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 told 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.
Many 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 security 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. (The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“We see state and local police departments effectively being coopted, our data being used and abused by other government agencies,” said attorney Albert Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, one of the attorneys representing Sauve and Wridt in the case.
There’s at least one case the plaintiffs’ attorneys know of in which data originally collected in the Domain Awareness System was eventually shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
