About Beyond the Lens
Surveillance technology in the United States is both abundant and non-transparent. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Brookings Institute perform important work on these issues by researching and investigating surveillance technologies, as well as offering the broader context and history of racial, class-based, religious and politically-motivated surveillance in the United States.
The open source database Atlas of Surveillance (AoS), created by EFF in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, seeks to archive police surveillance technologies in jurisdictions throughout the U.S. This database is the largest, most comprehensive publicly available dataset on all known law enforcement surveillance technologies in the United States. Therefore, the AoS serves the crucial purpose of trying to track this evolving field. Increased public awareness and understanding of the use of law enforcement surveillance is imperative because, as we will demonstrate in our findings on the technologies and vendors, most of these technologies 1) are publicly funded yet provided by the private sector, 2) implicate constitutional and state-based rights, 3) contribute to the further targeting of activists, people of color, immigrants, and low-income people, and 4) often do not have the intended effect of reducing crime and keeping communities safe.
The AoS logs contracts for surveillance technologies being given and unique instances of surveillance technologies being utilized. The database contains the following categories: city, county, state, agency, type of law enforcement agency, type of jurisdiction, summary of the case, vendor of the technology, and the links, dates, and summaries of the sources used to gather this information. We used python, excel and qualitative methods. This allowed us to analyze the AoS database and gather information, context and statistics on the technologies themselves, the vendors providing the information, and how these technologies and vendors are broken down within states and regions. Our main goal is to humanize the data by zooming into the technologies and the corresponding vendors, which should hopefully contribute to a broader project of public awareness and interest in these issues.