A growing movement has been campaigning against surveillance cameras from companies like Flock Safety, which allow local police to gather mass surveillance data, often citing the possibility of misuse of that data. But for years police have steadily been building a digital infrastructure with personal information on people with criminal backgrounds in the name of public safety — and often without proper digital security

Since 2020, the state police in Illinois have maintained a publicly accessible online map of 30,000 people that it has labeled as "offenders" in 685 nursing homes across the state. The map included the first and last names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, FBI numbers, and Social Security numbers of people listed. These are elderly people who are vulnerable to scammers. It's not stated what they have been convicted of. They may have a drug charge from decades ago before marijuana was legalized in Illinois, but their past still follows them.

Matt Chapman, a researcher with the Chicago-based Lucy Parsons Labs, stumbled across the map when he was researching license plate readers maintained by the Illinois State Police (ISP). "Anybody can find this," Chapman told Truthout. "Anybody can use this for nefarious purposes."

"Why do these agencies have all this information?" Chapman questioned. "Why are they not protecting it? It really speaks to the lack of care that Illinois State Police have for the information of sensitive folks — the people they're supposedly supposed to protect."

Registries, Databases, and Shackles

As police build an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus, they have been shown to be poor stewards of the mass amounts of information they collect on the public. Police have also wrongly entered people into gang databases. In 2020, a scandal erupted in Los Angeles after cops there falsified records in a gang database, which led to the suspension of several officers with the city's police department. Last year, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessed information from a disgraced Maryland cop who put him into a gang database linking him to M-13 for wearing a hoodie and Chicago Bulls baseball cap.

In 2021, Protocol, a company owned by BI Incorporated (a subsidiary of the private prison builder GEO Group), which supplies the Cook County Sheriff's Office with electronic monitors, leaked the personal information of thousands of people across Chicago wearing the devices, what expert James Kilgore calls "ankle shackles." Chapman, who also uncovered this data leak, said it included "an enormous amount of private information," such as names, email and home addresses, and the "detailed movement schedules" of people on these digital tracking devices.