Texas

Every one of the 254 counties in Texas has a dated source baseline here: an OpenStreetMap device snapshot and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance entries for its agencies. No Texas 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.

More plate readers than the rest of the index put together

Volunteers have mapped 18,841 devices across Texas. Of those, 16,989 are tagged as automated plate readers and 16,018 carry Flock Safety as the manufacturer. One vendor and one kind of device account for five of every six points on the state’s map.

Three counties hold a large share of it. Harris County has 4,182 mapped devices, Dallas County 1,815 and Tarrant County 1,807. Together that is more than two fifths of the state’s mapped devices in the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas. Fort Bend, Collin, Denton, Bexar and Travis each hold several hundred more.

These counts describe what volunteers have chosen to map, not what is installed. A county with a low number may have an active mapping community and few cameras, or many cameras and nobody mapping them. Twelve counties returned nothing from either dataset.

The border carries different hardware, and the map does not say who runs it

Fourteen counties along the Rio Grande, from El Paso and Hudspeth in the west to Cameron in the east, have some mapped points that look nothing like the rest of the state. They are tagged with General Dynamics and Anduril as manufacturers, and 110 of them are typed as camera and radar together rather than as plate readers. The map records a manufacturer on nearly every one of these points and an operator on none of them. A manufacturer is not an operator, and naming one from the other would be a guess, so the map does not say who runs them. It does name Customs and Border Protection on 48 plate readers in the same counties, and on none of the camera and radar points. Whether any of this appears in a county’s own record is a question the reading will answer.

Named operators are rare, and the ones that are named are not always police

Fewer than one mapped point in ten names who runs it. The two largest named operators are Flock Safety itself, on 463 points, and the Texas Department of Transportation, on 209, most of them traffic cameras. The next is a federal agency: 111 cameras around the National Security Agency’s campus in Bexar County, most of them pole-mounted and tagged as watching the surrounding area, which no county or city governs. Among police departments, West University Place, Dallas and Amarillo are the most often named, at fewer than a hundred points each. Two hardware retailers, Lowe’s and The Home Depot, are named more often than most police departments.

What the Atlas adds

The EFF Atlas of Surveillance records 910 entries for agencies in Texas. The largest groups are 326 for plate readers, 276 for body-worn cameras, 171 for drones, 51 for camera registries, 26 for face recognition and 17 for real time crime centers. A hundred and one counties have no Atlas entry at all, which describes the Atlas’s coverage as much as the counties.

Eight of the entries are fusion centers. A fusion center pools records from many agencies for analysis. The Atlas places one in Austin under the name Texas Joint Crime Information Center and the others in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Collin County, Austin, San Antonio and El Paso. The Department of Public Safety itself is recorded for face recognition, with Clearview AI named as a vendor, for drones, for a cell site simulator, for plate readers, for LexisNexis and Penlink investigative platforms, and for body cameras. A state agency’s decisions reach every county and sit in no county’s record, so Texas needs a state lane as much as a county loop, and the state lane has started.

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 Harris. A county page changes from a source baseline to a researched page when its Commissioners Court 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.