Nevada

Every county in Nevada has a dated source baseline here: an OpenStreetMap device snapshot and the EFF Atlas of Surveillance entries for its agencies. On most of them that is all you will find so far, two published datasets, dated and attributed, with the gap between them part of what they show.

Twelve counties have had their local records read: Storey, Humboldt, Lyon, Nye, Churchill, White Pine, Elko, Clark, Mineral, Washoe, Pershing and Esmeralda. Those pages carry findings from the counties’ own records, and they look different from the rest because they are different. A baseline page is a starting point. It is never a claim that a county has nothing in it.

Carson City, Douglas, Eureka, Lander and Lincoln stay at baseline. Their county records have not been read, and nothing on their pages should be read as an absence.

Clark County, which holds three quarters of the state’s population, is now read, and what it shows is not what its published datasets point at. The plate readers, the camera registry and the drone fleet attributed to agencies here belong to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which answers to its own board rather than to the county. What the county itself does is quieter and, in its way, larger: it requires businesses to install security cameras and coordinate with the police as a condition of being allowed to open.

Nevada is seventeen jurisdictions rather than sixteen counties. Carson City is a consolidated municipality, the state’s only independent city, and it is the capital. Read its numbers carefully: several of the agencies the Atlas files there are statewide rather than local, including the Nevada Highway Patrol, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Nevada Threat Analysis Center, which is the state fusion center. They are based in Carson City. They do not belong to it.

Those eight Carson City entries were missing from this site until 4 September 2026. The Atlas leaves the County column empty for an independent city, and our matcher asked only that column, so it returned nothing for the jurisdiction holding the most state-level surveillance in Nevada. A zero that means we asked the wrong question is not a finding, and it has been fixed rather than explained.

Two counties have no community-mapped devices at all, Humboldt and Pershing. That is a fact about what volunteers have mapped, not a finding that those counties have no cameras.

One entry in the EFF Atlas for Nevada belongs to no county on this site. It records the Cayuga Nation Police Department, filed under “Ontario County” with the city Geneva, which are both in New York. Seventy-nine of the eighty Nevada rows in that dataset appear on a county page and one does not.

Clark County holds most of what has been mapped here. It is Las Vegas, and 650 of the state’s mapped devices are inside it.

What Nevada’s own statutes do and do not cover

Two are on this site, read from the Nevada Revised Statutes rather than from summaries. NRS 493 governs government drones: a warrant requirement for law enforcement flying where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, capped at ten days; a two business day sworn filing with a court when an agency flies on an imminent threat instead; and a published statewide registry of public agency aircraft maintained by the Department of Public Safety, with an annual report to the Legislature every February. NRS 289.830 requires uniformed officers who routinely interact with the public to wear a portable event recording device, and requires every agency to adopt a written policy containing six named things, including a fifteen day retention floor.

The drone registry the statute promises

NRS 493.118 is the strongest transparency lever in Nevada law, because it does not just require agencies to register. It requires the Department of Public Safety to put the registry on its website, and to report to the Legislature every year. A resident should be able to look up whether their sheriff’s drones are registered without asking anyone.

We went looking for that registry on 4 September 2026. The department’s UAV registration page publishes the registration form, the statute and the regulations. It links no registry list and no annual report. Its footer gives a last update of 21 October 2025.

The only list we could find published on the department’s website is a PDF titled “Registered UAVs”. Its address contains the year 2021, and the most recent year appearing anywhere in its contents is 2018. It names sixteen agencies: the Carson City Fire Department, Carson City Public Works, the Carson City Sheriff’s Office, the City of Henderson, the City of Las Vegas, Clark County Public Communications, Clark County Public Works, the College of Southern Nevada, the Nevada Highway Patrol, the Elko County Sheriff’s Department, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, the Department of Transportation, NI AS, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the Division of Water Resources and the Division of Minerals.

That list also records each aircraft’s operators by name, with their contact details. We are not republishing those, and we do not link the file here for that reason. The agency names are public roles and are listed above.

Sixteen agencies is fewer than the number of Nevada agencies flying drones. Lyon County is one we can show: its sheriff budgets a recurring drone expense, sent four deputies to drone instructor training in May 2026, and bought an aircraft with donated money. Lyon County appears nowhere in the published list.

Read that carefully, because it is a finding about what the department publishes and not about what any county did. An agency that registered after that file was posted would not appear in it. The publication duty in NRS 493.118 sits with the Department of Public Safety. What we can say is that the route the statute lays out for a resident does not currently lead to a current answer.

If you want that answer, the request goes to the Department of Public Safety rather than to your county, and it asks for two things: the current public agency UAV registry, and the annual reports NRS 493.118 requires it to give the Legislature.

What we did not find is as useful. Nevada appears to have no statute governing automated license plate readers. The National Conference of State Legislatures keeps a survey of state ALPR statutes, and Nevada is not in it. Searching the titles of every chapter in the Nevada Revised Statutes returns no chapter on plate readers, facial recognition, biometrics or surveillance devices. That is a search of chapter titles and of one outside survey, not of every line of Nevada law, and it is written here as what it is. If you know of a provision we have missed, it belongs on this page.

The practical consequence for the counties below: a Nevada agency’s plate reader program is governed by whatever policy that agency chose to write, and by nothing else.