Linn County

Linn County’s own website, and with it the Board of Commissioners’ record, is unread.

The surveillance in this county is mostly not the county’s anyway. Two of the three entries the EFF Atlas records here belong to Albany Police Department, and Albany’s website is wide open.

Albany PD publishes an index of its policy manual by number and title. Among them:

“0350 License Plate Recognition System”

and, in the technology block, “0632 Mobile Data Terminals”, “0633 Digital Media Recording”, “0634 Public Safety Camera System”, and in operations, “0660 Drones”.

That is corroboration, of a limited kind, for the Atlas record placing Flock Safety plate readers at Albany PD. The department publishes a policy for the technology. It does not confirm the vendor: the index contains no occurrence of Flock, ALPR, Vigilant or plate reader beyond the policy title itself. And this is an index of titles. The policy documents are not linked from it, so nothing here tells you what any of these policies say. Not what the plate reader is for, not how long reads are kept, not who may search them. The existence of a titled policy is the whole of the claim.

The department is more forthcoming about a different camera system. From its own page:

“The Albany Police Department utilizes automated red light and speed enforcement cameras at several City-owned intersections in Albany.”

Several is the city’s own word and not a count. The page, last updated in March 2026, links a statistics dashboard and an FAQ, and does not name the number of intersections, the vendor, the retention period, or the council vote that authorized the program.

The city also publishes a page about its drones, and it is a city page rather than a police one. Several departments fly them, for disaster and emergency response, search and rescue, training, promotional imagery, infrastructure inspection, and collection of GIS and infrared imagery. Every flight requires an FAA licensed Pilot in Charge and a designated Visual Observer. What the page does not say is how many aircraft the city owns, which departments hold them, or what is kept from a flight and for how long.

So the honest shape of this county is: a city that documents its surveillance reasonably well, and a county government whose record is unread. The Linn County Sheriff’s Office appears in the Atlas with DJI drones, and that stays an unconfirmed third party claim for as long as the county’s site is unread. No absence claim about Linn County government can be made from this page, because we have read none of its record.

Lebanon, Sweet Home and Harrisburg are unread.