How this record is built

Source: the EFF Atlas of Surveillance

Deployment data 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 California slice of 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 category taxonomy

Each Atlas 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. Atlas types on a different axis (for example fusion centers, which are a data-sharing structure rather than a sensing technology) are not imported as deployments.

Counties and agencies

Deployments are aggregated by county for the map. The Atlas records each agency's county as text; a small number of entries carry variant spellings or a city in the county field, and these are normalized for display against the canonical list of California's 58 counties — the stored source text is never altered. Entries that cannot be confidently assigned to a county 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.

What this data is not

The Atlas 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." And a deployment record says nothing about the oversight around the system — the published policy, public-access path, disclosed data-sharing, and legislative limits that make up the observatory's oversight layer. Those records come from public-records requests, filed within each state's law; see the records-law analysis at law.ungovr.org/records/us. Until a jurisdiction's records arrive, its oversight status reads not yet requested.

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