How this record is built

WatchWatch assembles its record of government surveillance technology from several public sources, reconciled into one entry per deployment. Each entry keeps the sources it came from. For the United States, a find from any source other than the baseline compilation described below is reviewed by a person before it appears on the site, so what is shown is what has been checked — the rest waits in a review queue rather than being published automatically.

The United States record

The starting record comes from the Atlas of Surveillance, a dataset of surveillance technology used by law-enforcement and other government agencies, compiled from public sources — news coverage, agency documents, vendor announcements, and records requests — by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno — Reynolds School of Journalism. It is published under a CC BY 4.0 license and credited on every WatchWatch page that renders it.

WatchWatch imports the United States record from the Atlas (most recently retrieved July 2026) and keeps each entry's original citations, including archived snapshots where the Atlas provides them. Entries carry the Atlas's own record identifiers, so re-imports update in place; entries that later disappear upstream are retained but marked inactive rather than deleted.

The United Kingdom record

There is no Atlas equivalent for the United Kingdom, so the UK observatory is compiled directly from the public record: each force's own published deployment records and registers — several forces publish per-deployment live facial recognition records — and UK government publications on the National ANPR Service (Crown material under the Open Government Licence v3.0). Each entry keeps a citation to the publication it came from. Where a force publishes per-deployment records (live facial recognition deployment logs), those are compiled from snapshots of the force's own pages preserved by the Internet Archive, which also protects rolling publication windows from silently losing history; each log links the force's source page. The unit of record is the police force area; records requests follow the UK's access regimes — see the United Kingdom records-law analysis.

The Ireland record

Ireland has a single national force, so the Ireland observatory records An Garda Síochána's programmes nationally and local-authority CCTV schemes by county. Sources are the public record: Garda and Irish government publications under the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Act 2023, Oireachtas records, and the Data Protection Commission's published audits of local-authority surveillance. Records requests follow Ireland's Freedom of Information Act 2014 — see the Ireland records-law analysis.

The Australia record

Australia's record is compiled from the public record, published-records first: the eight state and territory police forces' annual reports and publications, determinations and decisions of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, state audit reports (for example the Victorian Auditor-General's review of public-place surveillance), and government open data. The Victorian Government's Road Safety Camera Network dataset is used under its Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. There is no consolidated national deployment map for Australia; each entry cites the primary or press source it was compiled from, with an as-of date where the source gives one. Oversight requests follow Australia's federal, state, and territory information access laws; see the Australia records-law analysis.

The Canada record

Canada's record is compiled from the public record, published-records first: police-service and government publications, police services board reports, and the published findings of the federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner and its provincial counterparts. The Canada observatory records deployments by province and territory. The RCMP's national programmes and the Canada Border Services Agency are recorded as national operators on their own pages; where a source documents RCMP activity in a particular province, the entry is recorded under that province. Canadian entries use Canadian terms (automated licence-plate readers). Records requests follow the federal Access to Information Act and the provincial and territorial access laws; see the Canada records-law analysis.

The New Zealand record

New Zealand has a single national police force, so the New Zealand observatory records New Zealand Police programmes nationally and council-operated systems by territorial authority. Sources are the public record: police and government publications, council tenders and camera policies, and council responses under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA). New Zealand entries use ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition), the local term. Where the public record documents police access to privately owned camera networks, that access is recorded in a separate private-network access section, apart from systems an agency owns and operates, because access and ownership are different facts. Records requests follow the Official Information Act 1982 and LGOIMA; see the New Zealand records-law analysis.

The Netherlands record

Dutch policing is national and public-space camera surveillance is a municipal power, so the Netherlands observatory records National Police programmes nationally and camera surveillance by gemeente (municipality). Sources are the public record: National Police and government publications, including the police's Camera in Beeld camera register, municipal camera-surveillance designation decisions (aanwijzingsbesluiten) published in the official local-regulation repositories, and published findings of the Dutch data protection authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens). Source documents are in Dutch and are cited as published; the record keeps their original wording. Netherlands entries use ANPR, the local term. Records requests follow the Open Government Act (Wet open overheid); see the Netherlands records-law analysis.

News monitoring

WatchWatch tracks public reporting across the technology categories below — license-plate readers, drones, gunshot detection, camera and real-time-crime- center programs, face recognition, and related tools — for accounts of a government body acquiring, piloting, or expanding a system. Each article is read against a fixed set of questions, and every candidate deployment it surfaces is reviewed by a person before it enters the record. A find already in the baseline is treated as corroboration; a find that is not is held as a pending candidate until it is confirmed, so news never publishes itself.

Vendor transparency portals

Some agencies publish their own transparency portals for a surveillance program — most commonly automated license-plate readers — listing the number of cameras, how long data is retained, the acceptable-use and prohibited-use policy, and the other agencies they share data with. Where an agency posts one, WatchWatch reads that public page directly: it is the agency's own account of what it operates. To find agencies the baseline has not yet recorded, WatchWatch also cross-checks an independent journalism dataset that collected these portals — The News & Observer / McClatchy Southeast's Private Eyes — and reconciles it against the record. A portal that names an agency absent from our data becomes a candidate for review, not an automatic entry.

Oversight-body reports

State auditors, county grand juries, and inspectors general publish reports that name a specific agency operating a specific system, often with detail a general compilation lacks. Where such a report documents a deployment, WatchWatch records it with a citation to the report — again through the same human review before it is shown.

Reconciliation and review

The sources are merged into a single record: one entry per agency and technology, carrying every source that evidences it. The same deployment reported by two sources is merged, not counted twice. Because most sources other than the baseline pass through a person first, the published count can trail what has been gathered — a deliberate trade of speed for confidence. Nothing about a system's oversight is inferred from a deployment record; the oversight layer is sourced separately, below.

Attribution: who operates, who contracts, who pays

Naming the responsible government is easy to get wrong: the agency that runs a system, the entity that signed the contract, and the body that pays for it can be three different governments — a county sheriff policing a contract city, a shared police department serving two towns, a purchase funded by a grant. WatchWatch keeps the source's own wording for the agency, and when the responsible entity is uncertain it leaves the link to a government profile open rather than assign the system to the wrong one. A missing link is recoverable; a wrong one is not.

The category taxonomy

Each technology type is mapped to one of the observatory's categories. Seven are core — the imaging-and-sensor technologies the observatory is about: automated license-plate readers, fixed cameras & real-time crime centers, face recognition, drones, gunshot detection, body-worn & dash cameras, and doorbell/camera registry programs. Three are adjacent — cell-site simulators, predictive policing, and social-media monitoring — tracked in the record but outside the core scope. Types on a different axis (for example fusion centers, which are a data-sharing structure rather than a sensing technology) are not recorded as deployments.

Observatory units and agencies

Deployments are aggregated by each country's observatory unit for its map: counties in the United States, police force areas in the United Kingdom, counties in Ireland, states and territories in Australia, provinces and territories in Canada, territorial authorities in New Zealand, and gemeenten in the Netherlands. A source records each agency's place as text; entries with variant spellings, or a city where the unit was expected, are normalized for display against the country's canonical unit list, and the stored source text is never altered. Entries that cannot be confidently assigned to a unit are counted in the site totals and noted as unassigned.

Where an operating agency corresponds to a government entity in the UnGovr registry, the entry links to that entity's page. Many municipal police departments are not yet modeled as distinct entities, so some agencies appear as text without a link — expected, and resolved over time as the registry grows.

The oversight layer — built on public records

A deployment record says what technology an agency operates. It says nothing about the oversight around that system — the published usage policy, public-access path, disclosed data-sharing, retention limit, and legislative constraints that make up the observatory's oversight layer. Those records come from public-records requests, filed within each state's law; coverage, recipients, and deadlines follow our per-jurisdiction records-law profiles, scoped to what the statute allows. See the records-law analysis at law.ungovr.org/records/us. A refusal is recorded as not disclosed with a link to the request; until a jurisdiction's records arrive, its oversight status reads not yet requested.

What this data is not

The record is a compilation of public sources, not a census: a county with few records may have few deployments, or few public sources. A zero here reads "none on record," never "none in operation." A deployment entry is a documented instance of a system, not a measure of how it is used or overseen — that is the separate oversight layer above.

License and reuse

WatchWatch's own contribution — the compilation, the category mapping, the entity linking, and this site's text — is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license: anyone may reuse it, including commercially, with attribution to WatchWatch / UnGovr. Individual facts are not ours to license, but the compilation and the writing are, and we license them openly — the same terms the EFF Atlas uses, so corrected or new records can flow back upstream and out to others freely. The sources we build on keep their own licenses: the EFF Atlas of Surveillance under CC BY 4.0, and other datasets as their publishers set them.

Corrections

For errors in the underlying Atlas data, EFF maintains a feedback channel at atlasofsurveillance.org. For errors on this site — a wrong county assignment, a broken citation, a mislinked agency — use ungovr.org/support/new.

Source: EFF Atlas of Surveillance (Electronic Frontier Foundation & University of Nevada, Reno — Reynolds School of Journalism) · CC BY 4.0 · retrieved July 2026