New York City Mayor Eric Adams uses free internet program to expand police surveillance

This story was originally published by New York Focus.

The New York City Police Department is working to use network connections established under the three-year-old Big Apple Connect program to link cameras at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments directly to the NYPD’s central digital surveillance system, a police department spokesperson confirmed to New York Focus. Cameras at one development were linked last Wednesday, the spokesperson said, and 19 more are set to follow.

Enabled by new modems and routers installed in NYCHA common spaces, the network connections allow the NYPD to feed CCTV footage directly into its citywide surveillance software systems, stream it remotely in real time, and review footage beginning 30 days prior to an incident — all without having to ask NYCHA for permission. Previously, the police department could only access footage from cameras operated by NYCHA by physically visiting the housing authority’s CCTV control rooms, upon request, for the purpose of investigating incidents.

By the end of this year, the NYPD plans to connect video cameras at 20 NYCHA developments — it won’t say which — to the Domain Awareness System, the department’s controversial counterterrorism and anti-crime platform that, without warrants, collects CCTV footage from thousands of cameras across the city. The system fuses expansive data on New Yorkers’ physical movements, digital footprints, biographical information, and law enforcement interactions into a centralized repository, which the NYPD can harness to support facial recognition analysis and predictive policing algorithms that use pattern recognition to decide where and how to allocate police resources.

Since the system formally launched in 2012, it’s received intense criticism from privacy and civil rights advocates for reinforcing racial bias in policing, shuttling information to federal immigration enforcement, and, according to Amnesty International, having a “chilling effect on citizens’ ability to exercise their most basic rights” to assemble and protest. The NYPD spokesperson, who spoke to New York Focus on the condition that his name not be used, said that “just like any tool we use, we use [the Domain Awareness System] responsibly to solve crimes.”

New York Focus learned of the plans for expanded surveillance, which have not previously been reported, after reviewing contracts and pitch decks for Big Apple Connect that described the Adams administration’s intention as early as the summer of 2022 to use the free internet program to expand the NYPD’s video surveillance capabilities in public housing. The city Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) released the contracts and pitch decks to the telecom provider People’s Choice Communications in response to a public records request, which OTI delayed 16 times and only fulfilled after a lawsuit. That provider had piloted an earlier free internet program at NYCHA under Mayor Bill de Blasio, but the Adams administration controversially scrapped it and replaced it with Big Apple Connect.

New York Focus separately obtained an internal OTI draft memo, dated September 2022, which noted the agency’s intent to “leverage Big Apple Connect connections to pull orphaned camera systems into the NYPD’s domain awareness system.”

That month, Adams and his chief technology officer, Matthew Fraser, began promoting Big Apple Connect publicly at press conferences, in Q&As, and through testimony at the New York City Council’s Committee on Technology. “Big Apple Connect is a game-changer for today’s New Yorkers living in public housing on par with the advent of utilities like heat or hot water,” Fraser said at a press conference, standing outside NYCHA’s Langston Hughes Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

“I’ve given OTI dozens of times to speak to this, at numerous hearings in different topics and I’m severely disappointed.”

—Jennifer Gutiérrez, City Council Technology Committee Chair

As the project progressed, Fraser touted OTI’s commitment to developing the program out in the open for all to see. “Some of the things that we’re also looking to do is create more transparency around what we’re doing,” he told city councilmembers in March 2023, “so we built a dashboard to summarize the deployment of Big Apple Connect, which we hope to launch soon.” The agency published the dashboard in October 2024; it shows that, as of last month, about 124,000 households use the internet service across 220 of NYCHA’s 335 developments.

Never in those press events, Q&As, testimony, in the mayor’s annual Management Report, or in any other publicly available materials New York Focus could identify did the Adams administration mention the video surveillance component of Big Apple Connect.

Jennifer Gutiérrez, who chairs the city council’s Committee on Technology and has been cross-examining OTI about its internet program for three years, was unaware of the surveillance component until New York Focus asked her about it.

“I’ve given OTI dozens of times to speak to this, at numerous hearings in different topics and I’m severely disappointed,” Gutiérrez wrote in a statement to New York Focus. “Just because you receive a public service doesn’t mean you’ve agreed to be surveilled. Surveillance is not a neutral add-on — it’s a serious trade-off that must be disclosed, debated, and governed. Security matters, but unchecked, untransparent monitoring undermines public trust and harms the very communities they claim to serve.” (Asked about Gutiérrez’s comments, OTI spokesperson Ray Legendre wrote to New York Focus that “histrionic assertions of unmitigated surveillance are false.”)

Public housing residents didn’t appear to be informed of the surveillance expansion, either. “I would think that it’s very shameful. I’m not aware that it’s happening here, because, again, everything they keep hush hush. … I say, shame on them.” said Lehra Brooks, president of the tenant association at the Bronx’s Throggs Neck Houses.

For weeks, New York Focus corresponded extensively with OTI, the NYPD, and NYCHA about the video surveillance component of Big Apple Connect to understand how it was conceived and its current status. The agencies provided contradictory and evolving accounts.

In late June, a NYCHA spokesperson wrote to New York Focus that Big Apple Connect “is not intended to support NYCHA’s CCTV cameras.” But in July, an NYPD spokesperson confirmed to New York Focus that, with OTI’s assistance, it was using Big Apple Connect to network those cameras. When New York Focus followed up with NYCHA, a spokesperson declined to comment on whether the housing authority was aware its CCTV systems were being used for this purpose.

Meanwhile, in early July, an OTI spokesperson wrote to New York Focus that while the program helps “facilitate transmission” of video footage at NYCHA to the NYPD, “these are not live camera feeds that the NYPD has access to.” Asked additional questions, the OTI spokesperson reiterated that “there is no live feed or increased access for law enforcement” as a result of Big Apple Connect. The NYPD spokesperson similarly said that officers still had to visit NYCHA in person to review footage, and that the connections enabled through Big Apple Connect simply improved the resolution of footage. But later in July, the NYPD spokesperson confirmed to New York Focus that the program “allows NYPD to access a live camera feed, do playback and view footage up to 30 days prior.”

The NYPD also gave an inconsistent account of why the city pursued the surveillance expansion, why it was never publicly disclosed, and what it achieved. At times, the NYPD suggested that the expansion was essential for improving public safety and was responsive to public housing residents’ needs and desires. “If you were living in one of these developments, and you saw that there was more crime happening, you would say, where is the NYPD?” the spokesperson told New York Focus. “And the response that we could say is, we have people on the ground and cameras that we can monitor or access to make sure we keep people safe.”

At other times, the spokesperson said the initiative wasn’t significant enough to merit public disclosure, emphasizing how little the tools did, how long it’s taken to get them online, and how few NYCHA developments were equipped with them. “If this was something that was such a major priority of this administration, why did it take three years, and why only 20 sites?” the spokesperson asked. OTI, meanwhile, stressed that there was no net addition of cameras under Big Apple Connect and that the cost to get them online was “nominal.”

The NYPD has wanted to expand its access to video footage in public housing developments for at least a decade. “Plans are in place to expand the fiber network to connect non-NYPD sites that have camera feeds or other data sources that the Department wishes to access in real-time,” the department wrote in a June 2015 report. The prime example was NYCHA. “The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has spent millions of dollars installing cameras at its facilities, but the NYPD does not have access to these feeds because its current network does not connect to NYCHA,” the report continues. This remained the case until the city built Big Apple Connect.

In its successful bid for a Big Apple Connect contract, Spectrum, the umbrella company that owns Time Warner Cable, addressed the city’s need for a unified network to enable video transmission from NYCHA to the NYPD and said that it was uniquely suited to deliver it. Responding to OTI’s request for services, the company assured the agency in its pitch deck that it was “well positioned to provide the network services required by the City to provide video transport back to the certain main hub site locations,” since two NYPD sites already had Spectrum fiber in place. (Spokespeople for Spectrum and for Altice USA, the parent company of Optimum and the other Big Apple Connect contract winner, both declined to comment.)

“Big Apple Connect is a game-changer for today’s New Yorkers living in public housing on par with the advent of utilities like heat or hot water.”

—Matthew Fraser, Office of Technology and Innovation

Civil liberties watchdogs were alarmed to learn of New York Focus’s findings. Jerome Greco, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s Digital Forensics Unit, framed the surveillance expansion at NYCHA as part of a growing overreach of policing capabilities throughout the city.

“The NYPD is getting direct access to other city agencies’ data and information, whether it be surveillance-related or not, seemingly with little to no oversight or poor ability to prevent it,” Greco said. “It’s also part of an ongoing campaign by the NYPD to expand not only their surveillance capabilities in general, but also specifically get access to more and more camera feeds around the city.”

In recent years, the NYPD’s lack of transparency around surveillance technology has been highlighted in audits conducted by the city’s Department of Investigation. The reports found that the NYPD has not fully complied with New York City’s Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, which requires the NYPD to publicly disclose new surveillance operations before implementing them.

Asked about checks and balances in place for its video surveillance technology, an NYPD spokesperson pointed New York Focus to a 2023 report laying out “internal audit & oversight mechanisms” for the department’s use of CCTV technology.

NYCHA’s current network of CCTV video systems includes more than 20,000 cameras across indoor and outdoor common spaces, like entryways, hallways, laundry rooms, lobbies, and courtyard areas. The NYPD also operates its own separate system of cameras at some NYCHA properties, which it could access remotely before Big Apple Connect.

The NYPD did not say whether it intends to expand the footprint of its network connections to NYCHA CCTV cameras beyond the planned 20 sites, but the spokesperson told New York Focus that “we are going to areas where we know there are higher instances of crime,” and that “this is all data-driven.”