Watchlist

Watchlist lets someone draw a zone on a map, and every camera inside that zone keeps automatically looking for a person matching a physical description an officer typed in—without anyone having to watch the screens themselves. Once you tell all the CCTV cameras in an area "let me know if you see someone wearing this," the cameras keep watching on their own from then on.

Instead of picking from a fixed list of categories, the officer simply types the description as a sentence. That sentence is then automatically scored across several sensitive categories—race, religion, political or social expression, and more—and depending on the category, the search is either completely blocked, shown with a warning, or allowed through without issue. The problem is that searches containing political, social, or cultural expression are the only ones that aren't blocked outright; they just get a warning message, and once the officer checks a confirmation box, surveillance starts anyway.

News coverage describes it as "a Watchlist feature where drawing a zone on a map lets every camera inside it continuously and automatically search for a person matching a written description." Unlike older search tools that only looked for license plates, Watchlist is different in that it tracks a person's appearance based on a written description on an ongoing basis—and it's easy to miss that this isn't a single search producing a one-time result, but surveillance that keeps running continuously.