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databases

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Tables and columns from government owned databases

This project is to request lists of databases, their tables, and the columns from databases that exist within national, state, county and city agencies throughout the US. This data will be used in the submission of future requests for information with those databases. I hope that the information obtained from these requests will be particularly useful to Open Data communities by providing them data that would otherwise be inaccessible, which leads to bigger and better community-run projects!

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Agency HQ/PR emails with attribution designation phrases

Part of Fiat Fiendum's FOIA audit, this is an all-agency request for emails containing phrases like "off the record", "on background", etc. It specifically targets emails as stored in centralized databases.

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11 Articles

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Data Driven: Explore how cops are collecting and sharing our travel patterns using automated license plate readers

Data Driven: Explore how cops are collecting and sharing our travel patterns using automated license plate readers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock have filed hundreds of public records requests with law enforcement agencies around the country to reveal how data collected from automated license plate readers is used to track the travel patterns of drivers. Today we are releasing records obtained from 200 agencies, accounting for more than 2.5 -billion license plate scans in 2016 and 2017.

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Understanding the Source Documents

Understanding the Source Documents

Part of our strategy with this public records campaign was to seek two separate, uniform classes of documents easily exportable through Vigilant Solutions’ LEARN system. We provided each agency with a guide to producing these records straight from the user manual, which had been obtained through open records law by Mike Katz-Lacabe of the Center for Human Rights and Privacy. Most agencies were able to follow these instructions and provide the standardized records. Some did not and require a little work to decipher.

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Download the ALPR Dataset

Download the ALPR Dataset

We have also provided the entire dataset as a CSV file that can be reviewed in various software programs, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. The spreadsheet is far more sortable than the table and includes various tabs that give greater information about each of the different fields.

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What We Learned

What We Learned

Our research shows that 173 agencies from 23 states and the federal government accounted for roughly 2.5 -billion license plate scans in 2016 and 2017. The remaining 27 agencies refused to turn over reports on how much data they collected.

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A Caveat on the Data

A Caveat on the Data

Analyzing ALPR data is an imperfect science, and we intend to update this dataset as inconsistencies are identified. If you encounter an issue, please email Dave Maass at dm@eff.org

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1 Request

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