What this is

Nothing To See Here is a running, sourced timeline of how license-plate readers, body cameras, AI report-writers, drones, gunshot detection and the rest of the "public-safety technology" market are actually going — and what the failures cost the people paying for them.

The format is borrowed, with credit, from Web3 is Going Just Great: one vertical timeline, newest first, each entry a few dry sentences with its sources attached, and a counter in the corner that adds up the money. The entries are deadpan on purpose. The facts carry the irony; we don't have to.

This site takes no position on whether any of these tools should exist. It records what happened when they were bought, deployed, misread, breached, litigated, audited or cancelled — with a citation for every claim.

THE TAB

THE TAB is the number in the corner. It answers one question: how much public money has demonstrably been spent because this technology failed, was misused, or had to be abandoned.

It counts, on published entries only:

• settlements and judgments paid by a government (not by the vendor);
• fees, contract balances or termination payments on systems a government cancelled or abandoned;
• refunds a government had to issue; fines a government paid;
• legal fees a government paid defending the technology's use.

It does not count:

• ordinary contract spend on a system still in use — we record it on the entry, marked "not on THE TAB", so the page can still show it;
• vendor valuations, funding rounds or revenue;
• private settlements paid by vendors;
• anything we estimated rather than a source printed. An estimate is labelled as one on the entry and never enters the counter, even if it looks conservative.

Every figure carries its source's precision and its source. When in doubt, it stays off the tab and on the page. The counter is a floor, not a total: most of what these systems cost never gets a number in public.

How entries are made

Sourced

Every entry cites at least one source, and every claim in the body traces to one of them — primary documents (court filings, council minutes, audits, contracts) and local reporting first, aggregators last. We store headlines, links and publishers, never article text. Where an archive copy exists it is linked as [archive].

Verified before it's visible

This site is produced by an automated pipeline, and we say so. A research pass finds incidents and writes a draft with its sources. A separate verification pass then fetches every cited page and tries to knock the draft down: any sentence no fetched source supports is removed, any figure or date is corrected to match the source, and any source that could not be fetched is dropped. A draft becomes public only when, in code, at least one fetched source supports the central claim, the date is supported, any dollar figure is printed by a fetched source together with who paid it, and no private name or address remains. Drafts that cannot be confirmed stay unpublished. Drafts whose sources turn out not to exist, or to describe a different event, are discarded and logged. The rules and the conditions are written down and applied the same way to every draft; ask and we'll share them.

Named with care

No private individual's name or home address appears here. Named plaintiffs in public court filings are the one exception, and only as such. Officers are named only when a source names them as the subject of formal findings. Vendors get the same standard as everyone else: we state what they said, and cite it.

Corrected in the open

If something is wrong, tell us with a source. Corrections are made on the entry itself, the entry's updated date changes, and a material change is noted in the text. Entries are never quietly deleted.

Who makes it

Nothing To See Here is an independent accountability project built and powered by ET3 Media, a creative studio in Norwalk, CT. ET3 Media designs, builds and pays for the site; it sells no product in this market, takes no advertising, and runs no analytics that can identify a reader. The colophon in the footer of every page is that disclosure, and it is the only place ET3 appears in the design.

Format credit and licence

The timeline format follows Web3 is Going Just Great by Molly White, whose code is MIT-licensed. We copied the idea and the shape, not the brand. Our text is CC BY 4.0; our code is MIT-licensed. Want to help? See Contribute.

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