Photos:NYC Mayor’s Office\NY City Council\Amnesty International
“We need transparency to deter government abuses of these dangerous technologies and hold governments accountable when they break the law. Yet, many government agencies, including NYPD, refuse to provide this essential information to the public.”
In September, investigative journalists published NYPD documents that I obtained with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project after over a year of open record requests, delays, and denials. We showed the NYPD spent over $10 million on contracts with Voyager Labs, which scrapes global social media for everything from politics to protests. It was a major win to publish the contracts, but under local law, this information should have been public to begin with.
New York City passed a technology oversight law called the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act (POST Act) in 2020. New York’s law built upon the Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) model of California cities, including Berkeley, Davis, and Oakland. Under the POST Act and these other ordinances, government agencies must disclose the technology they use and how they use it, including internet surveillance like Voyager Labs.
The POST Act has been a partial success, uncovering the general descriptions of NYPD’s surveillance tools and enabling the litigation that revealed this Voyager contract. But years later, NYPD continues violating the POST Act by refusing to disclose basic information about this technology in public reports and twisting the POST Act’s language to maintain secrecy over public investments and police operations.
