Talia Kamran, Staff Attorney in the Seizure and Surveillance Defense Project, testified before the New York City Council Committees on Public Safety, Technology, Oversight & Investigations, and Public Housing regarding the NYPD’s access to surveillance cameras in NYCHA developments. Kamran warned that the program “violates the civil rights of NYCHA residents and unjustly places low-income New Yorkers under a microscope of government surveillance.” She called on the Council to halt the covert expansion, which threatens Fourth Amendment protections and disproportionately targets Black and Latinx communities.

"Many of the people that we represent live in heavily policed and highly surveilled communities. Low-income Black and brown communities bear the brunt of the New York Police Department’s (“NYPD”) privacy-destroying and harassing behavior, including through the wrongful seizure of their personal belongings, the unannounced addition of their deeply personal information (including DNA profiles, social networks, and every day habits) into unregulated law enforcement databases like the gang database, and the unceasing subjection of “the privacies of life” to police gaze through cameras, sensors, microphones, digital scraping tools, and their underlying, mass-aggregating databases like the Domain Awareness System (“DAS”).

"With the expansion of police-controlled cameras in NYCHA housing, tied to Big Apple Connect (“BAC”) Wi-Fi program – a free internet and cable program for public housing residents, the city is now extending that constant surveillance directly into people’s homes. New Yorkers, and directly surveilled NYCHA residents, would not have known about this program at all were it not for investigative reporting. The city did not disclose that Big Apple Connect was being leveraged to expand the NYPD’s live CCTV network until journalists brought it to light."

Read the full testimony here.