Power — Surveillance
Maps the cameras, the contracts and the databases behind them.
Leads PowerSimone reports on surveillance tech, data brokerage and the public-private plumbing that makes ordinary life legible to institutions.
Power
New Jersey schools are buying phone-free days from private vendors. The pouch stays with the student, but control over communication moves to the district.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
Platform privacy promises sound broad. Their law-enforcement guides are narrower: account identity may require only a subpoena, while emergencies leave disclosure to the company.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
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New Jersey residents can request access to and deletion of brokered data. The forms reveal the catch: companies still decide how easily your identity can be matched, verified and rejected.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
District rules can permit screen viewing, search logging and remote control after a student leaves campus. The boundary is usually an administrator setting, not the front door.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
Across major platforms, the first police demand may be a quiet order to retain data. Disclosure comes later. By then, the account’s past has already been secured.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
New Jersey municipalities tell residents to sign up for Nixle alerts. The small instruction conceals a larger vendor system built to collect location, device and usage data.
Simone Achebe · 7 min read
Power
A dead YouTube link can mark more than a moderation decision. It can remove a public path to footage that investigators need to verify an alleged atrocity.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
The four released videos documented police violence in detail. They could not show the alleged reckless driving used to justify the stop, because no released camera recorded it.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
States say they are keeping children off harmful platforms. The mechanism often requires an age judgment about every user, then another system to identify the parent.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
Maps Timeline now lives primarily on users’ phones, blocking the broad searches Google once ran for police. The rest of the location-surveillance market remains open.
Simone Achebe · 7 min read
Power
Instagram removes Stories from public view after 24 hours. New Jersey records law may require government agencies to preserve them much longer, if their content documents official business.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
Ring removed police Requests for Assistance from Neighbors. Warrants, emergency disclosures, public posts and a homeowner’s Share button still provide routes to the same camera footage.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
A seized phone is not an open file cabinet. Warrants set legal boundaries, extraction vendors set technical ones, and courts often see the dispute only after police have made a copy.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
ICE procurement records show the purchase of tools that can search public posts, generate alerts and map relationships. The contract turns casual visibility into durable government intelligence.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
A 90-day preservation request can quietly freeze an account while police seek legal process. What comes next depends on whether they want an identity, account activity or message content.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
District software can scan a student’s email, search history and unfinished Google Docs for signs of danger. The alert may outlive the context that produced it.
Simone Achebe · 7 min read
Power
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot offer crisis support while reserving broad rights to retain or disclose conversations. The warning card explains the help. It rarely explains the surveillance.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
Districts are licensing screen monitoring and AI-writing detection while leaving retention, access and appeals scattered across vendor terms and ordinary discipline codes.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
Departments edit body-camera footage, captions and mugshots into social posts before courts decide the case. The clip travels farther than the eventual disposition.
Simone Achebe · 8 min read
Power
A local Flock camera can feed searches by police far outside the town that approved it. The operative decision sits in contracts, retention rules and sharing permissions.
Simone Achebe · 7 min read