Look up your local cops on the EFF's Atlas of Surveillance
Look up your local cops on the EFF's Atlas of Surveillance Rob Beschizza 7:36 pm Mon Jul 27, 2026 A Flock camera. Photographers / Shutterstock The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of police technology in use across the United States: enter your city, county, state or the name of a local law enforcement agency, and it will tell you what's in their toybox. Pittsburgh, for example, has the expensive and mostly useless Shotspotter system and dozens of Flock cameras, ostensibly for license-plate tracking but functionally a general-purpose (and widely-abused) surveillance network.
- ▪Look up your local cops on the EFF's Atlas of Surveillance Rob Beschizza 7:36 pm Mon Jul 27, 2026 A Flock camera.
- ▪Photographers / Shutterstock The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of police technology in use across the United States: enter your city, county, state or the name of a local law enforcement agency, and it will tell you what's in their to
- ▪Pittsburgh, for example, has the expensive and mostly useless Shotspotter system and dozens of Flock cameras, ostensibly for license-plate tracking but functionally a general-purpose (and widely-abused) surveillance network.
Boing Boing files mainly under tech. We currently carry 289 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/27/look-up-your-local-cops-on-the-effs-atlas-of-surveillance.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:36:58 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T03:23:24.760Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T03:23:24.760Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | lp13_AgJK2JZ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Look up your local cops on the EFF's Atlas of Surveillance Rob Beschizza 7:36 pm Mon Jul 27, 2026 A Flock camera. Photo: Aaron of L.A. Photographers / Shutterstock The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of police technology in use across the United States: enter your city, county, state or the name of a local law enforcement agency, and it will tell you what's in their toybox. Pittsburgh, for example, has the expensive and mostly useless Shotspotter system and dozens of Flock cameras, ostensibly for license-plate tracking but functionally a general-purpose (and widely-abused) surveillance network. The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of surveillance technologies deployed by law enforcement in communities across the United States.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Boing Boing
