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Assessment of POST Act effectiveness and other surveillance oversight laws
3:08:10
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5 min
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Council Member Yusef Salaam asks advocates to assess the effectiveness of recent legislation such as the POST Act and other laws related to surveillance technology oversight. Panel members discuss the impact and limitations of these laws.
- POST Act described as helpful for public defense, despite some flaws
- Importance of legislation in educating courts about rapidly evolving surveillance technologies
- Discussion of challenges in individual criminal cases due to parallel construction and corporate secrecy
- Suggestions for expanding the POST Act to address procurement and contracting of surveillance technologies
Yusef Salaam
3:08:10
And I just have one last As advocates, how do you assess the effectiveness of recent legislation such as the post act and other laws related to surveillance technology in creating meaningful oversight?
Jerome Greco
3:08:34
So for all the post tax flaws and, you know, one of them is that it doesn't ban the use of certain technologies, but, you know, I understand there are legal and political, you know, limitations for for everyone.
3:08:49
Right?
3:08:49
But it has been very helpful from the public defense side of being able to, one, understand what is actually being used in a case, that the technology exists, some basics about it, and to be able to point to courts to to that as well instead of just saying, oh, I know this from my my experience on, you know, assortment of cases, I can actually point to something for for the court.
3:09:13
So the post act has is still very important and I I think the updates that are being proposed will make it better for us.
3:09:23
So again, not perfect but definitely an improvement from the status quo before it was passed.
Talia Kamran
3:09:33
Yeah if I could add to that on the issue of like court education.
3:09:37
These technologies and the rates at which NYPD is picking up new contracts and deploying new technologies that have been maybe tested limited and in limited capacity move so much faster than the courts actually move that any information that our offices can have, right, to educate the courts as we go into this completely new and difficult terrain of policing and prosecution is indispensable.
3:10:03
The post act is completely indispensable.
Jennifer Gutiérrez
3:10:15
Thank you.
3:10:16
Thank you.
3:10:17
Thank you.
Cynthia Conti-Cook
3:10:22
In the context of individual cases, for example, the kinds of cases that my colleagues here fight every day and need to understand how a case was investigated, for example.
3:10:40
It's it's a very difficult thing to try to find out in the context of any single individual's case because of parallel construction which is the use by police of alternative investigation routes in order, for example, often reliant on surveillance technology they're not trying to make public and then constructing an alternative sort of court based theory of the case that we interact with.
3:11:08
Sorry.
3:11:09
When I say we, mean defenders, formerly.
3:11:12
And so when a case comes through arraignments and you're only finding out from the court paperwork or from the experience that your client had what kind of police investigation techniques were used, it really limits your ability to learn about them, to find out about them, to find out about how it was used, how it was supposed to be used, and if anything was done improperly.
3:11:37
And then it's also very difficult in the context of individual criminal cases to be able to fight back against those technologies.
3:11:46
And also the kinds of corporate entanglement that is happening within those contracts often allows, for example, trade secrets to be invoked either to discourage the police department from telling people or telling the courts what has been used.
3:12:03
It's also been invoked in criminal courts themselves.
3:12:07
And so something that happened when I was Society was we began to hear more private law firms come in to a criminal courtroom and make the argument that they could not share information with the defense because of trade secrets.
3:12:24
This created a problem because, as you know, the court system is an adversarial process through which we have to learn about the things in order to be able to adversarially test them.
3:12:36
The idea that there are private companies who walk into criminal courtrooms and say that their three years of research and development are worth more than the potential lifetime of prison that someone is going to spend is a conflict of interest between how public interest in transparency and accountability and oversight works versus how corporate values of secrecy tend to operate.
3:13:01
And I think that what we have to appreciate about bills like this is that it pushes back and makes very clear with any technology vendors who are operating in New York City that their their technology should be expected to be public and that is a very important service indeed, but and also understanding how the contract process and understanding how the procurement of those technologies happen is equally important, and yet there is a great deal of opacity around that process.
3:13:31
And if the postdoc could be expanded in in any other way in addition to not being confined to NYPD itself, I would say to open up the information around how this technology is procured, contracted, and monitored.