Idaho

Every one of the 44 counties in Idaho has a dated source baseline here: an OpenStreetMap device snapshot and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance entries for its agencies. No Idaho county has had its local records read yet, so nothing on those county pages is an Orwell Index finding. What you see is two published datasets, dated and attributed, and the gap between them is part of what they show.

A small map, and most of it is plate readers

Volunteers have mapped 544 devices across Idaho. Of those, 446 are tagged as automated plate readers and 330 carry Flock Safety as the manufacturer. Motorola Solutions and Axon Enterprise account for most of the rest that name one.

Two counties hold more than half of it. Ada County, which contains Boise, has 176 mapped devices and Canyon County, with Nampa and Caldwell, has 127. Bannock has 57, Twin Falls 51 and Bonneville 34. Twenty-two counties, half the state, have no mapped device.

These counts describe what volunteers have chosen to map, not what is installed. An empty county on this map says more about the mappers than about the county.

Named operators are rare

Fewer than one mapped point in twenty names who runs it. The operator named most often is a hardware retailer, Lowe’s, on 11 points. The Idaho Falls Police Department is named on 6. The Ada County Sheriff’s Office appears twice, under two spellings of the same name.

What the Atlas adds

The EFF Atlas of Surveillance records 62 entries for agencies in Idaho: 26 for body-worn cameras, 19 for drones, 14 for plate readers, and one each for a camera registry, a gunshot detection system and a fusion center. Police departments hold 32 of them and sheriffs’ offices 27. The other three belong to the Idaho State Police, the Idaho Criminal Intelligence Center and the Bellevue Marshal’s Office. No agency has more than three. Seventeen counties have no Atlas entry at all, which describes the Atlas’s coverage as much as the counties.

The two datasets do not overlap the way a reader might expect. Eleven of the twenty-two counties with no mapped device do have Atlas entries, all of them for body-worn cameras or drones. A county can be empty on the map and still have an agency with equipment on record, and the reverse.

The fusion center is the Idaho Criminal Intelligence Center, which the Idaho State Police presents as one of its own units at isp.idaho.gov/icic. A fusion center pools records from many agencies for analysis, and a state agency’s decisions reach every county and sit in no county’s record, so Idaho gets a state lane beside its county loop.

What happens next

Each county’s records are read one at a time, in the order of how much hardware stands in it, beginning with Ada. A county page changes from a source baseline to a researched page when its Board of County Commissioners record, its sheriff’s policies and its local press have been read and at least one finding has been verified against a primary document. Until then the page says what the two datasets say and nothing more.