University of Nevada, Reno, journalism students team on surveillance database
A new project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for user privacy, free speech, and consumer rights, has university students helping to build a database of the surveillance technologies used around the country.
Students at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, helped to build the so-called Atlas of Surveillance, which tracks technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, license plate readers and facial recognition systems. Searching by location, users can find entries for the various systems implemented where they live. A search for “Los Angeles,” for instance, yields 31 entries, such as the Axon camera registry program led by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department or the video analytics platform operated by Los Angeles County’s transportation authority.
Dave Maass, the EFF’s investigations director, told an ABC affiliate that the database is intended to be useful for journalists, state lawmakers and academic researchers.
By involving students, the project is also hoped to teach budding journalists how to examine public policy and better understand law enforcement.
“Through a combination of crowdsourcing, data journalism and public records reporting, we are creating the largest-ever repository of information on which law enforcement agencies are using what surveillance technologies,” the atlas’s about page reads. So far, the project includes some 15,000 data points from 6,000 jurisdictions.
