The surveillance technology governments operate
WatchWatch documents government surveillance technology on the public record — which agencies operate license-plate readers, cameras, face recognition, drones, and acoustic sensors, and where — across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, with a citation behind every entry.
14,010 deployments on record 9,020 agencies 3 countries 9 technologies on record
About this site
WatchWatch is a public record of the surveillance technology governments operate and the oversight around it — an observatory, not a campaign. It documents what exists and what its status is; readers draw their own conclusions. A zero here means none on record, not necessarily none in operation.
About Methodology The technologies Perspectives In the press
The observatories
One observatory per jurisdiction — each with its county map, technology filters, and per-county records.
Source: EFF Atlas of Surveillance (Electronic Frontier Foundation & University of Nevada, Reno — Reynolds School of Journalism) · CC BY 4.0 · retrieved July 2026
Beyond the United States
Deployments on the public record — by police force area in the United Kingdom, by county in Ireland.
The technologies
The categories the observatory tracks, counted across every covered jurisdiction. A zero means none on record, not necessarily none in operation. New to the subject? The technologies page explains each in plain language.
ALPR 4,139 Fixed cameras & RTCC 329 Face recognition 982 Drones / UAS 1,808 Gunshot detection 246 Body-worn & dashcam 5,468 Doorbell & camera registry 755 Cell-site simulators 83 Predictive policing 200 Social-media monitoring 0
The oversight layer
The record currently documents deployments: that a system is in operation, per public sources. It does not yet record the oversight around each system — whether the agency has published a use policy, whether the public has a path to the footage or data, what data-sharing is disclosed, and what legislation governs the technology.
Those records come from public-records requests, filed within each jurisdiction's law. Until a jurisdiction's records arrive, its oversight status reads not yet requested — a status, not a verdict.
How this record is built
United States deployment data comes from the EFF Atlas of Surveillance (CC BY 4.0), a public dataset compiled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno, credited on every page that renders it. The United Kingdom and Ireland records are compiled from force-, Garda-, and government-published records. Each entry keeps its citations, and the oversight layer is built from each jurisdiction's own public-records law (United States · United Kingdom · Ireland). The full notes, including what this data is and is not, are on the methodology page.