WatchWatch · United States · California

A public record · California

The surveillance technology California's governments operate

Which agencies operate license-plate readers, cameras, face recognition, drones, and acoustic sensors — where, with a citation behind every entry. The oversight around each system is the next layer of the record.

1,022 Deployments on record
466 Agencies
53 Counties with records
9 Technology categories

The observatory

Deployments on the public record, aggregated by county. Filter by technology; select a county for its full record.

adjacent

Adjacent categories are tracked in the record but sit outside the observatory's core imaging-and-sensor scope.

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

The technologies in California

Counts are California deployments on the public record; a zero means none on record, not necessarily none in operation.

ALPR

Automated license plate readers (ALPR): camera systems that automatically capture, read, and log vehicle license plates with location and time, producing a searchable record of vehicle movements.

324 on record

Fixed cameras & RTCC

Agency-operated fixed video cameras and the real-time crime centers (RTCC) that aggregate live and recorded feeds for monitoring. Extends the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Atlas, which enumerates real-time crime centers and camera registries but not standalone fixed-camera estates.

32 on record

Face recognition

Software that matches faces in images or video against a reference database to identify or verify individuals.

91 on record

Drones / UAS

Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), commonly called drones, operated by an agency for overhead observation, imaging, or sensing.

134 on record

Gunshot detection

Networks of acoustic sensors that detect and locate suspected gunfire and alert an agency.

29 on record

Body-worn & dashcam

Officer body-worn and in-vehicle dashboard cameras that record encounters; public access to the footage is frequently restricted.

281 on record

Doorbell & camera registry

Programs that give an agency access to privately owned camera footage — doorbell-camera partnerships, citizen camera registries, and private-camera integration platforms.

92 on record

Cell-site simulators

adjacent

Devices that mimic cell towers to locate or identify nearby mobile phones — often called Stingrays, or IMSI catchers after the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number that identifies each phone on a network. Adjacent: communications surveillance outside the visual/sensor core.

18 on record

Predictive policing

adjacent

Software that forecasts where crime may occur or who may be involved, to direct policing. Adjacent: analytics rather than a sensing deployment.

21 on record

Social-media monitoring

adjacent

Tools that collect and analyze public social-media activity for an agency. Adjacent: open-source/communications monitoring outside the visual/sensor core.

none on record

About this record

Deployment data comes from the EFF Atlas of Surveillance (CC BY 4.0), keeping each entry's original citations. The oversight around each system — published policy, public-access path, disclosed data-sharing, legislative limits — is the record's next layer, built from public-records requests; until a jurisdiction's records arrive its oversight status reads not yet requested. Full notes on the methodology page.