Interesting story in the Monitor about pushback against police surveillance of the public. The whole article is here.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance uses public information and an army of student journalists to document the tools that local law enforcement use and the spread of equipment like facial recognition technology and drones.
The database contains 16 entries for all of New Hampshire. There are fewer entries in part because the state’s police are spread across many small towns instead of large metropolitan police departments that tend to generate more public scrutiny and reporting.
New Hampshire departments use three of the most common technologies found in the database: body-worn cameras, drones and license plate readers. The City of Lebanon maintains a camera registry, where private citizens with cameras like the Amazon Ring can sign up to add their cameras to a larger system of surveillance.
The database also includes New Hampshire’s Information Analysis Center in Concord, one of the country’s 79 fusion center sites. At fusion centers, where a variety of surveillance technologies can be used in one place, local and state law enforcement gather and analyze intelligence with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
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