Street Level Surveillance

In a first-of-its-kind agreement, the Detroit Police Department recently agreed to adopt strict limits on its officers’ use of face recognition technology as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought...

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) wants to get a robot quadruped, popularly known as a robot dog. The city’s Board of Supervisors has a regulatory duty to probe into...

For the past year, EFF has been sounding the alarm about police in California illegally sharing drivers' location data with anti-abortion states, putting abortion seekers and providers at risk of prosecution....

Law enforcement wants more drones, and we’ll probably see many more of them overhead as police departments seek to implement a popular project justifying the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles...

Police in Minnesota are buying and flying more drones than ever before, according to an annual report recently released by the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Minnesotan law enforcement...

Government officials across the U.S. frequently promote the supposed, and often anecdotal, public safety benefits of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), but rarely do they examine how this very same...

California Assemblymember Phil Ting has introduced A.B. 1814, a bill that would supposedly regulate police use of facial recognition technology. The problem is that it would do little to actually...

Dozens of policing agencies are currently using cell-site simulators (CSS) by Jacobs Technology and its Engineering Integration Group (EIG), according to newly-available documents on how that company provides CSS capabilities...

The recent wave of protests calling for peace in Palestine have been met with unwarranted and aggressive suppression from law enforcement, universities, and other bad actors. It’s clear that the...

In March, the Alaska Supreme Court held in State v. McKelvey that the Alaska Constitution required law enforcement to obtain a warrant before photographing a private backyard from an aircraft....

There is a growing pile of evidence that cities should drop Shotspotter, the notorious surveillance system that purportedly uses acoustic sensors to detect gunshots, due to its inaccuracies and the...

Axon—the makers of widely-used police body cameras and tasers (and that also keeps trying to arm drones)—has a new product: AI that will write police reports for officers. Draft One...

This post was written by Rachel Hochhauser, an EFF legal intern

In keeping with law enforcement’s grand tradition of taking antiquated, invasive, and oppressive technologies, making them digital, and then calling it innovation, police in the U.S. recently combined two existing...

The University of Georgia (UGA) School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic has filed an Open Records Request lawsuit to demand public records from the private Atlanta Police Foundation (APF). The...

In a stunning reversal against the popular Transparent & Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology (TRUST) ordinance, the San Diego city council voted earlier this year to cut many of the...

Running the Atlas of Surveillance, our project to map and inventory police surveillance across the United States, means experiencing emotional extremes.

Proposition E, which San Franciscans will be asked to vote on in the March 5 election, is so dangerous that last weekend we chartered a plane to inform our neighbors...

If you live in San Francisco, there is an election on March 5, 2024 during which voters will decide a number of specific local ballot measures—including Proposition E. Proponents of...

A new report reveals that in just three months, from July 1 to September 30, 2023,  the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) racked up 193 hours and 19 minutes of...

San Francisco voters will confront a looming threat to their privacy and civil liberties on the March 5, 2024 ballot. If Proposition E passes, we can expect the San Francisco...

Amazon’s Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police's warrantless requests for footage from Ring users. This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket...

"The EFF are relentless."

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision making–regardless of what you call it, and there is hot debate over that, this technology has been touted as a supposed threat to humanity,...

The U.S.-Mexico border continues to be one of the most politicized spaces in the country, with leaders in both political parties supporting massive spending on border security, including technological solutions...

Today, EFF joins more than 25 civil society organizations to launch the Coalition #MigrarSinVigilancia ("To Migrate Without Surveillance"). The Latin American coalition’s aim is to oppose arbitrary and indiscriminate surveillance...

Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if...

California residents finally have a law designed to dismantle some of the secrecy around domestic acquisitions of warzone surveillance equipment.

By unanimous vote, San Francisco's public records appeals body ruled last night that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) violated state and local laws when it failed to respond adequately...

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, a long-time critic of Amazon’s surveillance doorbell camera, Ring, has released a letter of concern and inquiry concerning the device’s audio capabilities. This is partially in response...

A large coalition of community and civil rights organizations have sent a letter urging the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to oppose or significantly amend a San Francisco Police Department...

Amazon’s Ring devices are not just personal security cameras. They are also police cameras—whether you want them to be or not. The company now admits there are “emergency” instances when...

How transparent are police about surveillance technology? It depends on where you look. When it comes to acceptable levels of secrecy around police tools, states have drawn their lines in...

This article is part of EFF’s investigation of location data brokers and Fog Data Science. Be sure to check out our issue page on Location Data Brokers.

In yet another failure to follow the rules, the San Francisco Police Department is collaborating with the regional fusion center with nothing in writing—no agreements, no contracts, nothing— governing the...

In the week since EFF and the Associated Press exposed how Fog Data Science purchases geolocation data on hundreds of millions of digital devices in the United States, and maps them...

In a 4-7 vote, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a 15-month pilot program granting the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) more live surveillance powers. This was despite the objections...

In 2015, Leicestershire Police scanned the faces of 90,000 individuals at a music festival in the UK and checked these images against a database of people suspected of crimes across...

Researchers at a national laboratory are forecasting a future where police and border agents are assisted by artificial intelligence, not as a software tool but as an autonomous partner capable...

A California trial court has held a geofence warrant issued to the San Francisco Police Department violated the Fourth Amendment and California’s landmark electronic communications privacy law, CalECPA. The court...

In August, the Tulsa police department held a press conference about how its new Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), a controversial piece of surveillance technology, was the policing equivalent of...

This week, EFF's Atlas of Surveillance project hit a bittersweet milestone.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote soon on a policy that would allow the San Francisco Police Department to use deadly force by arming its many robots. This...

The U.S.-Mexico border is one of the most politicized technological spaces in the country, with leaders in both political parties supporting massive spending on border security and the so-called "Virtual...

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Nov. 29 voted 8 to 3 to approve on first reading a policy that would formally authorize the San Francisco Police Department to...

EFF is announcing a letter signed by 44 community groups who stand united in opposition to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors authorizing the San Francisco Police Department to deploy...

In a stunning 8-to-3 vote yesterday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the SFPD from using deadly force with remote-controlled robots. The Board also sent the killer robot policy...

The rising tide of policing by robots and drones may seem relentless or even inevitable. But activism, legislative advocacy, and public outrage can do a lot to protect our safety...

We love San Francisco. It’s EFF’s home.  It’s often an example for other cities in regards to technology use and civil liberties. We helped make San Francisco the first city...

Update April 10, 2023: EFF is no longer hosting this data, due to regularly updated data now being available on OpenJustice.

What started with a simple public records request became a journey into the absurd depths of Mexican bureaucracy. But we emerged victorious, and learned a lot about how a city...

The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General has released a troubling new report detailing how federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and the Secret...

U.S. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has sent a much-needed letter to car manufacturers asking them to clarify a surprisingly hard question to answer: what data cars collect? Who has...

There will be a ballot initiative in San Francisco on surveillance and policing that, if approved, would greatly erode our privacy rights, endanger marginalized communities, and roll back the incredible...

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued a legal interpretation and guidance for law enforcement agencies around the state that confirms what privacy advocates have been saying for years: It...

EFF Special Advisor Paul Tepper and EFF intern Michael Rubio contributed research to this report.

Sound Thinking, the company behind ShotSpotter—an acoustic gunshot detection technology that is rife with problems—is reportedly buying Geolitica, the company behind PredPol, a predictive policing technology known to exacerbate inequalities...

Should the government have to get a warrant before using a drone to spy on your home and backyard? We think so, and in an amicus brief filed last Friday...

Within a few years, fully self-driving cars have gone from science fiction to a very common reality for people in San Francisco with other places in the U.S. also testing...

Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring has reached a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission which will require the company to pay $5.8 million over its inability to keep private...

In a victory for transparency in police use of facial recognition, a New Jersey appellate court today ruled that state prosecutors—who charged a man for armed robbery after the technology...

New documents EFF received through public records requests have revealed that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) received live access to the hundreds of surveillance cameras that comprise the Union...

Police have their sights set on every surveillance camera in every business, on every porch, in all the cities and counties of the country. Grocery store trips, walks down the...