Reporters, community advocates, EFF, and others have used public records laws to reveal and counteract abuse, misuse, and fraudulent narratives around how law enforcement agencies across the country use and share data collected by automated license plate readers (ALPRs). EFF is alarmed by recent laws in several states that have blocked public access to data collected by ALPRs, including, in some cases, information derived from ALPR data. We do not support pending bills in Arizona and Connecticut that would block the public oversight capabilities that ALPR information offers.

Every state has laws granting members of the public the right to obtain records from state and local governments. These are often called “freedom of information acts” (FOIAs) or “public records acts” (PRAs). They are a powerful check by the people on their government, and EFF frequently advocates for robust public access and uses the laws to scrutinize government surveillance. 

But lawmakers across the country, often in response to public scrutiny of police ALPRs, are introducing or enacting measures aimed at excluding broad swaths of ALPR information from disclosure under these public records laws. This could include whole categories of important information: general information about the extent of law enforcement use; details on ALPR sharing across policing agencies; data on the number of license plate scans conducted, where they happened, and how many “hits” for license plates of interest actually occur; analyses on how many false matches or other errors occur; and images taken of individuals’ own vehicles. 

No thanks. Public records and public scrutiny of ALPR programs have shown that people are harmed by these systems and that retained ALPR data violates people’s privacy. In this moment, lawmakers should not be completely cutting off access to public records that document the abuses perpetuated by ALPRs. 

Transparency with privacy

To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about wholesale public disclosure of raw ALPR data. After all, many of the harms people experience from these systems are based on the government’s collection, retention, and use of this information. Public transparency rights should not exacerbate the privacy harms suffered by people subjected to ALPR surveillance. But many current proposals do not address legitimate privacy concerns in a measured way, much less seek to harmonize people’s privacy with the public’s right to know.

There is a better path to balancing privacy and transparency rights than outright bans or total disclosure. 

Any legislative proposal concerning public access to ALPR data must start with this reality: ALPR data is deeply revealing about where a person goes, and thus about what they are doing and who they are doing it with. That’s a reason why EFF opposes ALPRs. It is dangerous that the police have so much of our ALPR information. Even worse for our privacy would be for police to disclose our ALPR information to our bosses, political opponents, and ex-friends. Or to surveillance-oriented corporations that would use our ALPR information to send us targeted ads, or monetize it by selling it to the highest bidder.

On the other hand, EFF’s firsthand experience using public records from ALPR systems demonstrates the strong accountability value of public access to many kinds of ALPR data, including information like data-sharing reports and network audits. For example, in our “Data Driven” series, we used ALPR data-sharing and hit ratio reports to investigate the extent of ALPR data sharing between police departments and to analyze the number of ALPR scans that are ultimately associated with a crime-related vehicle. We have also identified racist uses of ALPR systems, ALPR surveillance of protestors, and ALPR tracking of a person who sought an abortion. Across the country, municipalities have been shutting down their contracts for ALPR use, often citing concerns with data sharing with federal and immigration agents. 

These records are not just informational—they are leverage. Communities, journalists, and local officials have used ALPR disclosures to block new deployments, refuse contract renewals, and terminate existing agreements with surveillance vendors whose practices proved too dangerous to continue. Without this evidentiary record, it is far harder for cities to exercise their procurement power to say no.

It is not always easy to harmonize transparency and privacy when one person wishes to use a public records law to obtain government records that reveal people’s personal information. The best approach is for public records laws to contain a privacy exemption that requires balancing, on a case-by-case basis, of the transparency benefits versus the privacy costs of disclosure. Many do. These provisions of public records laws already accommodate similar concerns about disclosing personal information of private individuals whose information the government may have collected, government employee’s private data, and other personal information. 

The balancing provisions in these laws are often flexible and allow for nuance. For example, if a government record contains a mix of information that does not reveal people’s private information and some that does, agencies and courts can disclose the non-private information while withholding the truly private information. This is often accomplished with blacking out, or redacting, the private information.

Applying this privacy-and-transparency balancing to ALPR records, it will often be appropriate for the government to disclose some information and withhold other information. Everybody should generally have access to records showing their own movements and other information captured by ALPRs, but the privacy protections in public records laws should foreclose a single person’s ability to get a copy of similar records about everyone else. And even with accessing your own data, there are complications with shared vehicles that should be considered when balancing privacy and transparency.

An example of where it may be appropriate to release unredacted data and images would be vehicles engaged in non-sensitive government business. For example, a member of the public might use ALPR scans of garbage trucks to identify gaps in service, which would not reveal private information. On other hand, it would be inappropriate to release the scans of a government social worker visiting their clients. 

Public records laws should allow a requester to obtain some ALPR information about government surveillance of everyone else, in a manner that accommodates the public transparency interest in disclosure and people’s privacy interests. For example, the best public records laws would disclose the times and places that plate data was collected, but not plate data itself. This can be done, for example, by an agency or court finding that disclosing aggregated and/or deidentified ALPR data protects the privacy or other interests of individuals captured within the data. The best laws recognize that aggregation or de-identification of databases are redactions in service of individual privacy (which responding agencies must do), and are not creating new public records (which responding agencies sometimes need not do). 

Likewise, in a government audit log of police searches of stored ALPR data, it will often be appropriate to disclose an officer’s investigative purposes to conduct a search, and the officer’s search terms – but not the search term if it is a license plate number. Many people do not want the world to know that they are under police investigation, and many public records laws generally limit the disclosure of such sensitive facts because of the reputational and privacy harm inherent in that disclosure.

Aggregate ALPR information about, for example, the amount of data collected and error rates can have important transparency value and impact government policy. Requiring the public release of that kind of data contributes to informed public discussion of how our policing agencies do their jobs. This kind of information has been used to study, critique, and provide oversight of ALPR use.

Thus, the wholesale exemption of ALPR information from disclosure under state public records laws would stymie the public’s ability to monitor how their government is using powerful and controversial surveillance technology. EFF cannot support such laws.

Blocking transparency

In Connecticut, SB 4 is a pending bill that would exclude, from that state’s public records law, information “gathered by” an ALPR or “created through an analysis of the information gathered by” an ALPR. This could ultimately harm individual civilians, who would have less ability to protect themselves from law enforcement that indiscriminately collect vehicle information. Other provisions of this bill would limit government use of ALPRs, and regulate data brokers.

In Arizona, SB 1111 would restrict public access to ALPR data “collected by” an ALPR. The bill would even make it a felony to access or use data from an ALPR (or disseminate it) in violation of this article, which apparently might apply to a member of the public who obtained ALPR data with a public records request. The bill’s author claims it adds “guardrails” for ALPR use.

Earlier this year, Washington state enacted a law that will exempt data “collected by” ALPRs from the state’s public records law. While “bona fide research” will still be a way for some people to obtain ALPR data, this may not include journalists and activists who analyze aggregate data to identify policy flaws. Notably, Washington courts found last year that information generated by ALPR, including images of an individual’s own vehicle, are public records; this new legislation will override that decision, blocking the ability for people to see what photos police have taken of their own vehicles. Other provisions of this new law will limit government use of ALPRs.

A year ago, Illinois’ HB 3339 ended use of that state’s public records law to obtain ALPR information used and collected by the Illinois State Police (ISP), including both information “gathered by an ALPR” and information “created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR.” This Illinois language for just the ISP is very similar to what is now being considered in Connecticut for all state and local agencies. 

Sadly, the list goes on. Georgia exempted ALPR data (both “captured by or derived from” ALPRs) of any government agency from its open records law. Adding insult to injury, Georgia also made it a misdemeanor to knowingly request, use, or obtain law enforcement’s plate data for any purpose other than law enforcement. Maryland exempted “information gathered by” an ALPR from its public information act. Oklahoma exempted from its open records act the ALPR data “collected, retained or shared” by District Attorneys under that state’s Uninsured Vehicle Enforcement Program.

These laws and bills in seven states are an unwelcome national trend.

Next steps

We urge legislators to reject efforts to amend state public records laws to wholly exempt ALPR information. This would diminish meaningful oversight over these controversial technologies. Public disclosure of some ALPR information is important. 

There is a better approach for states that want to harmonize privacy and transparency in the context of ALPR data: 

1. Open records laws should cover, and not exclude, information collected by ALPRs, and also any public records derived from that information.
2. Open records laws should have a privacy exemption that applies to all records, including information collected or derived from ALPRs. That exemption should require a case-by-case balancing of the transparency benefits and privacy costs of disclosure. These provisions work best when agencies and courts can analyze the context of the particular records, the weight of the privacy interests and public interests at stake, and other specific facts to fashion the best balance between these competing values. 
3. When a document contains both exempt and non-exempt information, open records laws should require disclosure of the latter and withholding of the former. The best public records laws allow agencies to black out, or redact, specific private information while disclosing non-private information in the same records, threading the privacy and transparency needle.
   
4. Finally, in the context of a law enforcement ALPR database (including both data collected by ALPRs and audit logs of police searches of stored ALPR data), the law should permit agencies to disclose aggregated and/or deidentified data, while withholding personally identifiable data. Importantly, the law should recognize that the steps an agency takes to protect individual privacy in ALPR databases should not be construed as creating a new public record. 

FOIA balancing standards are one layer in a larger governance stack, and work best alongside strong guardrails on whether and how governments procure ALPR systems in the first place: public debate over vendor contracts, binding surveillance ordinances, strict data‑retention limits, and clear pathways to end ALPR programs entirely where the risks prove too great.

Recognizing the Worst in Government Transparency 

The Foilies were written by EFF's Beryl Lipton, Dave Maass and Aaron Mackey and MuckRock's  Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Anna Massoglia. Art by Shelby Criswell.

For the last six years, a class of journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, has kicked off each semester by filing their first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The assignment: Request copies of complaints sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about their favorite TV show, a local radio station, or a major broadcast event, such as the Grammys or the Super Bowl halftime show. The students are learning that the federal government and every state have laws establishing the public's right to request and receive public records. It's a bedrock principle of democracy: If a government belongs to the people, so do its documents. 

In the past, the FCC always provided records within a few weeks, if not days. But that changed in September when students requested consumer complaints filed against NPR and PBS stations to see if there was absolutely anything at all to merit defunding public media. Seven months later — crickets. 

Now the students are learning to persevere even when public officials demonstrate an utter disdain for transparency. And The Foilies are here for it. 

Established in 2015, The Foilies are an annual project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock to recognize the agencies, officials and contractors that thwart the public's right to know. We give out these tongue-in-cheek "awards" during Sunshine Week (March 15-21), a collective effort by media and advocacy organizations to highlight the importance of open government.  

This year, we've got a few "winners" whose behavior defies belief. 

But it's not all negative. Those same Reno students are also assigned to file public records requests for restaurant health inspections. This semester, the records started to show up in their inboxes within 20 minutes. 

If every agency followed Northern Nevada Public Health's example, we could sunset this Sunshine Week project. 

Quick links:

• The Love Letters Award - Gov. Greg Abbott
• The Surcharge, Eh? Award - Vancouver, B.C.
• The Shady Screenshot Award - Department of Homeland Security
• The Discardment of Government Efficiency Award - DOGE
• The Secret Eyes in the Sky Award - Chula Vista Police Department, Calif.
• The City of Darkness Award - Richmond, Va.
• The Flock You Awards - Multiple Winners
• The Database Deletion Award - Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, formerly of Opexus

The Love Letters Award - Gov. Greg Abbott 

Last spring, the office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott withheld communications between himself and one of the state’s most powerful business figures, Elon Musk. The office claimed that the communications were exempt from public records law because they would reveal confidential legal and policy discussions, including how the state entices private companies to do business in Texas, or “intimate and embarrassing” information.

The claims were unelaborated boilerplate language based on exemptions in Texas’ public records law. But if you’re wondering what "intimate" and “embarrassing” exchanges Abbott and Elon Musk shared over email, you may be waiting a while. 

Last fall, the Office of the Texas Attorney General ordered Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office to release nearly 1,400 pages of communications between Abbott and Musk. About 1,200 of those pages were fully redacted–just sheets of gray obscuration. The records that were released don’t reveal much more than an invitation to a happy hour or a reminder of the next SpaceX launch.

The Surcharge, Eh? Award - Vancouver, B.C. 

Vancouver residents must now pay twice for public records. Despite taxes already funding the creation and storage of government records, the City Council approved charging people $10 Canadian (about $7.33 in the United States) every time they ask for “non-personal” public records.

Officials claim the fee is necessary to deter misuse and cover some administrative costs. The only people abusing anything, however, are the officials who imposed this tax on the public. The message Vancouver is sending is as crisp as a newly minted $10 note: Secrecy is a higher priority than public accountability.

The Shady Screenshot Award - Department of Homeland Security 

The Department of Homeland Security’s banner year of lawlessness included backsliding on its transparency obligations.

In response to a request from the nonprofit American Oversight, DHS stated that it was no longer automatically archiving text messages sent between officials. The department clarified that it had a new, and much worse, records retention policy. Instead of archiving officials’ text messages as the agency had done before, DHS now asks officials to take screenshots of any text messages conducting government business on their work phones. 

It’s hard to see the change as anything more than a giant middle finger to the public, especially because the Federal Records Act requires agencies to retain all records officials create while conducting their public duties, regardless of format. We won’t hold our breath waiting on DHS officials to dutifully press the volume and power button on their phones to record every text message they send and receive. 

The Discardment of Government Efficiency Award - DOGE 

As the Trump administration took over last year, there was a looming threat over government transparency: the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE. 

Billionaire Elon Musk, soon to be the de facto leader of DOGE, proudly claimed “there should be no need for FOIA requests” and “all government data should be default public for maximum transparency.” What quickly became apparent was there may be no need for FOIA requests, because there may be no FOIA officers to fulfill those requests.

DOGE quickly went to work slashing through the federal government, including seizing control of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Part of the takeover included restricting access to the agency’s FOIA system and firing the employees responsible for fulfilling FOIA requests, according to a letter sent to Bloomberg reporter Jason Leopold. Meanwhile, when CNN filed a FOIA request with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for information about Musk and DOGE's security clearance, they were told: "Good luck with that," because the FOIA officers had been fired. 

DOGE also argued that its own records are exempt from FOIA under the Presidential Records Act, meaning records cannot be accessed until five years after President Donald Trump is out of office. 

While DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore according to the OPM, there remains a lasting dark mark on the state of FOIA and records management. 

The Secret Eyes in the Sky Award - Chula Vista Police Department, Calif.

In 2021, Arturo Castañares at La Prensa San Diego filed a request with the Chula Vista Police Department for copies of videos taken by drones responding to 911 calls as part of the city's "drone as first responder" program. One of the goals was to evaluate the technology’s efficacy and risks to civil liberties. 

The city worked overtime to maintain the secrecy of the footage at the same time officials publicly touted the drones as a revolution in policing. That’s some impressive trust-us-but-don’t-verify chutzpah.

The city argued that every second of every video recorded by its drones was categorically off limits because they were law enforcement investigative records. They even got a trial court to initially buy the argument.

But an appellate court ruled that the investigatory records exemption is more limited, shielding only drone footage that is part of a criminal investigation or evidence of a suspected crime. Footage of wildfires, car wrecks, wild animal sightings and the like are not criminal investigations and must be disclosed.

The California Supreme Court rejected both of CVPD's appeals and a trial court bench slapped the city for inaccurate and incomplete court filings. In the end, the city had to shell out north of $400,000 to its outside lawyers, and then paid Castañares’ lawyers more than $500,000 when he prevailed. 

So what were Chula Vista police hiding? A bunch of routine service calls, such as unverified reports of a vehicle fire and a vehicle collision.

Now, according to La Prensa's reporting, officials are trying to raid a public safety fund created by voters to reimburse the city for the cost of its ill-advised secrecy. 

The City of Darkness Award - Richmond, Va. 

Richmond’s creation of a new FOIA Library may seem like a step toward transparency, but there are questions about the city’s commitment after it left the same officials subject to records requests in charge of curating which records might be released.

Faced with a plan to post all of the city’s eligible public records released under Virginia’s “sunshine” law, the Richmond City Council instead opted to go with the mayor’s alternative proposal. That plan lets the mayor’s administration — the same one that might be the subject of those records — decide what’s worth posting to the library.

Instead of providing access to all public records that the city released under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, the library will only contain a subset that officials believe meet certain criteria, including records that the administration deems "relevant" to city business or that would aid "accountability.” The city cites concerns that "transparency without context" might be too confusing for the average citizen. Forgive us for having more faith in Richmond residents than its leaders do.

The city’s secrecy shenanigans extend beyond the FOIA library.

In an ongoing legal battle, attorneys representing Richmond asked a judge to prohibit former city FOIA officer Connie Clay from filing FOIA requests seeking information about her firing, and sought a gag order to prevent her from talking about the case. Clay alleges she was fired for insisting the city comply with public records law, describing what she calls a “chaotic and mismanaged” and illegal FOIA request process. Rather than agree to a $250,000 settlement, Richmond has spent more than $633,000 in taxpayer funds on legal costs. The trial and the FOIA library launch are both slated for the summer of 2026. 

The Flock You Awards - Multiple Winners

If you live in one of the 5,000 cities where surveillance vendor Flock Safety claims to have established relationships with local cops, you may have noticed the sudden installation of little black cameras on poles by the side of the road or at intersections. These are automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which document every vehicle that passes within view, including the license plate, color, make, model and other distinguishing characteristics. The images are fed to Flock's servers, and the company encourages police to share the images collected locally with law enforcement throughout the country. Each year, law enforcement agencies across the country conduct tens of millions of searches of each other's databases. 

In 2025, journalists and privacy advocates started filing public records requests with agencies to get spreadsheets called a "Network Audit," which shows every search, including who ran it and why. Accessing these audits uncovered abuse of the system including: investigating a woman who received an abortion, targeting immigrants, surveilling protesters, and running racist searches targeting Roma people. 

In response, some cities have terminated their contracts with Flock Safety. Other law enforcement agencies, and Flock itself, have gone a different direction: 

Taunton Police Department, Mass.: The police department told the ACLU of Massachusetts to cough up $1.8 million if the organization wanted its network audit logs–the highest public records fee we documented this year. The civil liberties group filed requests with agencies throughout the state for the audits, and most agencies handed over the spreadsheets for free and with little fanfare. Taunton, however, said it would take 20,000 hours to process the request, at $86.57 an hour. 

Orange County Sheriff's Department, Calif.: The Orange County Sheriff gave a number of reasons it wouldn't release the network audit logs in response to a public records request. The most inane (and misspelled one): It would "disincentive law enforcement from conducting such research." Aren't cops the ones who say if you’re not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide? Well, well, well, how the tables have turned.

Flock Safety: The company responded to criticisms of its ALPR network by sending legal threats aimed at trying to silence its critics. First, the company used a bogus trademark claim to threaten DeFlock.me–a crowdsourced map of ALPR. (EFF represented its creator.) Then it hired a company to try to get the hosts of HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which hosts an interface for searching these network audits, to remove the site from the internet. 

The Database Deletion Award - Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, formerly of Opexus

Brothers Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter are accused of essentially hitting delete on government data, destroying access to information contained in millions of records. 

The government hired a federal contractor called Opexus, which hosts data and provides services to dozens of federal agencies. The company employed the Akhter siblings, though in February 2025, Opexus learned about the brothers’ previous convictions for wire fraud and obstructing justice. Soon after, the company fired the pair. But, according to prosecutors, the two decided to double down on being wildly unsuited for administrative access to government records systems. 

The Akhters immediately turned around and retaliated “by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities," according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The two have been accused of deleting 96 government databases, many of which contained FOIA records and sensitive investigative files. Their indictment alleges that a minute later, one brother queried an artificial intelligence tool for “how to clear system logs following the deletion of databases.” The brothers are also charged with stealing government records and conspiracy to commit computer fraud. 

The Brothers Akhter allegedly took mere moments to destroy untold amounts of information that belonged to the public. Though they could face decades in prison, the public may never know the extent of the damage.

Want more FOIA horror stories? Check out The Foilies archives!

Surveillance technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy private donors have long helped provide local law enforcement “free” access to surveillance equipment that bypasses local oversight. The result is predictable: serious accountability gaps and data pipelines to other entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that expose millions of people to harm.

The cost of “free” surveillance tools — like automated license plate readers (ALPRs), networked cameras, face recognition, drones, and data aggregation and analysis platforms — is measured not in tax dollars, but in the erosion of civil liberties. 

The cost of “free” surveillance tools is measured not in tax dollars, but in the erosion of civil liberties.

The collection and sharing of our data quietly generates detailed records of people’s movements and associations that can be exposed, hacked, or repurposed without their knowledge or consent. Those records weaken sanctuary and First Amendment protections while facilitating the targeting of vulnerable people.   

Cities can and should use their power to reject federal grants, vendor trials, donations from wealthy individuals, or participation in partnerships that facilitate surveillance and experimentation with spy tech. 

If these projects are greenlit, oversight is imperative. Mechanisms like public hearings, competitive bidding, public records transparency, and city council supervision aid to ensure these acquisitions include basic safeguards — like use policies, audits, and consequences for misuse — to protect the public from abuse and from creeping contracts that grow into whole suites of products. 

Clear policies and oversight mechanisms must be in place before using any surveillance tools, free or not, and communities and their elected officials must be at the center of every decision about whether to bring these tools in at all.

Here are some of the most common methods “free” surveillance tech makes its way into communities.

Trials and Pilots

Police departments are regularly offered free access to surveillance tools and software through trials and pilot programs that often aren’t accompanied by appropriate use policies. In many jurisdictions, trials do not trigger the same requirements to go before decision-makers outside the police department. This means the public may have no idea that a pilot program for surveillance technology is happening in their city. 

The public may have no idea that a pilot program for surveillance technology is happening in their city.  

In Denver, Colorado, the police department is running trials of possible unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for a drone-as-first-responder (DFR) program from two competing drone vendors: Flock Safety Aerodome drones (through August 2026) and drones from the company Skydio, partnering with Axon, the multi-billion dollar police technology company behind tools like Tasers and AI-generated police reports. Drones create unique issues given their vantage for capturing private property and unsuspecting civilians, as well as their capacity to make other technologies, like ALPRs, airborne. 

Functional, Even Without Funding 

We’ve seen cities decide not to fund a tool, or run out of funding for it, only to have a company continue providing it in the hope that money will turn up. This happened in Fall River, Massachusetts, where the police department decided not to fund ShotSpotter’s $90,000 annual cost and its frequent false alarms, but continued using the system when the company provided free access. 

 Police technology companies are developing more features and subscription-based models, so what’s “free” today frequently results in taxpayers footing the bill later.

In May 2025, Denver's city council unanimously rejected a $666,000 contract extension for Flock Safety ALPR cameras after weeks of public outcry over mass surveillance data sharing with federal immigration enforcement. But Mayor Mike Johnston’s office allowed the cameras to keep running through a “task force” review, effectively extending the program even after the contract was voted down. In response, the Denver Taskforce to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety and Transforming Our Communities Alliance launched a grassroots campaign demanding the city “turn Flock cameras off now,” a reminder that when surveillance starts as a pilot or time‑limited contract, communities often have to fight not just to block renewals but to shut the systems off.

 Importantly, police technology companies are developing more features and subscription-based models, so what’s “free” today frequently results in taxpayers footing the bill later. 

Gifts from Police Foundations and Wealthy Donors

Police foundations and the wealthy have pushed surveillance-driven agendas in their local communities by donating equipment and making large monetary gifts, another means of acquiring these tools without public oversight or buy-in.

In Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) attempted to use its position as a private entity to circumvent transparency. Following a court challenge from the Atlanta Community Press Collective and Lucy Parsons Labs, a Georgia court determined that the APF must comply with public records laws related to some of its actions and purchases on behalf of law enforcement.
In San Francisco, billionaire Chris Larsen has financially supported a supercharging of the city’s surveillance infrastructure, donating $9.4 million to fund the San Francisco Police Department’s (SFPD) Real-Time Investigation Center, where a menu of surveillance technologies and data come together to surveil the city’s residents. This move comes after the billionaire backed a ballot measure, which passed in March 2025, eroding the city’s surveillance technology law and allowing the SFPD free rein to use new surveillance technologies for a full year without oversight.

Free Tech for Federal Data Pipelines

Federal grants and Department of Homeland Security funding are another way surveillance technology appears free to, only to lock municipalities into long‑term data‑sharing and recurring costs. 

Through the Homeland Security Grant Program, which includes the State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) and the Urban Areas Security (UASI) Initiative, and Department of Justice programs like Byrne JAG, the federal government reimburses states and cities for "homeland security" equipment and software, including including law‑enforcement surveillance tools, analytics platforms, and real‑time crime centers. Grant guidance and vendor marketing materials make clear that these funds can be used for automated license plate readers, integrated video surveillance and analytics systems, and centralized command‑center software—in other words, purchases framed as counterterrorism investments but deployed in everyday policing.

Vendors have learned to design products around this federal money, pitching ALPR networks, camera systems, and analytic platforms as "grant-ready" solutions that can be acquired with little or no upfront local cost. Motorola Solutions, for example, advertises how SHSP and UASI dollars can be used for "law enforcement surveillance equipment" and "video surveillance, warning, and access control" systems. Flock Safety, partnering with Lexipol, a company that writes use policies for law enforcement, offers a "License Plate Readers Grant Assistance Program" that helps police departments identify federal and state grants and tailor their applications to fund ALPR projects. 

Grant assistance programs let police chiefs fast‑track new surveillance: the paperwork is outsourced, the grant eats the upfront cost, and even when there is a formal paper trail, the practical checks from residents, councils, and procurement rules often get watered down or bypassed.

On paper, these systems arrive “for free” through a federal grant; in practice, they lock cities into recurring software, subscription, and data‑hosting fees that quietly turn into permanent budget lines—and a lasting surveillance infrastructure—as soon as police and prosecutors start to rely on them. In Santa Cruz, California, the police department explicitly sought to use a DHS-funded SHSP grant to pay for a new citywide network of Flock ALPR cameras at the city's entrances and exits, with local funds covering additional cameras. In Sumner, Washington, a $50,000 grant was used to cover the entire first year of a Flock system — including installation and maintenance — after which the city is on the hook for roughly $39,000 every year in ongoing fees. The free grant money opens the door, but local governments are left with years of financial, political, and permanent surveillance entanglements they never fully vetted.

The most dangerous cost of this "free" funding is not just budgetary; it is the way it ties local systems into federal data pipelines. Since 9/11, DHS has used these grant streams to build a nationwide network of at least 79–80 state and regional fusion centers that integrate and share data from federal, state, local, tribal, and private partners. Research shows that state fusion centers rely heavily on the DHS Homeland Security Grant Program (especially SHSP and UASI) to "mature their capabilities," with some centers reporting that 100 percent of their annual expenditures are covered by these grants. 

Civil rights investigations have documented how this funding architecture creates a backdoor channel for ICE and other federal agencies to access local surveillance data for their own purposes. A recent report by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) describes ICE agents using a Philadelphia‑area fusion center to query the city’s ALPR network to track undocumented drivers in a self‑described sanctuary city.

Ultimately, federal grants follow the same script as trials and foundation gifts: what looks “free” ends up costing communities their data, their sanctuary protections, and their power over how local surveillance is used.

Protecting Yourself Against “Free” Technology

The most important protection against "free" surveillance technology is to reject it outright. Cities do not have to accept federal grants, vendor trials, or philanthropic donations. Saying no to "free" tech is not just a policy choice; it is a political power that local governments possess and can exercise. Communities and their elected officials can and should refuse surveillance systems that arrive through federal grants, vendor pilots, or private donations, regardless of how attractive the initial price tag appears. 

For those cities that have already accepted surveillance technology, the imperative is equally clear: shut it down. When a community has rejected use of a spying tool, the capabilities, equipment, and data collected from that tool should be shut off immediately. Full stop.

And for any surveillance technology that remains in operation, even temporarily, there must be clear rules: when and how equipment is used, how that data is retained and shared, who owns data and how companies can access and use it, transparency requirements, and consequences for any misuse and abuse. 

“Free” surveillance technology is never free. Someone profits or gains power from it. Police technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy donors do not offer these systems out of generosity; they offer them because surveillance serves their interests, not ours. That is the real cost of “free” surveillance.

Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public.

In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.

The ad for Ring’s “Search Party” feature highlighted the doorbell camera’s ability to scan footage across Ring devices in a neighborhood, using AI analysis to identify potential canine matches among the many personal devices within the network. 

Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like "Familiar Faces,” which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces. It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches. 

Ring’s “Familiar Faces” feature could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone. Unfortunately, not all states have similar privacy protections for their residents. 

Ring has a history of privacy violations, enabling surveillance of innocents and protestors, and close collaboration with law enforcement, and EFF has spent years reporting on its many privacy problems.

The cameras, which many people buy and install to identify potential porch pirates or get a look at anyone that might be on their doorstep, feature microphones that have been found to capture audio from the street. In 2023, Ring settled with the Federal Trade Commission over the extensive access it gave employees to personal customer footage. At that time, just three years ago, the FTC wrote: “As a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes.”

The company has made law enforcement access a regular part of its business. As early as 2016, the company was courting police departments through free giveaways. The company provided law enforcement warrantless access to people’s footage, a practice they claimed to cut off in 2024. Not long after, though, the company established partnerships with major police companies Axon and Flock Safety to facilitate the integration of Ring cameras into police intelligence networks. The partnership allows law enforcement to again request Ring footage directly from users. This supplements the already wide-ranging apparatus of data and surveillance feeds now available to law enforcement. 

This feature is turned on by default, meaning that Ring owners need to go into the controls to change it. According to Amazon Ring’s instructions, this is how to disable the “search party” feature: 

1. Open the Ring app to the main dashboard.
2. Tap the menu (☰).
3. Tap Control Center.
4. Select Search Party.
5. Tap Disable Search for Lost Pets. Tap the blue Pet icon next to "Search for Lost Pets" to turn the feature off for each camera. (You also have the option to "Disable Natural Hazards (Fire Watch)" and the option to tap the blue Flame icon next to Natural Hazards (Fire Watch) to turn the feature on or off for each camera.)

The addition of AI-driven biometric identification is the latest entry in the company’s history of profiting off of public safety worries and disregard for individual privacy, one that turbocharges the extreme dangers of allowing this to carry on. People need to reject this kind of disingenuous framing and recognize the potential end result: a scary overreach of the surveillance state designed to catch us all in its net.

The Baton Rouge Police Department announced this week that it will begin using a drone designed by military equipment manufacturer Lockheed Martin and Edge Autonomy, making it one of the first local police departments to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a history of primary use in foreign war zones. Baton Rouge is now one of the first local police departments in the United States to deploy an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with such extensive surveillance capabilities — a dangerous escalation in the militarization of local law enforcement.

This is a troubling development in an already long history of local law enforcement acquiring and utilizing military-grade surveillance equipment. It should be a cautionary tale that prods  communities across the country to be proactive in ensuring that drones can only be acquired and used in ways that are well-documented, transparent, and subject to public feedback. 

Baton Rouge bought the Stalker VXE30 from Edge Autonomy, which partners with Lockheed Martin and began operating under the brand Redwire this week. According to reporting from WBRZ ABC2 in Louisiana, the drone, training, and batteries, cost about $1 million. 

Baton Rouge Police Department with Stalker VXE30 drone

All of the regular concerns surrounding drones apply to this new one in use by Baton Rouge:

• Drones can access and view spaces that are otherwise off-limits to law enforcement, including backyards, decks, and other areas of personal property.
• Footage captured by camera-enabled drones may be stored and shared in ways that go far beyond the initial flight.
• Additional camera-based surveillance can be installed on the drone, including automated license plate readers and the retroactive application of biometric analysis, such as face recognition.

However, the use of a military-grade drone hypercharges these concerns. Stalker VXE30's surveillance capabilities extend for dozens of miles, and it can fly faster and longer than standard police drones already in use. 

“It can be miles away, but we can still have a camera looking at your face, so we can use it for surveillance operations," BRPD Police Chief TJ Morse told reporters.

Drone models similar to the Stalker VXE30 have been used in military operations around the world and are currently being used by the U.S. Army and other branches for long-range reconnaissance. Typically, police departments deploy drone models similar to those commercially available from companies like DJI, which until recently was the subject of a proposed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ban, or devices provided by police technology companies like Skydio, in partnership with Axon and Flock Safety. 

Additionally troubling is the capacity to add additional equipment to these drones: so-called “payloads” that could include other types of surveillance equipment and even weapons. 

The Baton Rouge community must put policies in place that restrict and provide oversight of any possible uses of this drone, as well as any potential additions law enforcement might make. 

EFF has filed a public records request to learn more about the conditions of this acquisition and gaps in oversight policies. We've been tracking the expansion of police drone surveillance for years, and this acquisition represents a dangerous new frontier. We'll continue investigating and supporting communities fighting back against the militarization of local police and mass surveillance. To learn more about the surveillance technologies being used in your city, please check out the Atlas of Surveillance.

Drone as first responder (DFR) adoption really took off in 2025. Though the concept has been around since 2018, this year saw more normalization of the technology, its integration into more real-time crime center structures, and the implementation of automated deployment of drones.

A DFR program features a fleet of camera-equipped drones, which can range from just a couple to dozens or more. These are deployed from a launch pad in response to 911 calls and other calls for service, sometimes operated by a drone pilot or, increasingly, autonomously directed to the call location. The appeal is the promise of increased “situational awareness” for officers headed to a call. This video offers a short explanation of DFR, and for a list of all of the cities we know use drones, including DFR programs, check out EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance. 

Major Moves from the FAA and Forthcoming Federal Issues

In order to deploy a drone beyond where it can be seen, operators need to receive a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and all DFR programs require this. Police departments and technology vendors have complained that the process takes too long, and in May, FAA finalized reworked requirements, leading to a flood of waiver requests. An FAA spokesperson reported that in the first two months of the new waiver process, it had approved 410 such waivers, already accounting for almost a third of the approximately 1,400 DFR waivers that had ever been granted.

The federal government made other major moves on the drone front this year. A month after the new waivers went to effect, President Trump issued an Executive Order with aspirations for advancing the country’s drone industry. And at the end of the year, one of the largest drone manufacturers in the world and one of the biggest purveyors of law enforcement drones, DJI, will be banned from launching new products in the U.S. unless the federal government conducts a security audit that was mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act. However, at the moment, it doesn’t seem like that audit will happen, and if it doesn’t, it won’t be surprising to see other drone manufacturers leveraging the ban to boost their own products. 

Automated Drone Deployment and Tech Integrations

Early iterations of drone use required a human operator, but this year, police drone companies began releasing automated flying machines that don’t require much human intervention at all. New models can rely on AI and automated directions to launch and direct a drone. 

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

This was the year we saw DFR integrated with other tools and tech companies teamed up to bring even more powerful surveillance. Flock Safety added automated license plate readers (ALPR) to their drones. Axon and Skydio built on the partnership they launched in 2024. Drone manufacturer Brinc teamed up with Motorola Solutions on a DFR program. Drone company Paladin teamed up with a company called SkyeBrowse to add 3-D mapping of the environment to their list of features. 

DFR also is increasingly part of the police plans for real-time crime centers, meaning that the footage being captured by these flying cameras is being integrated into other streams and analyzed in ways that we’re still learning about. 

Transparency Around DFR Deployments

Transparency around adoption, use, and oversight is always crucial, particularly when it comes to police surveillance, and EFF has been tracking the growth of DFR programs across the country. We encourage you to use your local public records laws to investigate them further. Examples of the kinds of requests and the responsive documents people have already received — including flight logs, policies, and other information — can be found on MuckRock. 

The Problem with Drones

Flying cameras are bad enough. They can see and record footage from a special vantage point, capturing video of your home, your backyard, and your movements that should require clear policies around retention, audits, and use, including when the cameras shouldn’t be recording. We’re also seeing that additional camera analysis and other physical features that can be added (so-called “payloads”) — like thermal cameras and even tear gas — can make drones even more powerful and that police technology companies are encouraging DFR as part of surveillance packages.

It's important that next year we all advocate for, and enforce, standards in adopting and using these DFRs. Check the Atlas to see if they are used where you live and learn more about drones and other surveillance tools on EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance Hub.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

Axon Enterprise Inc. is working with a Canadian police department to test the addition of face recognition technology (FRT) to its body-worn cameras (BWCs). This is an alarming development in government surveillance that should put communities everywhere on alert. 

As many as 50 officers from the Edmonton Police Department (EPD) will begin using these FRT-enabled BWCs today as part of a proof-of-concept experiment. EPD is the first police department in the world to use these Axon devices, according to a report from the Edmonton Journal. 

This kind of technology could give officers instant identification of any person that crosses their path. During the current trial period, the Edmonton officers will not be notified in the field of an individual’s identity but will review identifications generated by the BWCs later on. 

“This Proof of Concept will test the technology’s ability to work with our database to make officers aware of individuals with safety flags and cautions from previous interactions,” as well as “individuals who have outstanding warrants for serious crime,” Edmonton Police described in a press release, suggesting that individuals will be placed on a watchlist of sorts.

FRT brings a rash of problems. It relies on extensive surveillance and collecting images on individuals, law-abiding or otherwise. Misidentifications can cause horrendous consequences for individuals, including prolonged and difficult fights for innocence and unfair incarceration for crimes never committed. In a world where police are using real-time face recognition, law-abiding individuals or those participating in legal, protected activity that police may find objectionable — like protest — could be quickly identified. 

With the increasing connections being made between disparate data sources about nearly every person, BWCs enabled with FRT can easily connect a person minding their own business, who happens to come within view of a police officer, with a whole slew of other personal information. 

Axon had previously claimed it would pause the addition of face recognition to its tools due to concerns raised in 2019 by the company’s AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board. However, since then, the company has continued to research and consider the addition of FRT to its products. 

This BWC-FRT integration signals possible other FRT integrations in the future. Axon is building an entire arsenal of cameras and surveillance devices for law enforcement, and the company grows the reach of its police surveillance apparatus, in part, by leveraging relationships with its thousands of customers, including those using its flagship product, the Taser. This so-called “ecosystem” of surveillance technologyq includes the Fusus system, a platform for connecting surveillance cameras to facilitate real-time viewing of video footage. It also involves expanding the use of surveillance tools like BWCs and the flying cameras of “drone as first responder” (DFR) programs.

Face recognition undermines individual privacy, and it is too dangerous when deployed by police. Communities everywhere must move to protect themselves and safeguard their civil liberties, insisting on transparency, clear policies, public accountability, and audit mechanisms. Ideally, communities should ban police use of the technology altogether. At a minimum, police must not add FRT to BWCs.