Listen: "Free" internet, mass surveillance: Brooklyn Defender Services on KPFA
Brooklyn Defender Services staff attorney Talia Kamran appeared on KPFA's Law and Disorder on September 3 to unpack Big Apple Connect, the New York City program that promised free internet to public housing residents and instead helped open the door to mass police surveillance. Kamran explained how the city wired NYCHA buildings with free Wi-Fi and then linked roughly 20,000 hallway, lobby, and elevator cameras into the NYPD's centralized Domain Awareness System, concentrating surveillance on residents who already bear far more of it than other New Yorkers. She traced the program's history, the secret NYPD agreement revealed during its renewal, and the tenant lawsuit now seeking to shut it down and delete the footage already collected. On the shift at the heart of the case, Kamran put it plainly: "Now it's just live-streamed into an app that every NYPD officer has on their department-issued cell phone. They no longer need a reason to troll the cameras."
