The Atlas of Surveillance Hits Major Milestones: 2023 in Review

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“The EFF are relentless.”

That’s what a New York Police Department lieutenant wrote on LinkedIn after someone sent him a link to the Atlas of Surveillance, EFF’s moonshot effort to document which U.S. law enforcement agencies are using which technologies, including drones, automated license plate readers and face recognition. Of course, the lieutenant then went on to attack us with unsubstantiated accusations of misinformation — but we take it all as a compliment.

If you haven’t checked out the Atlas of Surveillance recently, or ever before, you absolutely should. It includes a searchable database and an interactive map, and anyone can download the data for their own projects. As this collaboration with the University of Nevada Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism (RSJ) finishes its fifth year, we are proud to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone: more than 12,000 data points that document the use of police surveillance nationwide, all collected using open-source investigative techniques, data journalism, and public records requests.

We’ve come a long way since the Atlas of Surveillance launched as a pilot project with RSJ back in the spring semester of 2019. By that summer, with the help of a few dozen journalism students, we had accumulated 250 data points, focused on the 23 counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. When we launched the formal website in 2020, we had collected a little more than 5,500 data points. Today’s dataset represents more than a 100% increase since then.

That isn’t the only major milestone we accomplished this year. To collect data for the project, EFF and RSJ designed a tool called Report Back, which allows us to distribute micro-research assignments (about 10-20 minutes each) to students in our classes. This winter, the 3,000th assignment was completed using Report Back.

This year we also dug into one particular technology. As part of our Atlas efforts, we began to see Fusus—a company working to bring

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