban areas.
It is worth noting that the map has been built based on data and news recorded over the past 18 months, including news articles, notes from government meetings, press releases, as well as social media. Users can also submit new data points to be included in the map.
Gi Yun, professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism and Director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies, emphasized that although it is known that the ever-increasing adoption of surveillance technologies presents many challenges related to privacy and freedom of expression, it is even harder to see this data being mapped onto a map.
