For press
If you are on deadline, everything you need is on this page and it is free to use. If you need something that is not here, ask — we would rather answer than be paraphrased.
What we are
Unsurveilled is an independent, nonpartisan civil-liberties project based in Arizona. We oppose warrantless government surveillance of people suspected of no crime. We are not anti-police and not anti-technology: we support targeted investigation through lawful process and oppose indiscriminate collection.
We are not a registered legal entity, we accept no donations, and we have no paid staff. We say so plainly because you would find out anyway and it is better coming from us.
The story most coverage misses
Existing national databases record where surveillance cameras were installed. None of them record where programs were reversed. Four days after Chandler, Arizona shut down forty license plate readers, the most widely cited national deployment database still listed Chandler as a 2019 deployment of a different vendor’s equipment, with no record of the cameras that had just been switched off.
That gap produces two reporting blind spots worth knowing about:
- Vendor swaps read as victories. Denver ended its Flock contract and signed with Axon twelve days later. A city that "dropped Flock" may simply have changed suppliers.
- Reversals reverse. Richmond, California switched its cameras off in November 2025 and voted 4–3 to switch them back on in March 2026. A single snapshot will mislead you.
Our Decision Record exists to track exactly this, and it records adoptions and renewals as readily as removals.
Data, free to use
Everything is downloadable from our open data page: the full dataset as JSON, decisions and incidents as CSV, and the mapped reader locations as GeoJSON.
Our own datasets are CC BY 4.0 — copy, adapt and republish with attribution, including commercially. The map data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors and stays under ODbL. A citation like this is plenty:
Unsurveilled, Decision Record, retrieved [date], https://unsurveilled.org/data/
How to read our sourcing tiers
Every record carries the strength of its sourcing as a field in the data, not a footnote, so you can filter on it. If you are publishing, filter to the strongest tier and check the sources yourself — every URL is in the file.
- primary-document / court-documented — official release, contract, agenda, minutes, or a public docket.
- official-agency — confirmed publicly by the agency or an official.
- news-reported — established outlets report it and it is not denied, but we hold no primary document.
- contested — the agency or vendor disputes the characterisation, and both accounts are in the record.
What we will tell you before you ask
- Our record is incomplete, and the counts above are a floor rather than a census. Roughly three dozen further entries are researched but withheld pending verification, because we do not publish what we have not checked.
- The map is crowdsourced and incomplete. A blank area means nobody has mapped there, not that the area is unwatched.
- We publish authority that cuts against us. See The Law, where a published federal appellate decision holding that a small reader system is not a search is listed alongside the cases that help us.
- No court has held ALPRs categorically unconstitutional, and we will correct any reporter who writes that we said so.
Contact
hello@unsurveilled.org, or the contact form. Tell us your deadline and we will work to it.
On attribution: the project speaks as “Unsurveilled” and our contributors are not public. We will happily be quoted as an organisation, point you to primary documents, or go on background — but we will not supply a named individual, and we would rather you cite the underlying records than us in any case.