March 15, 2020 - 1:00pm PDT
The Interwebs

Update: an earlier version of this invitation also included a social gathering at EFF's office in San Francisco. Due to widespread health concerns we have decided to move forward with the online participation portion exclusively. 

Join EFF and your fellow surveillance transparency advocates for an afternoon of investigative research into the technologies that law enforcement is deploying in our communities. 

Not all surveillance is secret: there is an immense amount of information online—news articles, press releases, and FOIA documents—that just hasn’t been aggregated before. Until now. 

Since early 2019, EFF has collaborated with hundreds of journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, to gather “open source intelligence” about which police and sheriff’s offices use which tech, such as drones, automated license plate readers, and face recognition. Now we are expanding our research pool to empower EFF members and our Electronic Frontier Alliance affiliates to shine light on high-tech policing. 

On March 15, we will gather online for a “Surveillance Sprint.” Attendees will have the opportunity to contribute to the “Atlas of Surveillance” dataset by completing micro-research assignments. For example, you may be assigned to spend 20 minutes using search engines and advance filters to look for news articles about body-worn cameras at the Tulsa Police Department. After that, you submit your findings to our database.

The data will be incorporated into the “Atlas of Surveillance,” a new project set for launch in May 2020. This resource will provide members of the public and journalists with access to thousands of data-points about the proliferation of various surveillance technologies across the country. You can also view the results of our 2019 pilot project, which focused on the U.S.-Mexico border region: “Atlas of Surveillance: Southwestern Border Communities” (https://www.eff.org/atlas-border). 

Pre-registration is required for this event. Zoom call information will be provided to all registered participants. 

When:
Sunday, March 15
1pm - 4pm PST

Where:
via Zoom
Call details will be provided to all registerd participants.