EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project shines a light on the surveillance technologies that law enforcement agencies routinely deploy in our communities. These resources are designed for advocacy organizations, journalists, defense attorneys, policymakers, and members of the public who often are not getting the straight story from police representatives or the vendors marketing this equipment.
Whether it’s phone-based location tracking, ubiquitous video recording, biometric data collection, or police access to people’s smart devices, law enforcement agencies follow closely behind their counterparts in the military and intelligence services in acquiring privacy-invasive technologies and getting access to consumer data. Just as analog surveillance historically has been used as a tool for oppression, we must understand the threat posed by emerging technologies to successfully defend civil liberties and civil rights in the digital age.
The threats to privacy of these surveillance technologies are enormous, as law enforcement agencies at all levels of government use surveillance technologies to compile vast databases filled with our personal information or gain access to devices that can lay bare the intricacies of our daily lives. Use of these surveillance technologies can infringe on our constitutional rights, including to speak and associate freely under the First Amendment or be free from unlawful search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Law enforcement also tends to deploy surveillance technologies disproportionately against marginalized communities. These technologies are prone to abuse by rogue officers, and can be subject to error or vulnerability, causing damaging repercussions for those who interact with the criminal justice system.
EFF Unveils Its New Street Level Surveillance Hub
The Updated and Expanded Hub Sheds New Light on the Digital Surveillance Dragnet that Law Enforcement Deploys Against Everyone
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy.
The hub has new or updated pages on automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body-worn cameras, camera networks, cell-site simulators, drones and robots, face recognition, electronic monitoring, gunshot detection, forensic extraction tools, police access to the Internet of Things, predictive policing, community surveillance apps, real-time location tracking, social media monitoring, and police databases.
It also features links to the latest articles by EFF’s Street Level Surveillance working group, consisting of attorneys, policy analysts, technologists, and activists with extensive experience in this field.
“People are surveilled by police at more times and in more ways than ever before, and understanding this panopticon is the first step in protecting our rights,” said EFF Senior Policy Analyst Dr. Matthew Guariglia. “Our new hub is a ‘Field Guide to Police Surveillance;’ providing a reference source on recognizing the most-used police spy technology. But more than that it is a vital, constantly updated news feed offering cutting-edge, detailed analysis of law enforcement’s uses and abuses of these devices.”
The new hub also interfaces with several of EFF’s ongoing projects, including:
The Atlas of Surveillance, EFF’s collaboration with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno to map more than 12,000 police surveillance technologies in use across America; and
Spot the Surveillance, an open-source educational virtual reality tool to help people identify street-level surveillance in their community.
"We hope community groups, advocacy organizations, defense attorneys, and concerned individuals will use the hub to stay abreast of the latest legal cases and technological developments, and share their own stories with us,” Guariglia said.
Visit EFF’s new Street Level Surveillance hub at Street Level Surveillance
New online database details the shocking extent of intrusive surveillance tech used by American police.
Who watches the watchmen? All of us, if we're smart. In the age of surveillance, that means monitoring how and where the snoops put us under scrutiny. Among the people and organizations doing such important work is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which recently updated one of its countersurveillance tools.
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans' privacy," the group announced January 10.
Understanding How We're Being Watched
The hub consolidates information about such evolving and increasingly common technologies as automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body-worn cameras, camera networks, cell-site simulators, drones, face recognition, gunshot detection, and social media monitoring. There's also a news section featuring relevant articles about such topics as the huge amount of data modern cars collect about their drivers and the legal status of surveillance efforts in various jurisdictions.
Not all of the technologies and practices covered by the Street Level Surveillance hub are inherently bad; body-worn cameras (BWCs), for instance, have been championed by reformers as a means of recording interactions between police and the public so that there's an objective record of events.
"For nearly two decades, law enforcement agencies have explored and implemented the use of body cameras as a tool to help hold officers accountable and make departments more transparent," PBS News Hour reported in 2020.
But, as EFF points out, "because police often control when BWCs are turned on and how the footage is stored, BWCs often fail to do the one thing they were intended to do: record video of how police interact with the public." The organization says the cameras should be used only with strict safeguards regarding usage, privacy, and storage of recordings.
Other technologies are more obviously intrusive, such as automated license plate readers (ALPRs) which "capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the location, date, and time." While the readers have the potential to solve crimes by showing who was at the scene, they do so by following people's movements and can build patterns of life around where people travel and with whom they associate.
"Where you go can reveal many things about you—whether you attend political rallies, which religious institution you attend, if you go to the gun store," the ACLU's Allie Bohn warned the South Bend Tribune in 2014 about the use of automated license plate readers.
That was two years after New York City cops were found to be tracking mosque attendance using ALPRs.
EFF engages in extensive litigation to limit the use of ALPRs and to restrict data-sharing among law-enforcement agencies.
Where Are We Being Watched?
The Street Level Surveillance hub integrates closely with EFF's already established Atlas of Surveillance. Users can search the Atlas for jurisdictions to see what surveillance tools are currently in use in their hometowns or in places they're visiting.
Unsurprisingly, Washington, D.C. is closely monitored by the powers that be. Residents and visitors in the nation's capital are scrutinized by automated license plate readers, face recognition scanning by the FBI of driver's license photos, a registry of private security cameras, gunshot detection microphones (yes, they can overhear conversations), cell-site simulators which pinpoint the locations of phones and their users, and more. The Atlas lists the surveillance tools used in the city and links to more information on them—including the extensive write-ups on the Street Level Surveillance hub.
The Atlas also includes an interactive map of the United States plotting the use of various surveillance technologies, including links to information about local implementations. It's a handy tool if you're planning a trip and want to see just how likely it is that you'll wind up on somebody's radar (or camera, or microphone). In 2022, I used the map to trace a road trip my son and I took to visit a college campus in Kansas.
"According to the Atlas of Surveillance, we passed through jurisdictions that, in addition to bodycams and doorbell cameras, register private surveillance cameras for official use, monitor the public with drones, detect gunshots, use facial recognition, track cellphones, and automatically check passing license plates against databases," I wrote at the time.
That route isn't becoming any more private, but the leg of our journey through northeastern New Mexico and into Kansas remains relatively unmonitored.
For those who truly want to marinate in the Big Brother experience, EFF also offers Spot the Surveillance, a virtual reality tool demonstrating how to identify spying technologies. According to the summary, "the user is placed in a 360-degree scene in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco, where a young resident is in the middle of a police encounter. By looking up, down, and all around, you must identify a variety of surveillance technologies in the environment, including a body-worn camera, automated license plate readers, a drone, a mobile biometric device, and pan-tilt-zoom cameras."
No, thanks. I'm paranoid enough as it is.
We Can All Watch the Watchmen
For anybody concerned about privacy and surveillance, and interested in how the use of such technologies is implemented and regulated, EFF's Street Level Surveillance hub offers a handy resource. Instead of wondering just what biometric surveillance is, you can quickly look it up and be simultaneously informed and creeped out by discovering that it "encompasses a collection of methods for tracking individuals using physical or biological characteristics, ranging from fingerprint and DNA collection to gait recognition and heartbeat tracking."
Biometric surveillance is an evolving field and not yet widely implemented as such, though various technologies under the very broad heading (it includes tattoo recognition) are certainly gaining ground. But it's closely related to face recognition, which is all over the place.
It's all just a little bit spooky. But so long as the snoops are watching us—and they are—it's only fair that we return the favor by keeping an eye on them, too.
Cameras aren’t just monitoring us in public—now they’re actually yelling at us.
Last week, there were people walking to a used bookstore during their lunch break, a startling voice yelled at them. The voice was not human but, like Siri and many other digital assistants, it approximated a female voice and a “friendly” tone. “Hi!” it called out. “All of you are being recorded!”
The culprit was a large outdoor speaker attached to a security camera, both affixed beneath the cornice of a sleek, freshly opened sushi joint on Milwaukee Avenue, the main drag of Chicago’s trendy Logan Square neighborhood. The voice was scary. It came from above—a place voices on the street don’t usually come from. It (implicitly) threatened them. they did nothing wrong, and yet there they were, walking in public, only to find their mere presence equated with the potential to do harm.
It’s a high-traffic area, so they were far from the device’s only perceived threat. In fact, because it uses an indiscriminate motion sensor, the camera treats everyone who walks by the restaurant as a potential ne’er-do-well and automatically yells the same thing at them—a dog afraid of its shadow. This was not the first time one has experienced this kind of rude intrusion. During this past Christmas season, they went to a large Target to buy wrapping paper. Blaring from speakers across a massive parking lot, a similar message: “For your safety, you are being recorded.” Both this and the restaurant message are passive-aggressive. One delivers the notice with phony, feminized friendliness; the other, in an equally gendered role, uses a male voice to make a false and patronizing claim of safety. Both imply that the act of being in public space is inherently dangerous, and each, in their own way, suggests that we could be—the source of the danger.
The panoptic bugbear known as the home surveillance camera is nothing new. However, for many years, the products were expensive due to the cost of video, and later the cost of digital storage. The advent of cloud computing meant such costs were no longer an issue, and the now-ubiquitous doorbell camera (and its many offshoots) was born. Having the power to surveil one’s property even in absentia is an alluring prospect. It’s also a predictable response to decades of “dangerous crime” rhetoric, the omnipresent American fear of hooliganism and property damage, and the corresponding cultural fantasy of vigilante justice.
Obviously, there are many downsides to surveilling one’s neighbors. Ring security cameras in particular have come under fire in recent years because of their “neighbors” feature—a kind of NextDoor for Ring users that allows them to send videos from their devices directly to law enforcement, which, as Wired notes in its edict “Why We Do Not Recommend Ring Cameras,” incentivizes increased racial profiling. To many in the United States, this may be a feature, not a bug. Regardless, the products remain popular despite the fact that there’s no evidence that using such a device increases public safety outcomes.
Many of the houses one's neighborhood, especially those built in the last five years, have these cameras. But the audio addition is not something most haven't encountered until recently. In a world where everything we do is surveilled—whether that’s through cookies on the Internet, location tracking on our smart devices, or our own self-surveillance and scrutiny of others via social media—it is easy to forget that we are always being watched. The talking camera phenomenon reminds us. Loudly. It is an escalation of an already omnipresent aggression. It intrudes into our consciousness, induces paranoia and anger, makes us feel unwelcome in public life, furthers the idea that one’s private property extends beyond the stoop, and suggests that by owning property one has earned the right to curtail the rights of others. This is a net negative for society. When we shared the screaming camera incident on Twitter, the horror stories poured in: multiple cameras on every block creating a chorus of shrieks, cameras near trailheads “greeting” returning runners, and oversensitive sensors that turn quiet environments into squawking, aggressive ones.
Paradoxically, it is the public nature of the urban environment that incentivizes the use and proliferation of such a device. Urban property owners have fewer avenues than suburbanites do when it comes to turning their parcels into hostile sites of exclusion. Suburbs famously exclude by way of high fences, gated communities, neighborhood watch programs, homeowner associations, private police, and more. On an urban street, there is seldom a gated community, and buildings are rarely further than 50 feet away from the sidewalk. While urban realms do have ways to alienate—invasive highways, transit deserts, increased policing—at the end of the day it is not illegal for us or for anyone else to walk on the streets of Chicago. (Whether one’s right to walk those streets is respected is another, complicated story, but to make changes on that front, first we have to believe in the right itself.)
The talking camera is modeled on the policeman loitering on the street. Both take whatever personal insecurity we might feel as we navigate a neighborhood—that perhaps we are out of place or unwanted, anxieties that compound when adding factors like race and gender—and rub our faces in it. They target our dignity, making our right to be out and about in our city feel unearned.
One of the most beautiful, humanistic things about cities is that on the street one always has the potential to come in contact with both the everyday and the unexpected. By being in public, one joins the great human milieu of people trying to get wherever they’re going. This, of course, entails some vulnerability and requires a basic human trust, something that devices like the Ring camera actively erode. This was true of the silent version but the loud, threatening iteration is far worse. It’s one thing to have a misanthropic, nosy neighbor; it’s another to have one that harasses you for existing. Amid all the fraught discourse around NIMBYism, a device that yells “Not in my backyard!” at you is a little too on the nose.
Whatever you want to call it—suburban creep, techno-feudalism, NIMBYism—the yelling camera has no place in cities. (Neither, of us would argue, does the silent one.) For all of the above reasons, they should be banned. If you remain unconvinced that they undermine civic decency, you can surely oppose a device that shouts at every person on a street where hundreds of people walk each day on a purely sensory basis as being intolerable noise pollution. Cities are public spaces, even if we increasingly behave otherwise.
We seem to have less and less tolerance for other people. The cameras are a symptom of this trend toward misanthropy, this same privatization of everything, this inability to treat the public with good faith. These devices escalate this tendency because they presuppose that everyone is undesirable. Individual building owners are empowered to take matters into their own hands: They’re allowed, under the guise of private property, to intimidate passersby. If that doesn’t say enough about what kind of cities we’re building and living in, one doesn't know what does.
Also:
The Cops Are Watching You
Also:
Urban Surveillance Is More Menacing Than Ever