Watching the Watchers

How surveillance gear quietly becomes normal.

Surveillance rarely arrives as an announcement. It arrives as a contract, a pilot programme, a box bolted to a pole. By the time anyone asks what it does, it is already installed and paid for, and the burden of proof has shifted onto the people who object.

This series follows that pattern through specific pieces of equipment: number plate readers, border towers, microphones, face recognition systems. Together they show something the individual news stories do not — that the decisive moment is almost always procurement, not legislation.

Read the series

1. Are Your Local Police Using Flock Safety ALPRs to Scan for Immigrants?
   July 20, 2026 — A way to find out whether the cameras in your own town feed a nationwide search tool.
2. An Explosion of Surveillance Towers is Coming to U.S. Borders, Costing Over $1 Billion
   July 22, 2026 — A billion-dollar network of watchtowers arrives with barely any public debate.
3. Victory! Flock Ends Rollout of Audio “Distress Detection” of Human Voices
   July 17, 2026 — What happened when a camera company tried to add microphones to the street.
4. EFF, TEDIC and CEJIL Challenge Secrecy in the Use of Face Recognition in Paraguay
   July 20, 2026 — Face recognition deployed behind a wall of official secrecy, and the legal push to open it.
5. Victory! Supreme Court Says Constitution Protects People’s Location Data
   July 20, 2026 — A ruling that puts limits on tracking where people go.
6. The FCC’s Spam Call Proposal Is Just a Data Collection Scheme
   July 20, 2026 — A plan sold as protection that would quietly gather more data about callers.

The series continues

New articles are added to this series as they are published. You can also follow the full Watching the Watchers archive, or browse all our series.