The Watchers, Watched

How to use this room

1. Pick a system below and read what it is, in plain words.
2. Run the find-it-near-you steps for your own address. Most take under twenty minutes.
3. Read what the record so far shows, and what the official evaluations found.
4. Read what each system cannot show you — the blind spots are load-bearing.
5. If you want it changed, the levers are at the bottom: the agenda, the comment, the records request, the vote.

Find it near you

1. Open DeFlock (deflock.me), a crowd-sourced map of reported ALPR camera locations, and search your area. It is volunteer-built and incomplete — treat it as a starting point, never as the full picture.
2. Search the Atlas of Surveillance (atlasofsurveillance.org), the Electronic Frontier Foundation's database of which technologies which agencies use, by your county and city.
3. Search your city or village council's agenda portal (usually Legistar, BoardDocs or Granicus) for 'Flock', 'ALPR' and 'license plate'. The contract, the renewal and the camera count usually passed through a public meeting.
4. File a records request for the contract, the camera locations and the data-sharing list. In Illinois, FOIA is 5 ILCS 140 and the body has 5 business days to respond. Federally, it is 5 U.S.C. § 552 and 20 business days. The toolkit's FOIA lever has the full procedure and a template.
5. Check whether your police department publishes a Flock transparency page — some agencies turn on a public page listing their cameras, searches and sharing. Its absence is itself an answer you can bring to a council meeting.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• A federal Fourth Amendment lawsuit against the City of Norfolk, Virginia over its Flock camera network, brought by the Institute for Justice on behalf of local drivers (filed 2024, Eastern District of Virginia). Filed, not decided — read the complaint and the docket, not a summary.

  Source: ij.org · last verified 2026-08-11

• Several municipalities have voted not to renew or to remove ALPR networks after public campaigns — Austin, Texas let its program lapse in 2025 after a council fight. Your own council's minutes are the record that matters for your town.

  Source: www.austintexas.gov · last verified 2026-08-11

• Colorado's supreme court held in People v. Tafoya (2021) that months of continuous pole-camera surveillance of a home was a search requiring a warrant. Massachusetts' highest court reasoned about ALPR networks in Commonwealth v. McCarthy (2020): enough cameras, aggregated, can cross the constitutional line.

  Source: www.courts.state.co.us · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• Fourth Amendment — freedom from unreasonable search. Carpenter v. United States (2018) held that the government's acquisition of a week of cell-site location history was a search: a record of the whole of a person's movements is different in kind from one observation. An always-on plate network raises the same aggregation question, and the courts are working through it now.

  Authority: Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018) · read it

• First Amendment — association and assembly. A record of every car at every protest, clinic, union hall and church is a record of association. The Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department (2021), held Baltimore's aerial surveillance program unconstitutional on aggregation reasoning that speaks directly to this.

  Authority: Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Dept., 2 F.4th 330 (4th Cir. 2021) (en banc) · read it

Find it near you

1. Search your city's council agenda portal and budget documents for 'ShotSpotter' or 'SoundThinking' — the subscription renewals pass through public votes.
2. Search the Atlas of Surveillance for your city's entry under gunshot detection.
3. File a records request for the contract and coverage-area maps. Some cities have refused to release exact sensor locations; the refusal, and its claimed exemption, is itself a public record you can appeal. In Illinois, the Public Access Counselor in the Attorney General's office reviews FOIA denials — free.
4. Read your city's own oversight reports. If your city has an inspector general, search their published reports for the system by name.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• Chicago's contract termination and September 2024 decommissioning followed years of documented community campaigns, the OIG evaluation, and litigation over an arrest that began with an alert. The court filings and the OIG report are the records; read them rather than any side's summary — including ours.

  Source: igchicago.org · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• Due process — evidence quality at real stakes. When a machine classification helps send armed officers to a corner or becomes evidence in a case, the classification's error rate and human review process become due-process questions. Court filings in documented cases have contested exactly this. The library's automated-decisions volume teaches the two questions to ask: what data, what rule.

  Authority: Documented litigation records; see also the education library's the-software-decided volume · read it

• Equal protection — where the sensors go. Sensor coverage maps are deployment decisions about which neighborhoods live under continuous listening. Whether a given city's map raises an equal-protection problem is a legal question for a lawyer with the map in hand — the point here is that the map is requestable.

  Authority: U.S. Const. amend. XIV; the coverage map via your state's public records act · read it

Find it near you

1. Search the Atlas of Surveillance for your agencies under face recognition.
2. Read the federal audit record: the Government Accountability Office has published repeated audits of which federal agencies use facial recognition and how — search gao.gov for 'facial recognition'. Federal use touches local life through task forces and data sharing.
3. File a records request asking your police department: which facial-recognition services it has used, under what policy, with what human-review requirement. Ask for the policy document by name.
4. In Illinois: the Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14) requires written consent before a private company collects your face geometry, and it gives you — personally — the right to sue. If a private system scanned your face in Illinois without consent, that is not just a policy argument; it is a claim. A lawyer, not this page, can tell you if you have one.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• ACLU v. Clearview AI settled in 2022 in Cook County, Illinois, under BIPA: Clearview accepted a nationwide permanent ban on selling its database to most private entities. A documented settlement, on the court record.

  Source: www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai · last verified 2026-08-11

• Documented cases in which a facial-recognition match preceded the arrest of the wrong person are on the public record in multiple states, reported in court filings and in journalism that names the departments. Read the filings. This page names the pattern and not the individuals, because the individuals are private people who were wronged.

  Source: www.aclu.org · last verified 2026-08-11

• Several cities have banned government facial-recognition use by ordinance, and some later revisited those bans — both directions are documented in municipal records. Your city's code is searchable.

  Source: atlasofsurveillance.org · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• Biometric privacy — an Illinois statutory right. BIPA (740 ILCS 14) is the strongest biometric privacy law in the country and it is ours: written consent before collection, disclosure of retention, and a private right of action with per-violation damages. The Illinois Supreme Court has held claims accrue per scan. For Outpost's Illinois readers this is the single most usable rights instrument on this page.

  Authority: 740 ILCS 14 (Biometric Information Privacy Act, 2008) · read it

• Due process — arrest on a machine match. An arrest that begins and ends with an algorithmic match, without independent investigation, is the documented failure mode in the wrongful-arrest cases. What data, what rule, what human checked it — the same three questions as every automated decision.

  Authority: Documented litigation records; the education library's the-software-decided volume · read it

Find it near you

1. Check the ACLU's stingray-tracking page, which maps which state and local agencies are documented as owning cell-site simulators.
2. File a records request for purchase records, grant applications (these were often bought with federal grants, which leave a paper trail), and any non-disclosure agreement with the vendor or the FBI.
3. In Illinois: the Citizen Privacy Protection Act (725 ILCS 137, 2016) requires a court order before use and limits what may be collected. Ask your department, in writing, for its policy under that act.
4. Federally: the Department of Justice's September 2015 policy requires a warrant for federal use in most cases — the policy document is public. Ask whether your local agency follows it.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• Years of documented litigation forced the NDAs and use records into the open; courts have suppressed evidence obtained by unwarranted simulator use in documented cases. The Illinois statute and the federal warrant policies are themselves the campaign's documented outcome.

  Source: www.justice.gov · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• Fourth Amendment — location tracking. Carpenter's aggregation reasoning applies with extra force to a device that actively collects location rather than requesting stored records. The DOJ's own warrant policy concedes the point for federal use.

  Authority: Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); DOJ Cell-Site Simulator Policy (Sept. 2015) · read it

• Illinois statutory protection. 725 ILCS 137 requires a court order, limits collection to the target, and requires deletion of bystander data. If you are in Illinois, your department is bound by it — and its compliance records are requestable.

  Authority: 725 ILCS 137 (Citizen Privacy Protection Act, 2016) · read it

Find it near you

1. Search your department's site and council agendas for 'drone', 'UAS' or 'DFR' — programs and purchases pass through public budgets.
2. Drone operations require Federal Aviation Administration authorization; ask your department, by records request, for its FAA authorizations and its flight logs. Both exist if a program exists.
3. In Illinois: the Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act (725 ILCS 167) sets when police may use drones and what requires a warrant, and it was amended in 2023 to permit use at special events with restrictions. Read the act — it is short — and ask your department for its policy under it.
4. Ask whether flight logs and footage-retention schedules are published. Some departments publish flight dashboards; the absence of one is a council question.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• Illinois' drone statute is itself the documented outcome of a privacy campaign, and its 2023 amendment after the Highland Park attack was a documented public fight over exactly where the line sits — the legislative history is public.

  Source: www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3520 · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• Fourth Amendment — aerial observation. The older aerial-observation cases predate persistent, cheap, recording flight, and Beautiful Struggle shows courts treating persistence as the constitutional variable. A standing program that records routes over a city is a different thing from one flight over one scene.

  Authority: Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Dept., 2 F.4th 330 (4th Cir. 2021) (en banc) · read it

• Illinois statutory limits. 725 ILCS 167 requires warrants for drone surveillance with enumerated exceptions and requires destruction of information about people who are not targets. The exceptions list is exactly what to read.

  Authority: 725 ILCS 167 (Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act) · read it

Find it near you

1. Ask, by records request, whether your department uses any software that scores places or people for crime risk, naming 'predictive', 'risk score', 'hot spot' and the vendor names above.
2. Search your city's inspector general and auditor reports — the two most consequential documents in this field are official evaluations (see below), and your city may have one.
3. Search council agendas for the vendor names; the subscriptions pass through budgets.
4. If your state has a pretrial or sentencing risk-assessment tool, that is this system wearing court clothes — the toolkit's court lever explains how to find your state's tool and its validation studies.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• The documented campaigns here largely succeeded and their record is the evaluations themselves plus the decommissioning documents — Chicago's OIG advisory and LA's budget decision. Both are public records.

  Source: igchicago.org · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• Due process — being scored without notice or appeal. A person on a risk list usually cannot see the list, the data, or the rule, and has no route to contest any of them — the exact inversion of the automated-decision rights the library teaches. The documented SSL record shows what that looks like at scale.

  Authority: The RAND evaluation and Chicago OIG records; the education library's the-software-decided volume · read it

• Equal protection — feedback loops. A system trained on past enforcement sends patrols where enforcement was, which generates the data that justifies returning. The feedback-loop critique is documented in the academic literature and was central to the documented municipal fights.

  Authority: Published evaluations and municipal records cited above · read it

Find it near you

1. Find your state's center on DHS's published national fusion center list.
2. File a records request with your state police for the center's privacy policy — federal guidance requires each center to have one, and it is a public document.
3. Ask your local department, by records request, what it submits to and receives from the center — suspicious-activity-report criteria are documented in federal standards.
4. Read the documented congressional oversight: the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a bipartisan report on fusion centers in October 2012 — findings about output quality and civil-liberties incidents, on the congressional record. Whether it still describes your center is a records request away.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• Documented incidents in the congressional record and in released center documents — including reporting on lawful political activity — drove the privacy-policy requirements that now exist. The record is the report itself.

  Source: www.hsgac.senate.gov · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• First Amendment — reporting on lawful activity. The documented failure mode in the congressional record is suspicious-activity reporting that swept in lawful political and religious activity. The federal standards were revised in response; whether practice matches them is what the records levers are for.

  Authority: Senate PSI, Federal Support for and Involvement in State and Local Fusion Centers (Oct. 2012) · read it

Find it near you

1. Search USAspending.gov for your agencies' contracts with the broker names above — the subscription line items are public.
2. Read the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's declassified report on Commercially Available Information (released June 2023) — the intelligence community's own senior advisors describing the scale and the gap. Free, public, and the single most important document on this topic.
3. Read the Federal Trade Commission's enforcement docket: its 2024 orders against location brokers X-Mode Social and InMarket banned specific sales of sensitive location data. The orders name what was being sold — clinics, churches, shelters — as documented findings.
4. File a records request with your state and local agencies for data-broker subscriptions by the vendor names.

Opposition and litigation, on the record

• FTC v. X-Mode and FTC v. InMarket (2024 consent orders) are documented federal enforcement against the supply side. Proposed federal legislation on warrantless data purchases has passed one chamber in documented votes; its current status is a moving fact — read it from congress.gov.

  Source: www.ftc.gov · last verified 2026-08-11

Rights this touches

• Fourth Amendment — the purchase question. Carpenter held that acquiring stored location history is a search. Whether buying the same records on the open market is different is the live question the ODNI report itself flags. No court has settled it; that unsettledness is the honest state.

  Authority: Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); ODNI CAI Report (2023) · read it

Pull the contracts yourself

1. Open USAspending.gov and search recipients for 'Palantir Technologies'. Filter by awarding agency to see who pays, for what category, since when. Award descriptions and amounts are on each record.
2. Open SEC EDGAR, find the latest 10-K under CIK 0001321655, and read two sections: the business description and the government-revenue concentration in the risk factors. This is the company describing itself under securities law.
3. For any specific federal contract, FPDS.gov holds the underlying award records; for the documents themselves, a federal FOIA request to the awarding agency (5 U.S.C. § 552, 20 business days) reaches the contract text, subject to redaction — and the redaction categories are appealable.
4. For the UK health platform, NHS England publishes the award and its documentation; UK freedom-of-information requests run under their own act.

Opposition, on the record

• Documented public campaigns have opposed specific contracts — most prominently the campaign against ICE-related work under the name No Tech for ICE (organized by Mijente), and documented UK campaigns against the NHS platform award. These are documented campaigns with their own published materials. A campaign is a documented fact about public opposition; it is not a court finding about the company, and this page holds that line in both directions.

  Source: notechforice.com · last verified 2026-08-11

• Documented shareholder and academic scrutiny exists in the public record — proposals, open letters, and university petitions — findable in proxy records and news archives. Same standard: documented opposition, not adjudicated wrongdoing.

  Source: www.sec.gov · last verified 2026-08-11

Find it near you

1. Search your county board and municipal agendas for 'data center' — the zoning, the abatement and the utility agreement each pass through a public meeting before ground breaks.
2. Search your utility commission's dockets (Illinois: icc.illinois.gov) for filings that name data-center load — interconnection requests and rate cases are public.
3. File a records request for the water-service agreement with any named facility; where the body claims a trade-secret exemption, the claim is appealable, and in Illinois the Public Access Counselor reviews it for free.
4. Public-comment windows on zoning and permits are the resident's standing lever — the toolkit's comment lever has the full procedure.

Where plans surface first

1. Council and county agendas (Legistar, BoardDocs, Granicus portals): search 'Flock', 'ALPR', 'ShotSpotter', 'drone', 'facial recognition', 'data center' — contracts and renewals are agenda items before they are anything else.
2. Procurement portals: SAM.gov federally, your state's bid board, your city's procurement page. Requests for proposals name the technology before a vendor is chosen — the earliest public moment.
3. Budget documents: subscription lines recur annually; a new line is a new system.
4. Vendor press pages announce customer wins, often before local coverage notices.
5. Contract end dates — pullable by records request — are the calendar of renewal votes, which are the recurring moments a community can actually decide.