Washington

Every county in Washington has a dated source baseline here: an OpenStreetMap device snapshot and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance entries for its agencies. Counties marked researched have also had their local records read, and their pages carry Orwell Index findings. On the rest, what you see is two published datasets, dated and attributed, and the gap between them is part of what they show.

Five counties have no community-mapped devices at all: Asotin, Columbia, Garfield, Pacific and Wahkiakum. That is a fact about what volunteers have mapped, not a finding that those counties have no cameras, and each zero was checked against the map data directly before it was published. Asotin’s map tells a border story: the six devices nearest the county are plate readers across the Snake River in Lewiston, Idaho, and they appear on Idaho’s side of the line, not here.

Unlike Oregon’s dataset, Washington’s tribal police agencies appear in the Atlas under the counties where they operate, so the Chehalis, Quinault, Nooksack, Kalispel, Sauk-Suiattle, Stillaguamish, Tulalip, Puyallup, Nisqually, Lummi and Shoalwater Bay tribal departments each show on a county page. Tribal governments are their own jurisdictions; a county page records what the dataset files there and claims nothing more. One Atlas row labeled Washington belongs to Eugene, Oregon, an upstream mislabel we exclude rather than assign to a Washington county.

Washington’s statutes are in the State law section below, read from the codified Revised Code of Washington and the passed bills. The 2026 plate reader act (RCW 10.130, effective 30 March 2026) is the strictest on this site: plate reader use is unlawful except as the chapter provides, non-case data cannot be kept past 21 days, every system had to be registered with the state Attorney General by late September 2026, and from December 2027 every agency using one must publish an annual report on its own website naming its camera locations and everyone its data was shared with. Facial recognition has been regulated since 2021 (RCW 43.386): a public accountability report, community meetings, and a warrant for ongoing surveillance. Drones have no Washington surveillance statute; the bill that would have created one passed both chambers in 2014 and was vetoed, and body camera policies are required by RCW 10.109. California’s and Oregon’s statutes are listed on their own pages and do not apply here.