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September 15, 2025 
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| Wesley Allsbrook |
More than four years ago, Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, then head of a science and surveillance project at a public defenders office, started to become alarmed by the scale of digital surveillance that the New York Police Department had put in place across the city. The department was gathering data not just on people suspected of criminal activity, but on everyone — huge troves of it, potentially to be stored forever, with exceedingly few guardrails or oversight.
The more she saw, she told me last week, the more it became clear that the public knew way too little about these policies and their impact.
Determined to change that, she scoured news reports, public testimony, documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, patent applications from the technology companies the department was contracting with, lawsuits and more. “Working with a data scientist on my team, we mapped the system,” she told me, “and from there realized that we needed to share what we’d learned with everyone in the city.”
In a deeply reported essay for Times Opinion, she lays out what she found about the degree to which every New Yorker is being tracked, the harms that tracking is already inflicting, and the reasons to fear that things might get much worse, here and across the nation.
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