How surveillance crept up on us

For years, police have spent billions of tax dollars on watching us, tracking us, and recording us. In the largest police department in the country, these surveillance systems were paid for and adopted without the kind of public oversight cities usually require. In the wake of 9/11, the New York Police Department built one of the most sophisticated and omnipresent surveillance systems in the country. And while decisions were being made about what tech to adopt and how much to pay for it, few outside the NYPD were consulted. Not the City Council nor the public. For over a decade, the only paper trail of these purchases were offline, stored in filing cabinets, inaccessible to the public. Today on the show, how the country’s largest police department built its surveillance system, and the fight to get police everywhere to tell us how they’re watching us. Read: Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUBOur weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuwsTikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrqYouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3CFacebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. This episode was produced by Vito Emanuel and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Music: NPR Source Audio - "Funky Space Mama," "Sunday Lights," and "Blammo" See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  A couple of months ago, I got put on a grand jury. Now, this is not the kind of jury where you have to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This was the kind of jury where you sit and watch a bunch of cases. Prosecutors for each case come in, present evidence, and then ask us, is there enough evidence to proceed to trial? A grand jury might see dozens of cases. It's a kind of triage at the beginning of the jury system, and it's there to protect people from the state, you know, overreaching, trying to put people on trial without enough evidence. And for me, it was a really intense month. The prosecutors played videos for us of thefts in progress and assaults and attempted murders

• 1:05Speaker 02

  and a couple of murder murders. It was kind of brutal. Now, look, we all know there are cameras everywhere. Everyone is talking about those flock automated license plate readers and what their local police departments are doing with that info. But I did not understand the extent of it, just how vast it is. I did not know I was being watched on practically every street, every corner, in every store, on every subway. So as my time as a juror was wrapping up, I called up Michelle Dahl. She runs the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, also known as STOP, because they are trying to stop surveillance. And I wanted to talk about how much video the New York City Police Department seemed to have access to.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  So I feel like I'm an aware person in the city, but was shocked by grand jury duty. And so I called your organization, STOP, and discovered that you couldn't really answer my call because you were on grand jury duty.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  How did that happen? Like, did nobody ask you what you do for a living?

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Oh, I volunteered the information. I said, I'm a civil rights lawyer. Is this going to be an issue?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Weirdly, it wasn't. We were on grand jury duty at the same time, on the same floor, in adjoining courtrooms.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  We must have crossed paths at some point.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  There was a farmer's fridge. I ate that. It was old, a little.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  I never tried that, but I did get a couple Celsius drinks.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  We are not allowed to talk to each other or tell you about the specific cases we saw or the witnesses we heard from. We have been sworn to secrecy. But we can talk very broadly about the experience. So for example, let's say a grand jury was shown video of a hit and run. There might be footage of the incident from a camera on the street. That's not all that surprising. But there might also be an edit, like dozens of videos of the vehicle driving for miles, shot from all sorts of cameras, all sorts of angles, in black and white, in color. Then the prosecutor might show a video still of the driver. And it was like, how did they do this?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Do the police go visit all the bodegas, you know, ask the state police for videos of the highways and then go to each and every business on the route to edit all of these videos together? Michelle says they often don't have to. Work that used to take days now can take just minutes because police can pull it all from this massive system.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  And it acts essentially as a search engine. Police officers can type in a person's name, and it will pull up a profile of that person, pulling data from different databases that they have.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  They might also be able to type in an address and pull up video.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  So it draws data from 80,000-plus cameras across the city, footage from drones, automated license plate readers, facial recognition tech can be used alongside it, and it's done without a warrant.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  A warrant, like an official permission slip from a judge to invade your privacy and search you or your stuff if it seems like you might have broken a law.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  And so we're just mass monitoring everyone for the chance that something might happen.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Michelle's not saying that the police just sit around all day watching videos to wait and see if one of us is criming, but they have so many details about us and our lives available to them within seconds. I mean, whether this is good or bad, I just don't remember agreeing to all this. And that's because when it comes to the details, almost no one did.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  When I started to look into how and why the city where I live set up a massive all-watching system, like picture a digital version of one of those bulletin boards with all the red strings tying together faces to names to locations to today to a year ago. I ended up talking to the NYPD, to government officials, to researchers, and to lawyers to figure out what happened. Turns out that while decisions were being made about what tech to adopt and how much to pay for it, almost no one was consulted. For a long time, the only paper trail was offline, stored in filing cabinets, kept under lock and key.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Aronchek. For years, police have argued for security over transparency and spent billions of tax dollars without our permission on watching us, tracking us, recording us. Today on the show, how this all went down with the largest police department in the country and the fight to get police everywhere to tell us how they're watching us.

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• 7:01Speaker 02

  I'm going to tell you this story in two parts. The first is about how this web of surveillance ended up on every NYPD-issued cellphone. The second part is about how that web grew so big without any of us agreeing to it. So it's a story about the rise of the surveillance system and the secrecy that built it. To start off, I wanted to talk with someone who remembers what policing was like back in the day, without all the fancy tech and video cameras. So I got in touch with former NYPD captain Joe Pascarella, who remembers thinking back in the early 2000s, more video might be helpful for police.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  You know, at the time, I didn't think we were doing a good job in the NYPD.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  The NYPD was being heavily criticized for what was known as stop and frisk, where police officers were stopping mostly young people of color and searching them based on some vague notion of suspicion.

• 7:54Speaker 05

  So I thought, you know, a good way to cut down stops, just film everybody instead.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  That is what you thought?

• 8:01Speaker 05

  That was my thought, you know, non-physical policing.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  So, right, in the early days of more camera surveillance, it was seen as a fix for something.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. I think it was a fix for, you know, less physical policing. You know, in a camera, there's a lot. You get a field of view, you get a direction, you could get someone's gait, you can get their biometrics. You could get a lot more off a camera than a physical observation.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  And is this, I can't tell what your take is on that. Like, is that positive, is that negative?

• 8:29Speaker 05

  You know, I don't know. It's hard to say. It's in that public safety versus individual rights. Depends on, you know, the old adage, where you sit is where you stand.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Joe now sits at a desk at St. Joseph's University in Brooklyn. There, he's a professor of criminal justice and cybersecurity, and he's got more time to think about the ways technology might step on people's rights. But when he was first starting out, all the way back in 1991, he was mostly thinking about how to stay safe.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  My first role is actually I'm walking a footpost in Times Square.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Times Square footpost in 1991.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  Times Square was actually a quite harrowing place.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Today, you might go to Times Square to get your initials put on some M&Ms at the flagship M&M store. But back in that era, if you were going to Times Square, it was probably to go get some porn.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  Then actually, it went from a porn haven to a place to go buy crack or, you know, illegal things like guns and all kinds of things you could buy at the street. It was quite a shock, actually.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  And that was your job?

• 9:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was the job. And basically, what they wanted you to do was, quote unquote, "clear your footpost." You know, when the sergeant drove around, did not want to see drug dealers, did not want to see, you know, unfortunately homeless people.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  And are you using any technology at all?

• 9:45Speaker 05

  No technology, actually. You did have a radio, and, you know, obviously, you have your other self-defense weapons, but your biggest technology actually was your mouth.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  You know, Joe's talking to everybody on the block, he's making connections, he's trying to keep it peaceful, keep it orderly. And he's got his gun and his radio with him if he needs to call for backup. But if someone called in a stolen car or a break in, there wasn't much here the detectives could do. At that time, the police were solving fewer than a fifth of property crimes.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  There used to be an old joke where, you know, how'd you arrest this burglar while he jumped into the back of my patrol car?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, fingerprinting and DNA profiling existed, but both were pretty limited. There just weren't that many tools. Over the 1990s, though, police all over the country adopted lots of the new innovative technologies, cell phones and computer databases and video and mapping. But what truly transformed the NYPD was not one single tech innovation. It was actually a conceptual shift of what the police department was for. This came in the aftermath of 9/11. Up to that point, had counterterrorism been a thing that had been part of your workload?

• 10:58Speaker 05

  It was not a part of our workload. And more importantly, we thought it was someone else that was going to take care of it.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Like counterterrorism. That was the CIA's job, or the FBI's. But 9/11 was a massive intelligence failure. And if the federal government couldn't tell the city what was coming, then the NYPD was like, look, we have to protect ourselves. We need to see what's coming at us and stop it before it does. So the NYPD starts going from being a local police department into also being a counterterrorism force.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  You know, we had to really account for, you know, everything from all the way down to the bottom of the rivers to the top of the skies and, you know, building by building. It's the basis of the Brooklyn Bridge, the basis of the Manhattan Bridge. And also our air. I started seeing a lot of air monitors to make sure that, you know, there's not a terror attack released in the air. It's a very, very big city.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  And all of the changes to scale up were really, really expensive. So the city lobbied the federal government to get massive Homeland Security grants. And so did police departments across the country. They also wanted to be ready for the next terrorist attack. There was a huge battle to get that money. Ultimately, Joe watched the NYPD get quite a lot of federal dollars.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  Lots, billions, billions. Just all kinds of federal resources for counterterrorism. So built out a lot in personnel, a lot of equipment, a lot of technology.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  With all of this money pouring in, the NYPD had the resources to, you know, send its own detectives to other countries, expand a joint terrorism task force to work more closely with federal agencies, to hire a former CIA guy to lead intelligence, and to amass all kinds of new technology to help the police see and hear and learn about anything bad that might happen in New York. At first, the aim of all this is to prevent a truck bomb or bioweapon attack by spotting a suspicious license plate or maybe an unattended backpack. But then, the mission started to creep, both figuratively and geographically.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  So, you know, you could put up a camera. It's, you know, we used to call it a double bang for your buck. You put up a camera to try to stop terrorism and you're also, you know, you have enough surveillance for, you know, local disorder and crime problems.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Double bang for your buck. Looking for terrorists might also be able to catch a burglar. So now, to do both. They've got the federal money pouring in, plus all of this private and corporate money going to groups like the nonprofit Police Foundations. After 9/11, there was a surge in donations to these kinds of groups across the country. In New York, the NYPD begins to build what will arguably become the most advanced high-tech surveillance and intelligence platform in the country. It starts with gathering what they know into one place. So this means like databases and criminal records and 911 calls, a ton of data. Then they centralize all that info

• 14:03Speaker 02

  into a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week real-time crime center, which launched in 2005. So say a detective was investigating a serious shooting. They could call.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  Call up, are there any cameras in the areas? You know, I have this license plate. Can you run this against the database? As opposed to going back to the detective squad officers getting on the computer. So it evolved into a very, very important help center to try to solve crimes.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  The NYPD also started to build a way to watch the city. A network of cameras, license plate readers, radiation detectors. In 2008, they launched the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. And here, the city did something quite savvy. It was expensive to buy and put up cameras everywhere. And low and behold, a lot of the private businesses and buildings near Wall Street already had cameras set up. So the NYPD goes to these businesses and is like, hey, what if you sent your video feed directly to us? You know, share your cameras. And lots of places agree to this, like the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs. And eventually, this becomes so normalized

• 15:16Speaker 02

  that the NYPD even creates an explainer video about how, like, the bodega, or, I don't know, Grey's Papaya, could share their video too with the NYPD.

• 15:26Speaker 06

  By enrolling in Connect New York, you could play a crucial role in enhancing public safety and enabling swifter responses to incidents.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Today, Connect New York is just one of multiple programs for sharing video with the NYPD.

• 15:40Speaker 06

  You could opt to provide live access to your camera feeds. Or you can register your camera locations for easy reference when assistance is needed.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  In the years that followed the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, the video network extended all across the city. And eventually, this public-private model of shared camera networks becomes a model for other cities across the country. And then, the NYPD has its biggest, boldest idea yet. What if we mix the chocolate with the peanut butter? We've got all this data. We also have this enormous network of cameras. What if we put it all together into a massive centralized platform? They bring in Microsoft to help. Just so you know, Microsoft is a sponsor of NPR. The NYPD then spends the next four years developing a platform with a military-inspired name.

• 16:35Speaker 07

  Today, we're announcing the full launch of the Domain Awareness System.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  In 2012, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg formally launched the Domain Awareness System from a secure command center. He is flanked by cops and surrounded by live video monitors. It's really giving Batcave.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  We're not your mom and pop's police department anymore. We are in the next century. We are leading the pack. That's exactly what you would expect us to do.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  He wrapped up in Bloomberg Spanish.

• 17:06Speaker 07

  El departamento de policia ha creado un nuevo sistema.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Anyway, the Domain Awareness System is a big part of why I had the experience I had on grand jury duty. Why grand juries today can watch videos from all over the city, from all kinds of cameras, all edited together. And why the police can connect videos to people using license plate readers and geolocation. All that red string tying the story together, leading to names and ultimately arrests. Four years later, in 2016, the NYPD was a finalist for an international award for the Domain Awareness System. And at the awards ceremony, a deputy commissioner, now commissioner, Jessica Tisch, she reveals the scale of what the Domain Awareness System can do

• 17:57Speaker 02

  and the extent of its reach.

• 17:59Speaker 07

  We currently have 2 billion license plate reads, 100 million summonses, 54 million 911 calls, 15 million complaints, 12 million detective reports, 11 million arrest records, 2 million warrants, and 30 days of video from 9,000 cameras.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And this is just in New York. But she makes it clear that hundreds of other law enforcement agencies from dozens of other countries have come to tour the Batcave, to learn from it. Police all over the country and the world are incorporating similar systems into their police departments. Let me emphasize.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Every day, we have more than 10,000 cops using the analytics in DAS to inform their decision making.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  And this was a decade ago. Now, way more cops use it.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Using analytics, we can have a safer city and a fairer city, too.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Tish said at the time that the domain awareness system was helping police reduce crime and prevent terrorist attacks. We reached out to the NYPD to see if Commissioner Tish or another rep from the NYPD would speak with us, and they declined to be recorded. But I did talk to a spokesperson, Bradley Weeks, about the details in this story. And he said that the domain awareness system has made New Yorkers safer. In a statement, they said, quote, "Anyone who has ever called 911 for help, been the victim of a crime, or who cares about their safety has benefited from this system," unquote. Today, New York is considered one of the safest cities in the country, although sorting

• 19:34Speaker 02

  out whether that's because of population growth, or economics, or policing policy is kind of hard to do. When it comes to security cameras more broadly, a meta-analysis of 40 years' worth of studies found that cameras do reduce car theft. But overall, it's not clear that more cameras equal less crime. Do you, when you walk around, do you just see cameras?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  I do. I kind of can't help but spot them.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Recently, I went on a sort of surveillance tech tour with Michelle Dahl, my fellow grand juror.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Right here, there's another one there.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Her group is very opposed to the NYPD's use of the domain awareness system. That's our third camera. Stop, her group, has recently sued the city, saying the system violates our constitutional rights to privacy and free speech.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  1415 here.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  So they have done a lot of research on what the NYPD is using.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  All right, if we want to pause here, there's a really good view of the camera right up there.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Michelle points upwards at a large tan box attached to a streetlight with an NYPD sticker on it.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  And it's got a little dome, so it's also likely a 360 camera. We know that they can do 360, pan, tilt, zoom, and basically, one camera can cover an entire block and get good enough resolution to identify somebody's face on the entire city block.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  We then continue a couple of blocks, and we stop in a park. A cop walks by.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  This police officer is on his phone. Every police officer in the city can access the domain awareness system on their police-issued phones.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  The NYPD said that not all officers can access video from their phones, but there's lots of other data.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  So if he came over here and stopped us, he could look us up and take our IDs and look up our profiles in the domain awareness system, which would show all the information they have about us, things like 311 calls, any past criminal records.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  What are the odds that they have me in there?

• 21:34Speaker 03

  I mean, have you lived here for any period of time?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  I asked the NYPD this question, if I'm in the domain awareness system or not, and they said that if I had a driver's license or a car registered in New York, then yeah, I'm in there. But they said they would not look me up for, like, no reason. It can only be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes, like criminal investigations or civil litigation. Over the past 35 years, we have gone from practically no cameras in the streets to practically no streets without cameras. And since 9/11, those cameras have been integrated into this web of tech, tracking our movements and our faces, and tying them to our names, birthdates, addresses, phone numbers, and more.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  So I've told you the story of the rise of this incredibly thorough surveillance system in New York. Now, for the story of how a lot of it happened behind our backs. And that is because there has been a kind of technological creep. And a lot of that creep happened in secret. In New York, there was an actual secret agreement to keep this hidden. The NYPD went to the mayor and a handful of city agencies and was like, what if we wanted to buy a lot of new police stuff, but we wanted to keep it on the down-low? After the break, the secret agreement that kept thousands of police purchases and tech

• 23:03Speaker 02

  contracts out of the public eye, and the fight to expose it all.

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• 24:46Speaker 02

  So in law enforcement, there is this tension between security and transparency. Because when the police are trying to catch bad guys, they don't want the bad guys to know all the things that they're up to. But that secrecy allows law enforcement to use tools we don't know about, and that can be risky, too. This half of this story is about a secret deal that allowed police to build a massive surveillance system without much public oversight. This deal came to light when, in New York, a few key people started noticing that the police had some new tactics and tricks that they weren't telling the public about. One of those key people was the former New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Comptroller, comptroller.

• 25:32Speaker 06

  Comptroller.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  In New York, that means the person in charge of city finances. When Scott Stringer came into office in 2014, he was told that if the NYPD wanted to buy some new tech or software that they didn't want to make public for security reasons, they could classify it as a special expense, a special expense that did not need to be scrutinized by the city council or by the public.

• 25:56Speaker 06

  So they would come in, they would brief us about what they wanted to do. And in the old agreement, it was like, OK, wink, wink, nod, nod. Security, we understand.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  This wink, wink, nod, nod system had been established years earlier, all the way back in 2007, when the comptroller and former mayor Bloomberg, plus a couple of city agencies, agreed to a memo of understanding with NYPD about the special expenses.

• 26:22Speaker 06

  Well, you know, remember, it was not that far away from 9/11.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:27Speaker 06

  And so part of what I think people felt was that enhanced security and having every tool at your disposal was important.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  But Scott Stringer was like, ah, is this OK? Normally, when a city agency wants to make some big purchase, even a new set of history books for sixth graders, there's a whole process for it, and it's designed to ensure public accountability. They take requests for bids, select a vendor, submit that vendor to be vetted, and within that process, there might be a big public debate about it.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  It's a check, and we are a city of checks and balances. That's why we have a city council, that's why you have a comptroller, that's why you have an independent budget office. You know, all of this is to check a very powerful police department and a powerful mayor, no matter who the mayor is.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  So a few years into the wink, wink, nod, nod agreement with the NYPD, Scott Stringer was like, ah, maybe skipping public debate about all of this new tech that the NYPD is buying is a mistake.

• 27:26Speaker 06

  When you're going to look at a technology, well, it can't be, you know, five guys in a room. It has to be, will this pass the smell test? Are we dealing with good actors? Are the contractors honest? Is their pay to play? A tool is important if it's effective, but how do we measure if it's effective if there's no oversight?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Now, it wasn't just the comptroller who was worrying about what the police department was buying or what they were up to. Civil liberties advocates were like, is this even legal? All over the United States, there are longstanding rules about what information police departments can collect about people before they become suspects in a crime. So for example, police are not supposed to spy on people because of their political or religious beliefs, or demand data on people just to see who was near a crime scene, or search someone's home without a warrant. Did any of the tools woven into the domain awareness system in those early years cross any existing lines or break any rules?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  At the time, and without more information, it was hard to know. Over at the Legal Aid Society, a lawyer named Jerome Greco was seeing evidence of all kinds of new NYPD surveillance tools in court. At the time, he was defending clients, kind of like the people I was seeing in the videos while I was on grand jury duty. He remembers one particular case from 2016.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  We had a client who had a one-night stand. The NYPD was looking for him and found him at that woman's apartment and were like, he has no connection to this woman before this night. Tell us how you found him and, you know, crickets.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Had they tracked his cellphone? If so, how? Jerome wanted to know, were these tools legal and effective? But he also wanted to know, could he buy his own? Not for like eavesdropping or wiretapping, but tools to extract data from cellphones or laptops or enhance video. You guys have bought these things for yourself?

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Yes, well, I wouldn't say for ourselves, for our clients.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I see. Like if the NYPD has data from a cellphone, Jerome can also check the data for himself, make sure the evidence is accurate. He even goes to some of the same conferences that police go to to do some shopping.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  We go to see the vendors and they're talking about, and this will help you catch the bad guy. And they'll give us a whole little spiel. And then they'll say, where are you guys from? And like LegalAid, we're public defenders. And just watching their face like drop, they're like, oh.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  A lot of the reps from the tech companies are also former police officers themselves, which Jerome worries gives the products a kind of stamp of approval without due diligence.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  How much are we evaluating what they're saying? Right? They say, oh, this worked this way and it'll capture this. It's like, well, did you evaluate that at all before you decided to sign on the dotted line?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  And before spending what is usually taxpayer money. Now, today, the NYPD says they have a strict procurement and vendor review process. But back then, the main reason Jerome knew that the NYPD was buying all of this tech was because of what he was seeing in courtrooms. But the contracts themselves, with the names of the companies, the cost of the products, and those signatures on the dotted lines, those were mostly hidden from the public. And these kinds of surveillance tech contracts have also been kept quiet in police departments around the country through non-disclosure agreements or off-the-books funding. Funding like from those police foundations that raised a bunch of money after 9/11?

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Or sometimes through federal grants? Police have more latitude to spend that kind of outside money without public oversight. For years, civil liberties groups had been pushing for more concrete information. In New York, Jerome says that they tried but could not get answers.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  The NYPD had been stonewalling everybody and it either got very limited or none.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  It wasn't until 2020, with the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd by police, that something kind of shook loose. The protesters were being videotaped and there was lots of debate about them ending up in police databases. A wave of cities passed laws that forced police to be more transparent about the tech they were using. In New York, former city council member Vanessa Gibson had already introduced the POST Act, the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act. Now, because of the protests, it passed. Today, today is a very important day in our city where the New York City Council will take a very bold step forward in recognizing that a sleeping nation has finally woke up

• 32:16Speaker 02

  following the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. A couple of weeks after the POST Act passes, former comptroller Scott Stringer also decides to end that wink, wink, nod, nod agreement with the police, officially withdraws from it.

• 32:29Speaker 06

  I decided at that point, we need to disclose all of this.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Now, Stringer says that unless the NYPD can make an urgent and specific argument for why something should remain secret, when the police propose adopting a new technology, they have to tell the public about it on the NYPD POST Act disclosure page. And then when they buy something new, that goes online, too. But we still don't know the full story of what the NYPD bought or who they bought it from before the POST Act. A few months later, Scott Stringer released his office's copies of these special expenses, but they were heavily redacted. So Jerome from LegalAid, he is still on a mission to make sure his team of public defenders has the tech they need to counter what the NYPD is using.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  He says he still wants to see all those old contracts. LegalAid filed a lawsuit asking for their release.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  So in response to our lawsuit, part of what they said was that it would be a Herculean effort to provide us with all these documents that they'd have to go through because it was 165,000 pages of documents.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  165,000 pages worth of files and contracts between the police department and tech vendors. Those are the contracts the NYPD says exist only on paper in 22 filing cabinet drawers. Because of Jerome's lawsuit, the NYPD is now required to make those documents public. And they have started to. So now you can see that the NYPD paid $45 million to SecureWatch24 for their cameras or that they paid $11.5 million to MorphoTrack for improving the identification of biometrics, like things like fingerprints and palms and irises. There is also a contract for purchasing and maintaining cellular tracking systems. But so far, they have turned over

• 34:23Speaker 02

  about 600 of the 165,000 pages. NYPD not making it easy.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  But I don't care.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  And I will continue. And if it means, you know, we'll be litigating this until I am at my grave, then maybe that's what we will do. But, you know, there's also a principle here at this point, too, which is that you shouldn't be allowed to hide these things from the public, right? You shouldn't, it shouldn't be acceptable, and it's not.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Now Jerome is just one guy in one city. But with Flock license plate readers all over the news, across the country, people are showing up at their local city council meetings. In San Diego, one guy went dressed up as Darth Vader.

• 35:11Speaker 07

  The Emperor is a fan of Flock.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Back to our former police captain turned professor at a desk, Joe Pascarella. He says people should be asking for more transparency everywhere. He says when the public doesn't know what their local police department is doing, there's no way to verify or even know if these tools are effective. And it's hard to put in guardrails.

• 35:32Speaker 06

  It's a problem because it doesn't give what we call a bright line rule in law enforcement. Law enforcement needs a bright line rule. They need to tell you, all right, you can only keep this data for 60 days. If you tell them, you know, you can keep it within reason, they're just going to do whatever they want.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  A bright line rule?

• 35:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, it's called a bright line rule. You know, like Miranda. Essentially, if you're going to accuse someone, you have to give them their rights, right? If they're in custody, that's a bright line rule. It's pretty simple. Surveillance does not have any bright line rules.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Now, police departments are being forced to put in some bright line rules kind of after the fact, after they've adopted things like Flock cameras or facial recognition software. And these bright line rules might be more relevant than ever with the spread of AI. Like in the past, it was hard to imagine that anyone could actually watch all of those videos that the police were collecting. It was just like too time consuming. But once you start using AI to say, look through the hours of footage and look for unusual behavior, surveillance just got that much easier.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  If you like stories like this one, you can get more Planet Money in your inbox. Join 150,000 other readers, that's a lot of readers, and sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can sign up at npr.org/planetmoneynewsletter or at the link in the show notes.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Today's episode was produced by Vito Emanuel and edited by Mary Ann McCune. It was engineered by Sina LaFredo and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Thanks this week to Ron Craswell and to Matthew Goriglia. I'm Amanda Orancheck. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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