Evidence before assertion
Every material public claim is linked to its source, date, institutional context, and scope.
THE MONITOR SHOULD BE INSPECTABLE TOO
Trust is not a badge
It is a visible practice
Who Is Watching? asks public institutions to explain how surveillance systems work. This page explains the standards used to build, correct, and limit this record.
THE EDITORIAL CONTRACT
What a visitor can reasonably expect from this record
Observation before inference
A city record is not made national; legal authority is not made operational use; supplier presence is not made a contract.
Uncertainty remains visible
Missing or non-comparable public evidence remains a gap, not a reassuring zero or a dramatic assumption.
Correction is part of the method
Public submissions are reviewed privately. Accepted changes retain a public source-and-scope history.
SOURCE HIERARCHY
Not every public statement carries the same weight
The source level determines the wording that the monitor can responsibly use. It does not determine whether a lived concern is important.
Primary public record
Legal text, court decision, regulator record, public procurement notice, audit, or directly responsible public body.
Independent oversight
Ombud, data-protection authority, legislative committee, or information-access response.
Disclosed-method research
Peer-reviewed research, established investigation, or expert human-rights documentation.
Attributable reporting
Reputable journalism that identifies its record, people, or documents.
Lead, not proof
Supplier statement, public website, visual observation, or unattributed secondary claim; insufficient alone for a material claim.
THE PUBLICATION THRESHOLD
A claim needs a place, a time, a source, and a limit
Every incident entry names a country, a date or bounded period, an institutional or geographical scope, a category, a plain-language summary, an evidence state, a source, and a limitation. The first release favours accessible primary sources and directly attributable public-interest research.
See the incident recordCORRECTION AND REVIEW
A contribution is a source to be checked, not an accusation to be amplified
Unreviewed submissions remain private. Only accepted changes appear in the country file’s public update history, and contributor identity is not displayed by default.
Received
A contributor has submitted a source or correction.
Private to the contributor and reviewers.Needs source or scope
The record lacks an accessible source, bounded geography, time, or clear classification.
Private to the contributor and reviewers.Under review
A reviewer is checking the source, wording, scope, and evidence state.
Private to the contributor and reviewers.Accepted
A source-backed update meets the protocol.
Public change note with source, scope, and review date.Declined
The material cannot support publication under the protocol.
Private reviewer outcome; contributor identity is not published.WHAT WE DO NOT DO
No hidden index
No private data
No manufactured certainty
The monitor does not publish private personal data, unverified allegations about named individuals, detailed security-bypass instructions, or public conclusions from evidence that cannot be responsibly described. It does not treat the number of country records as a measure of surveillance prevalence, safety, legality, or rights performance.
Its value is more modest and more useful: giving people a way to follow a public claim back to its source, scope, date, uncertainty, and next question.
Read why the record exists