The Atlas of Surveillance Removes Ring, Adds Third-Party Investigative Platforms

Running the Atlas of Surveillance, our project to map and inventory police surveillance across the United States, means experiencing emotional extremes.

Whenever we announce that we’ve added new data points to the Atlas, it comes with a great sense of satisfaction. That’s because it almost always means that we’re hundreds or even thousands of steps closer to achieving what only a few years ago would’ve seemed impossible: comprehensively documenting the surveillance state through our partnership with students at the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism.

At the same time, it’s depressing as hell. That’s because it also reflects how quickly and dangerously the surveillance technology is metastasizing.

We have the exact opposite feeling when we remove items from the Atlas of Surveillance. It’s a little sad to see our numbers drop, but at the same time that change in data usually means that a city or county has eliminated a surveillance program.

That brings us to the biggest change in the Atlas since our launch in 2018. This week, we removed 2,530 data points: an entire category of surveillance. With the announcement from Amazon that its home surveillance company Ring will no longer facilitate warrantless requests for consumer video footage, we’ve decided to sunset that particular dataset.

While law enforcement agencies still maintain accounts on Ring’s Neighbors social network, it seems to serve as a communications tool, a function on par with services like Nixle and Citizen, which we currently don’t capture in the Atlas. That’s not to say law enforcement won’t be gathering footage from Ring cameras: they will, through legal process or by directly asking residents to give them access via the This article has been indexed from Deeplinks