EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project shines a light on the surveillance technologies that law enforcement agencies routinely deploy in our communities. These resources are designed for advocacy organizations, journalists, defense attorneys, policymakers, and members of the public who often are not getting the straight story from police representatives or the vendors marketing this equipment.
Whether it’s phone-based location tracking, ubiquitous video recording, biometric data collection, or police access to people’s smart devices, law enforcement agencies follow closely behind their counterparts in the military and intelligence services in acquiring privacy-invasive technologies and getting access to consumer data. Just as analog surveillance historically has been used as a tool for oppression, we must understand the threat posed by emerging technologies to successfully defend civil liberties and civil rights in the digital age.
Public data about businesses, government entities, military agencies, police, and so forth throughout the United States.
OpenOversight is a Seattle Tech Bloc project that aims to improve law enforcement visibility and transparency using public and crowdsourced data. We maintain databases, digital galleries, and profiles of individual law enforcement officers from departments the so called Pacific Northwest that consolidate information including names, birthdates, mentions in news articles, salaries, and photographs.
This project is a response to the lack of transparency and justice in policing. The public should have the right to know which officers are patrolling their neighborhoods and watching their communities. When officers abuse their positions of power, they should be able to be easily identified and held accountable.
It is the first project of its kind in the United States, and was first implemented in Chicago in October 2016. OpenOversight launched in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area in fall 2017 and in New York City in 2018. A Baltimore instance was launched in 2019 at BPDWatch.com. A Portland instance was launched around the same time at cops.photo.
The number of IMSI-catchers (rogue cell towers) has been steadily increasing in use by hackers and governments around the world. Rogue cell towers, which can be as small as your home router, pose a large security risk to anyone with a phone. If in range, your phone will automatically connect to the rogue tower with no indication to you that anything has happened. At that point, your information passes through the rogue tower and can leak sensitive information about you and your device. Currently, there are no easy ways to protect your phone from connecting to a rogue tower (aside from some Android apps which are phone specific and require root access).
This project demonstrates how you can create a rogue cell tower detector using a Raspberry Pi and a SIM 900 module. The detector can identify rogue towers and triangulate their location. The demonstration uses a SIM 900 GSM module to fingerprint each cell tower and determine the signal strength of each tower relative to the detector.
Database of local and national community-based alternatives to calling the police or 911, broken down by city.
The Plain View Project is a database of public Facebook posts and comments made by current and former police officers from several jurisdictions across the United States.
We present these posts and comments because we believe that they could undermine public trust and confidence in our police. In our view, people who are subject to decisions made by law enforcement may fairly question whether these online statements about race, religion, ethnicity and the acceptability of violent policing—among other topics—inform officers’ on-the-job behaviors and choices.
To be clear, our concern is not whether these posts and comments are protected by the First Amendment. Rather, we believe that because fairness, equal treatment, and integrity are essential to the legitimacy of policing, these posts and comments should be part of a national dialogue about police.
A website that mashes up news reports of crime with Google Maps for cities in the United States of America.
A Frequently Asked Questions file about phonetic alphabets. Covers the phonetic alphabets of multiple countries and military forces.
The database of radio scanner frequencies at radioreference.com. Curious about what's happening in your area? Tune in and give a listen.
A site that aims to collect as much information as possible about police related fatalities, and fatalities resultant from police brutality.
A voice inversion descrambler (and scrambler). Can invert live signals in realtime. Has commonly used inversion carriers as presets.