Our transparency crawler.
If a User-Agent string sent you here, this is the whole story: what it collects, how often, what it never does, and how to reach us.
What we collect.
EvilASF-TransparencyBot reads the public transparency-portal pages that automated license plate reader (ALPR) vendors publish for individual law enforcement agencies. It records five figures — camera count, searches in the last 30 days, retention window, vehicles detected in the last 30 days and hotlist hits in the last 30 days — together with the list or count of other agencies a department shares data with. Everything it reads is already published by the agency or its vendor for anyone to view. It records these figures at the agency level only.
How often, and how hard.
The crawl runs about once a week, in two phases. Discovery comes first, and it is the noisier of the two: no vendor publishes an index of these portals, so the only way to find one is to derive candidate portal addresses from public Census place and county names and request them. We try up to four naming conventions for a jurisdiction before giving up on it, and most of those addresses turn out not to exist. That phase is capped at 300 requests per run, paced no faster than about three per second, and stops after 45 minutes whether or not it has worked through its list.
Then we fetch the portals we already know about: one page per agency, at most two requests in flight at a time, paced at about one request per second. Neither phase behaves as a burst against any portal, and every request carries the User-Agent above.
No accounts, no individuals.
We never authenticate, never sign in and never accept a login or clickwrap prompt on any portal we visit. We collect nothing about individual people: no individual plate reads, no individual hotlist hits, no search subjects. What we do record includes the 30-day totals a portal publishes for vehicles detected and hotlist hits — those are aggregate figures a department discloses about its own program, not facts about a person, and they are on the page for anyone to read.
Tell us and we will honour it.
If you administer one of these portals and want us to stop crawling it, email [email protected]. Tell us which agency or portal, and we will stop.
Questions about the wider project are welcome at the same address. Read more about why we build this way. To see what this data shows, start with the Federal Reach ledger.