An NYPD Camera Points Directly Into Their Bedroom. They’re Suing the City Over It.

On a quiet street in Brooklyn s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood a camera owned and operated by the New York City Police Department points directly at the bedroom window of Pamela Wridt and Robert Sauve It can see potentially directly into any part of our house Sauve reported The Intercept The camera is one of tens of thousands that feed into a massive warrantless surveillance system that police use to track and profile millions of New Yorkers each day Numerous of the cameras including those mounted to drones and helicopters as well as stationary cameras like the one just outside Wridt and Sauve s bedroom and living room are owned operated and bear the logo of the NYPD Footage from tens of thousands of other privately owned cameras however like those posted outside of shops businesses and banks are also made available to the NYPD through a little-publicized tool that holds one of the world s biggest networks of defense cameras the city s Domain Awareness System Wridt and Sauve are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed Monday against the city of New York which holds responsibility for the NYPD over the department s expansive surveillance machine one of the largest in the world that their attorneys say violates their First and Fourth Amendment rights to free association expression and privacy TKTK NYPD COMMENT The suit is the first of its kind of take on the NYPD surveillance system We see state and local police departments effectively being coopted our statistics being used and abused by other regime agencies revealed attorney Albert Cahn of the Surveillance Instrument Oversight Project one of the attorneys representing Sauve and Wridt in the affair There s at least one matter the plaintiffs attorneys know of in which figures originally collected in the Domain Awareness System was eventually shared with U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch was an architect of the surveillance apparatus which police use to join evidence from populace and private sources across the city collecting information on people s identities their biometric material their daily movements their social media activity and people with whom they associate The NYPD uses that information combined with forms of machine learning to build profiles that construct the sessions religious and political affiliations and thoughts and beliefs of millions of people and stores the information indefinitely The NYPD is a model for the nearly state and local police departments across the country that are increasingly acting like mini-NSA and CIA operations Attorneys in the New York circumstance hope it will be the start of a wider effort to take on police surveillance networks in other cities where police departments with bipartisan advocacy and unprecedented amounts of cash have built up their surveillance threshold and weaponizing it to political ends The NYPD may be the worst offender but they re also a model for the nearly state and local police departments across the country that are increasingly acting like mini-NSA and CIA operations Cahn explained American policing runs on details You Are Being Watched The reach of the surveillance is largely unknown to multiple city dwellers but the Domain Awareness System received citizens scrutiny during the police search for Luigi Mangione who was tracked using the multitude of cameras throughout the city to which the NYPD has access You are being watched the plaintiffs wrote in their suit At present throughout New York City the police are monitoring tracking and cataloguing you Nearly everywhere Nearly all the time All that surveillance is made doable by the Domain Awareness System they wrote It is a voyeuristic policing platform that unifies into one centralized system more than a dozen technologies residents and private including video camera systems tracking technologies biometric tools input and financial aggregation analytics and digital communications monitors Companies like Microsoft Clearview AI Patternizr and Dataminr have all bolstered the NYPD s surveillance system which feeds into controversial policing tools like the citywide gang database and ShotSpotter Attorneys hope the lawsuit will shed light on other private companies and federal agencies that have access to evidence collected by the NYPD There is no one firm that is really enabling this mass surveillance Cahn mentioned That s what s key to this lawsuit Related Kathy Hochul Is Ready to Spend Millions on New Police Surveillance Through the system the NYPD collects the identity location banking details wagon information social media activity and friend groups of all who live in or enter the city It combines these entries with civil and criminal records and converts them into digital profiles reconstructing in effect the private lives of millions It is virtually impossible to avoid according to the suit Previous lawsuits and legislative battles have targeted smaller pieces of the surveillance system but the new occurrence focuses on the broader constitutional harm that plaintiffs say is greater than the sum of its parts Aggregated material enables the NYPD to uncover constitutionally protected activity says the suit such as political expression religious practice or private association that would be unknowable from any single source Not a Hot Spot for Crime Since the camera was first installed outside Wridt and Sauve s home in April the couple announced it s changed the character of her neighborhood and negatively affected their mental robustness and well-being We had to mirror tint all our windows We can t open them because if we do we re exposed Sauve revealed There s very hot days I like having my windows open I can t even do that Wridt stated her house no longer feels like a home Your home is supposed to be your safe space and I feel very violated she declared It s constant It never goes away that level and feeling of violation The couple explained the surveillance has been a point of contention and disagreement among their neighbors They ve notified others who live on their block and engaged certain of them in their efforts to get rid of the cameras Related License Plate Surveillance Courtesy of Your Homeowners Association Specific people are uncomfortable with the cameras and don t spend as much time outside on the block anymore Wridt explained And while their neighborhood hasn t had an issue with crime others see it as their own personal defense system Our approach has been to educate our neighbors and let them decide how they would like to proceed Wridt explained There s no crime on our block This is not a hot spot for crime So of subject your brain is going to go in other directions why is it there It s like my greatest concern and my greatest fear was proven At first Sauve and Wridt weren t sure where the cameras feeds went When they learned that they were collected into the city s wider surveillance arrangement they felt repulsed Now Suave worries that lack of masses knowledge about the Domain Awareness System breeds complacency and gives officers the space to entrench it It s like my greatest concern and my greatest fear was verified Sauve commented People that are oblivious to the whole surveillance state we re in they re getting more and more secure with it being there The post An NYPD Camera Points Directly Into Their Bedroom They re Suing the City Over It appeared first on The Intercept