New Mexico

Every county in New Mexico has a dated source baseline here: an OpenStreetMap device snapshot and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance entries for its agencies. No New Mexico 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.

What the two datasets show

Volunteers have mapped 1,746 devices across the 33 counties. Of those, 1,012 are tagged as automated plate readers and 802 carry Flock Safety as the manufacturer. Bernalillo County holds 688 of the devices, more than the next four counties together.

Bernalillo is also the one county whose map is not a single-vendor picture: 269 of its devices are Flock, 158 are Genetec and 62 are Motorola Solutions. Elsewhere in the state one vendor usually takes almost everything. San Juan County’s fifty-two mapped devices are fifty-two Flock plate readers and nothing else.

The decisions that reach every county are made in Santa Fe

Four of the Atlas rows in this state belong to state agencies rather than to any county: the New Mexico All Source Intelligence Center, recorded as a fusion center; the Motor Vehicle Division and the State Police, both for face recognition; and the Santa Fe Regional Emergency Communications Center for video analytics.

A fusion center pools records from many agencies for analysis. A driver license database searched by face covers everyone the state has licensed, which is a different population from the people any one police camera records. No county commission governs either, so reading all 33 county records would never reach them.

We have started reading that state layer separately. The Department of Public Safety publishes its policy manual, and seven of those policies have now been read in full.

The State Police wrote rules for their drone, and left retention to another policy

The drone policy requires a search warrant before any flight that “may intrude upon reasonable expectations of privacy”, forbids using the aircraft “for routine observation of the public at large”, and says they “shall not be equipped with weapons of any kind”. Every flight is logged with its reason, its time, its place and the supervisor who approved it. Most agencies in this project have no published policy at all for equipment they own.

What the policy does not say is how long the video is kept. It hands that question to the department’s evidence handling policy, so we read that one as well. It carries revision 9, took effect in October 2017, and it never mentions an aircraft. Its section on digital evidence is about copying files onto a disc that cannot be rewritten and storing the disc the way film negatives are stored. The one policy that does set clocks for video covers body cameras, in-car cameras and audio recorders, not the aircraft.

So across the seven policies we read, none says how long a State Police drone’s video is kept, or who may search it afterwards. That is a statement about the documents rather than about the practice. A retention schedule may exist somewhere we have not read, and asking for that specific schedule is now a precise request rather than a vague one.

The state’s plate readers purge in ten days

The State Police run plate readers too, and their policy is unusually direct about what the program is for. “The ALPR program is a function of the Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Bureau.” Most of the readers are fixed units at the state’s ports of entry, where commercial trucks come into New Mexico. A small number are mobile, and district commanders can ask to borrow them.

Then the sentence that decides most of what a plate reader system means for an ordinary driver: “Stored information is purged every 10 days.” The policy adds that “No personal identifying information is retained, only vehicle information is stored”, and keeps a three year exception for records covered by the state’s rule on transportation and trip permits. Anything with evidentiary value leaves the system and becomes evidence under a different policy.

Ten days is a short window, and a stated number is something a resident can ask an agency to demonstrate. The plates are checked against three federal databases: the FBI’s crime information center and two federal systems that track commercial carrier safety. No commercial hot list appears in the policy, no data sharing network appears in it, and no vendor is named anywhere. Which company supplies these readers is not answered by the document.

One approved use reaches past commercial vehicles. The policy permits “Identifying vehicles that are known to have been used by criminal offenders or are on a Department of Homeland Security Watch List”. How often that happens is not in the document, and every shift’s log records the plate numbers read, which makes those logs a records request worth making.

The policy took effect in April 2018 and has never been revised. The plate reader market it was written for is not the one that exists now.

The fusion center is not the State Police

The Atlas lists the New Mexico All Source Intelligence Center as an agency of its own. The department’s intelligence policy agrees, in as many words: “the Department of Public Safety does not operate an intelligence component and/or fusion center”. Officers submit intelligence into the state criminal justice information system, or send it to the Center. So the fusion center has its own record, and reading the State Police will not produce it.

The same policy rules four things out of bounds for intelligence collection. Two of them are information on a person or group “merely on the basis that the individual or group supports controversial causes” and “merely on the basis of religious or political affiliations”. Intelligence older than five years is purged automatically. That policy was last revised in 2011.

A warrant, and a letter telling you about it

New Mexico has its own Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the department wrote a policy to match it in 2021. An officer who gets a warrant or court order for someone’s electronic information has to deliver to that person “a notice that informs the target of the warrant or court order”, served at the same time as the warrant unless a judge orders the notice delayed.

A person whose messages or location history were handed over is told, on paper. That is not the default in most of the country, and it is the sort of provision nobody learns about from the news.

The border counties carry hardware the map cannot attribute

Doña Ana, Luna and Hidalgo counties hold twenty-six Anduril installations between them, typed as camera and radar together rather than as plate readers, and Luna adds five General Dynamics points.

On the points we checked, the operator field is empty. The map records the equipment and the company that built it, and not the agency that runs it. Naming an operator from the manufacturer would be a guess, and a guess about who is watching a border community is not something to publish.

Four counties appear in neither dataset

Catron, De Baca, Harding and Sierra return nothing from either source. Two empty datasets are not a finding that those counties have no surveillance. They mean nobody has mapped any and the EFF has not recorded any, in four of the least populous counties in the United States. De Baca County has no government website of any kind, so its record is reachable only by a records request or in person.

What comes next

Local records research has not started in any New Mexico county. The meetings, contracts, policies and purchase records that would show who approved what, and when, are still unread.