New Yorkers may soon have a much better understanding of how the NYPD uses technology to conduct surveillance, track cell phones and maintain its facial recognition database.
An appeals court ruling last Thursday ordered the Police Department to disclose all documents related to those technologies — and others — that were part of the estimated $3 billion in contracts the department entered into between March 2007 and October 2020 and were shielded from public view under terms of the Special Expenses, or SPEX, program.
The NYPD, which has described SPEX expenditures as vital to public safety, specifically efforts to fight terrorism, could ask the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to overturn the unanimous ruling issued by the lower court, the Appellate Division, First Department.
Jerome Greco, who heads Legal Aid’s digital forensics unit, called the ruling a victory for transparency that will allow New Yorkers to see how their money is being spent “and what privacy measures were included in these contracts.”
Jerome Greco of the Legal Aid Society. (stopspying.org)
“We expect to learn how much is being spent on these different technologies and services and the terms of those contracts — how they’re supposed to be used and what security or privacy measures were included in these contracts,” he said.
Many of the technologies used by the NYPD are well-known, with various details revealed in recent years in a variety of ways, including in reports by the city Department of Investigation, during criminal trials and in documents, though heavily redacted, from the city comptroller’s office.
“But we expect that there may be a lot that has been hidden and not previously revealed,” Greco said.
The Legal Aid Society filed a Freedom of Information Law request in October 2020 for the SPEX information, but the NYPD refused, calling the request not conducive to a proper search for the information.
Legal Aid then went to court, with a judge in October 2023 ruling in Legal Aid’s favor. The NYPD appealed, but in the ruling last week the appeals panel criticized the “vacuousness” of the FOIL denial, noting that the documents in question were easily accessible. The ruling also criticized the NYPD’s later argument, that a request for the documents was burdensome.
An NYPD lawyer had testified that to meet Legal Aid’s demand he and one other NYPD employee with access to the documents would have to review some 165,000 pages. But the court ruling said the lawyers could not adequately explain why it would “take years” to do so.
The NYPD, the ruling said, most now “provide a rolling production every quarter and provide status updates on its compliance.”
The SPEX program was shut down in late 2020 after the passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act.
The NYPD has been accused since then of not adhering to the POST Act guidelines regarding new proposed technologies, though police have said the department is in compliance.