San Francisco is considering whether to strengthen or roll back civil rights protections against government surveillance. Nearly three years ago, EFF joined a coalition of community groups to support the city’s passage of the Surveillance Technology Ordinance, which bans government use of facial recognition technology and empowers the...

The ACLU of Northern California has concluded a year-long Freedom of Information campaign by uncovering massive spying on Black Lives Matter protests from the air. The California Highway Patrol directed aerial surveillance, mostly done by helicopters, over protests in Berkeley, Oakland, Palo Alto, Placerville, Riverside, Sacramento, San Francisco, and...

There are more federal facial recognition technology (FRT) systems than there are federal agencies using them, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Its latest report on current and planned use of FRT by federal agencies reveals that, among the 24 agencies surveyed, there are 27 federal FRT...

ˀThe Chicago Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has released a highly critical report on the Chicago Police Department’s use of ShotSpotter, a surveillance technology that relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human “acoustic experts” to purportedly identify and locate gunshots based on a network of...