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On a quiet<\/span> street in Brooklyn\u2019s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, a camera owned and operated by the New York City Police Department points directly at the bedroom window of Pamela Wridt and Robert Sauve.<\/p>\n \u201cIt can see potentially directly into any part of our house,\u201d Sauve told The Intercept.<\/p>\n The camera is one of tens of thousands that feed into a massive warrantless surveillance system that police use to track and profile millions of New Yorkers each day.<\/p>\n Many of the cameras \u2014 including those mounted to drones and helicopters, as well as stationary cameras like the one just outside Wridt and Sauve\u2019s bedroom and living room \u2014 are owned, operated, and bear the logo of the NYPD.<\/p>\n Footage from tens of thousands of other privately owned cameras, however, like those posted outside of shops, businesses, and banks, are also made available to the NYPD through a little-publicized tool that holds one of the world\u2019s biggest networks of security cameras: the city\u2019s Domain Awareness System.<\/p>\n Wridt and Sauve are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed Monday against the city of New York, which holds responsibility for the NYPD, over the department\u2019s expansive surveillance machine \u2014 one of the largest in the world \u2014 that their attorneys say violates their First and Fourth Amendment rights to free association, expression, and privacy. (TKTK NYPD COMMENT)<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The suit is the first of its kind of take on the NYPD surveillance system.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see state and local police departments effectively being coopted, our data being used and abused by other government agencies,\u201d said attorney Albert Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, one of the attorneys representing Sauve and Wridt in the case.<\/p>\n There\u2019s at least one case the plaintiffs\u2019 attorneys know of in which data originally collected in the Domain Awareness System was eventually shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.<\/p>\n NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch<\/a> was an architect of the surveillance apparatus, which police use to join data from public and private sources across the city, collecting information on people\u2019s identities, their biometric data, their daily movements, their social media activity, and people with whom they associate. The NYPD uses that information, combined with forms of machine learning, to build profiles that construct the activities, religious and political affiliations, and thoughts and beliefs of millions of people \u2014 and stores the information indefinitely.<\/p>\n The NYPD is \u201ca model for the nearly 18,000 state and local police departments across the country that are increasingly acting like mini-NSA and CIA operations.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Attorneys in the New York case hope it will be the start of a wider effort to take on police surveillance networks in other cities where police departments, with bipartisan support and unprecedented amounts of cash, have built up their surveillance capacity and weaponizing it to <\/a>political ends<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe NYPD may be the worst offender, but they\u2019re also a model for the nearly 18,000 state and local police departments across the country that are increasingly acting like mini-NSA and CIA operations,\u201d Cahn said. \u201cAmerican policing runs on data.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n