Lantern pulls together the jail roster, arrest blotters, street incidents, the state offender registry, FBI wanted persons, and a live, transcribed scanner feed for Springfield and Sangamon County — searchable in one place, running entirely on hardware its author owns. A transparency-first answer to the surveillance apps.
No cloud, no accounts, no data broker on the other end. Everything Lantern shows is already public — it just makes it legible, and refuses the capabilities that would make it a surveillance tool.
Runs on hardware its author owns. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is sold, there's no account and no tracker — the opposite of a Flock camera or a data broker.
Every source is data a resident could already request or read: the jail roster, arrest blotters, the registry, scanner audio in the clear. Lantern only gathers it.
Built for residents, journalists, and civic hackers — not for surveilling neighbors. Freshness flags and a FOIA co-pilot hold agencies to account when they stop publishing.
Scanner audio is transcribed and summarized by a local model on a local GPU. No API keys, no transcripts leaving the machine.
Each is scraped on its own schedule and cross-referenced by person and place. Every record carries how current it is — and says so plainly when a feed goes stale.
Counts as of the most recent scrape. Full provenance and freshness for every source lives on the in-app transparency report.
A tool that demands transparency from institutions owes the same about itself. These rules run in code, before anything publishes — and are published in full.
The full picture — live incidents, dossiers, the map, and the transcribed dispatch log — is one click away. The public-data view needs no account.