SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY OVERSIGHT PROJECT INC

S.T.O.P. launched in 2019 as a novel public interest, advocacy, and legal services organization. The Urban Justice Center hosts S.T.O.P. as one of five organizations in UJC’s 2019-2020 Social Justice Accelerator incubator. Our team uses litigation, legislation, education, and grass roots advocacy to fundamentally shift New Yorkers’ understanding of surveillance.

Our virtual law firm model leverages the pro bono assistance of private law firms to exponentially augment our staff’s litigation capacity. We already partner with more than a dozen of New York City’s leading law firms, including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP; Shearman & Sterling, LLP; and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, LLP. Our litigation agenda is nothing short of fundamentally redefining the scope of the Fourth amendments for the digital age. By the end of 10 years, we hope to establish a state constitutional right against warrantless searches that extends to third-party data (such as location data held by service providers).

S.T.O.P. is coordinating city and state-wide legislative campaigns, pushing long overdue reforms of surveillance. Our lead bill is the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which would close the appropriations loophole that lets the NYPD purchase unlimited surveillance equipment with federal grants and private donations. The POST Act is just the first step in a legislative agenda. At the end of 10 years, we will create legislative best practices for existing and emerging technologies, transforming New York into a model of surveillance oversight for the country.

Our Digital Self-Defense curriculum educates New Yorkers about the scope of local surveillance and how they can safeguard their privacy. Our workshops not only educate impacted communities about the scope of surveillance, but teach them how to use freely-available tools to promote privacy. These workshops, often held in conjunction with partner community-based organizations, also enable us to document community members’ reports about surveillance abuse. Our 10-year goal is to scale-up our course offerings, providing a comprehensive surveillance education curriculum.

Our advocacy work includes a mix of media engagement and non-violent direct actions. We educate reporters on breaking news about surveillance, helping broaden coverage. We strategically place op-eds and stories to shape the narrative around privacy. We engage in highly-visible protest tactics, such as “spy-ins”, where participants turn their cameras on law enforcement agencies. In 10 years, we want to transform local and state surveillance from a relatively-obscure topic into something as common as complaining about the subway.

In phase one, S.T.O.P will use our novel model to replicate privacy-protective legislation and court decisions from around the country. Since New York has fallen so far behind peer cities (and even progressive states) in addressing the adverse impact of privacy, we have a number of reforms we can quickly adapt and adopt here. In phase two, we will expand our work to make New York an early adopter of rights-protective measures. We will also shift our focus to include greater emphasis on state-wide reforms and New York localities apart from New York City.

In phase three, we will shift even more of our focus to statewide campaigns, while working to develop statutory proposals and litigation strategies that go further than anywhere else in the country. In phase four, we will expand our focus to also address technical support and guidance for community-based groups across the country. In short: first we make New York a model of privacy protections, and then we help the rest of the country replicate our success.

S.T.O.P. shows an unprecedented ability to leverage the private bar and existing stakeholders to amplify our impact. In a few months, we’ve successfully created a platform to provide more than a million dollars in free legal services and promote numerous advocacy and legislative campaigns (consistent with all local, state, and federal limitations on lobbying by a 501(C)(3) tax-exempt organization).

Because of the technical and legal barriers to entry, local advocacy groups often deprioritize surveillance and privacy campaigns. Many organizations focus on local surveillance as a small part of their mission, but S.T.O.P. uniquely focuses on state and municipal surveillance as the entirety of our work. This has quickly made S.T.O.P a leader in the New York privacy debate, creating a model we can replicate in other localities in the future.

As a corollary, because many organizations are aligned with S.T.O.P.’s privacy objectives, we amplify our impact through intersectional policy coalitions, reaching a broader audience than any one organization could alone. Our community advisory board includes members of many of the leading organization working on surveillance in New York, and our partnerships with other community-based organizations helps us reach segments of New York that are not yet engaged with these issues.

S.T.O.P.’s accomplishments prove that our model works. In 2020, we led 100 organizations to enact New York’s Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act – the first NYPD surveillance reform in a generation – forcing the NYPD to disclose every spy tool it uses. We also passed a statewide moratorium on K-12 facial recognition and the strongest privacy protections for COVID-19 contact tracing data in the country.

In court, we forced the NYPD to end its biased “hijab ban” policy, which required arrestees to remove head coverings for mugshots and fueled its facial recognition database. In California, S.T.O.P. brought a putative class action lawsuit alleging Thomson Reuters illegally sold personally identifying data to private companies, police, and ICE. Recently, S.T.O.P. won our motion to dismiss, establishing a powerful precedent for future cases and chill investment in deadly data-driven policing.

Our open records litigation and research empower the public to understand complex surveillance systems and regulations. We have published dozens of research papers and posts on topics ranging from warrantless cellphone seizures to congestion pricing. Our more than 100 op-eds have made us an international thought leader on privacy, technology, and law, addressing crucial issues of the day.

S.T.O.P.’s partnerships further amplify our impact, providing nearly $5 million in free legal services and campaigning on issues that previously received little public attention. We provide support and technical assistance to partners far beyond New York, including New Jersey, New Delhi, and countless places in between.