What Can Go Wrong When Police Use AI to Write Reports?

Axon—the makers of widely-used police body cameras and tasers (and that also keeps trying to arm drones)—has a new product: AI that will write police reports for officers. Draft One is a generative large language model machine learning system that...

Responding to ShotSpotter, Police Shoot at Child Lighting Fireworks

This post was written by Rachel Hochhauser, an EFF legal internWe’ve written multiple times about the inaccurate and dangerous “gunshot detection” tool, Shotspotter. A recent near-tragedy in Chicago adds to the growing pile of evidence that cities...

Cops Running DNA-Manufactured Faces Through Face Recognition is Tornado of Bad Ideas

In keeping with law enforcement’s grand tradition of taking antiquated, invasive, and oppressive technologies, making them digital, and then calling it innovation, police in the U.S. recently combined two existing dystopian technologies in a brand...

Lucy Parsons Labs Takes Police Foundation to Court for Open Records Requests

The University of Georgia (UGA) School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic has filed an Open Records Request lawsuit to demand public records from the private Atlanta Police Foundation (APF). The lawsuit, filed at the behest of the Atlanta Community...

San Diego City Council Breaks TRUST

In January, San Diego voted to reduce public oversight over police surveillance even before the ordinance enforcing that oversight has been fully implemented.

The Atlas of Surveillance Removes Ring, Adds Third-Party Investigative Platforms

Running the Atlas of Surveillance, our project to map and inventory police surveillance across the United States, means experiencing emotional extremes. Whenever we announce that we've added new data points to the Atlas, it comes with a great...

We Flew a Plane Over San Francisco to Fight Proposition E. Here's Why.

Proposition E, which San Franciscans will be asked to vote on in the March 5 election, is so dangerous that last weekend we chartered a plane to inform our neighbors about what the ballot measure does and urge them to vote NO on it. If you were in...

What is Proposition E and Why Should San Francisco Voters Oppose It?

If you live in San Francisco, there is an election on March 5, 2024 during which voters will decide a number of specific local ballot measures—including Proposition E. Proponents of Proposition E have raised over $1 million …but what does the...

San Francisco Police’s Live Surveillance Yields Almost 200 Hours of Spying–Including of Music Festivals

A new report reveals that in just three months, from July 1 to September 30, 2023, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) racked up 193 hours and 19 minutes of live access to non-city surveillance cameras. That means for the equivalent of 8...

San Francisco: Vote No on Proposition E to Stop Police from Testing Dangerous Surveillance Technology on You

San Francisco voters will confront a looming threat to their privacy and civil liberties on the March 5, 2024 ballot. If Proposition E passes, we can expect the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) will use untested and potentially dangerous...

Victory! Ring Announces It Will No Longer Facilitate Police Requests for Footage from Users

Amazon’s Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police's warrantless requests for footage from Ring users. This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket police surveillance, but also against a culture in which private,...

The Atlas of Surveillance Hits Major Milestones: 2023 in Review

"The EFF are relentless." That's what a New York Police Department lieutenant wrote on LinkedIn after someone sent him a link to the Atlas of Surveillance, EFF's moonshot effort to document which U.S. law enforcement agencies are using which...

Artificial Intelligence and Policing: Year in Review 2023

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision making–regardless of what you call it, and there is hot debate over that, this technology has been touted as a supposed threat to humanity, the future of work, as well as the hot new...

EFF Joins Forces with 20+ Organizations in the Coalition #MigrarSinVigilancia

Today, EFF joins more than 25 civil society organizations to launch the Coalition #MigrarSinVigilancia ("To Migrate Without Surveillance"). The Latin American coalition’s aim is to oppose arbitrary and indiscriminate surveillance affecting...

Is This the End of Geofence Warrants?

Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data...

U.S. Senator: What Do Our Cars Know? And Who Do They Share that Information With?

U.S. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has sent a much-needed letter to car manufacturers asking them to clarify a surprisingly hard question to answer: what data cars collect? Who has the ability to access that data? Private companies can often...

It’s Time to Oppose the New San Francisco Policing Ballot Measure

San Francisco Mayor London Breed has filed a ballot initiative on surveillance and policing that, if approved, would greatly erode our privacy rights, endanger marginalized communities, and roll back the incredible progress the city has made in...

VICTORY! California Department of Justice Declares Out-of-State Sharing of License Plate Data Unlawful

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued a legal interpretation and guidance for law enforcement agencies around the state that confirms what privacy advocates have been saying for years: It is against the law for police to share data...

The State of Chihuahua Is Building a 20-Story Tower in Ciudad Juarez to Surveil 13 Cities–and Texas Will Also Be Watching

Chihuahua state officials and a notorious Mexican security contractor broke ground last summer on the Torre Centinela (Sentinel Tower), an ominous, 20-story high-rise in downtown Ciudad Juarez that will serve as the central node of a new...

Cities Should Act NOW to Ban Predictive Policing...and Stop Using ShotSpotter, Too

Sound Thinking, the company behind ShotSpotter—an acoustic gunshot detection technology that is rife with problems—is reportedly buying Geolitica, the company behind PredPol, a predictive policing technology known to exacerbate inequalities by...