WatchWatch · United States · South Dakota

A public record · South Dakota

The surveillance technology South Dakota'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.

54 Deployments on record
48 Agencies
34 Counties with records
4 Technology categories

The observatory

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

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 South Dakota

Counts are South Dakota 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.

5 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.

none on record

Face recognition

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

1 on record

Drones / UAS

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

4 on record

Gunshot detection

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

none on record

Body-worn & dashcam

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

44 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.

none 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.

none 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.

none 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.