S.T.O.P.: Putting a Check on Unchecked Local N.Y. Government Surveillance

Recently I got the chance to speak with longtime Electronic Frontier Alliance member Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.). They’ve got a new Advocacy Manager, Kat Phan, and exciting projects are coming down the pike! Kat took some time to share with EFF how things are looking for STOP, their many successes, education & advocacy work, and how people from across the country can plug-in and support.

Can you share how S.T.O.P. came to be, got started, and its mission?   

S.T.O.P. as an organization grew from the belief that emerging surveillance technologies pose an unprecedented threat to public safety and the promise of a free society. Our executive director, Albert Fox Cahn, started S.T.O.P. in 2019 to address the long-ignored threat of state and local government surveillance. While federal advocates spent years at loggerheads over the federal surveillance powers, the growth of local police surveillance, particularly the NYPD, often went unchecked. S.T.O.P. started with an understanding that digital surveillance has played a key role in the historic criminalization of BIPOC, Muslim, and immigrant communities.  Building an intersectional coalition, we began to educate New Yorkers on the disparate and discriminatory impact police surveillance has on Muslim Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, Indigenous peoples, communities of color, and disabled people. These local collaborations, which enable us to share resources for anti-surveillance work and advocate for legislation with the support of impacted community members, form the backbone of our mission – which is to systematically dismantle the local surveillance apparatus here in New York City, as well as to build a model for dismantling local surveillance across the United States.  

What have been some of the issues you’ve concentrated on and could you walk us through a timeline of some of your early successes to more recent?  

Unveiling the NYPD’s sprawling surveillance systems has been a huge chunk of our work thus far. The This article has been indexed from Deeplinks