Brooklyn Defender Services warned the City Council that New York City’s rapidly expanding data-collection systems are exposing low-income and over-policed communities to unprecedented levels of surveillance and harm. Talia Kamran, Staff Attorney in the Seizure and Surveillance Defense Project, urged lawmakers to modernize privacy laws, curb discriminatory technologies like facial recognition and gang databases, and end the city’s reliance on tools that quietly funnel deeply personal information to law enforcement, “the normalization of stripping low-income and working-class New Yorkers, and particularly New Yorkers of color, of their privacy rights must come to an end.”

Read the full testimony here.