Below is a letter to send to your elected official to support Banning Big Brother.

Dear X, 

I support “Banning Big Brother: New York’s Surveillance Sanctuary State Blueprint,” a New York State anti-surveillance legislative campaign. The bill package includes first-in-the-nation bans on geofence warrants and fake police social media profiles. I urge you to co-sponsor these ten bills that ban harmful surveillance tools and firmly secure the privacy rights of all New Yorkers:

Reverse Location and Reverse Keyword Search Prohibition Act (Solages A3306/Myrie S217)

  • Bans both geofence warrants and keyword warrants to prevent large-scale location tracking 

Modernize the PPPL Act (Epstein A3051/Gonzalez S4044)

  • Narrows law enforcement exemptions in the Personal Privacy Protection Law (PPPL) to require a warrant and expands the law to cover local agencies. New Yorkers should not have to choose between receiving government benefits and maintaining privacy.

Stop Online Police Fake Accounts and Keep Everyone Safe Act (Mamdani A4638/Cleare S1764 ) 

  • Prohibits police from creating fake social media accounts and coercing people to provide social media passwords. Police use fake accounts to monitor Black Lives Matter activists and deceive children into exposing private content.

New York For All Act (Reyes A5658/Gounardes S987)

  • Prohibits New York’s state and local government agencies from colluding with ICE, disclosing data, and diverting resources to further federal immigration enforcement. This bill is essential to make New York a true sanctuary state.  

Unofficial DNA Database Ban (Zinerman A1877/Hoylman-Sigal S998)  

  • Requires police to stop using any DNA database other than New York’s official DNA index. New York City and other localities maintain illegal DNA databases which are ripe for abuse. These databases let police trick New Yorkers, including young children, to expose their DNA, potentially keeping it forever. 

DNA Phenotyping Ban (Rosenthal A4965/Gianaris S226)

  • Bans police use of DNA phenotyping to predict what the suspect of a crime might look like, including what race they may be. New York must ban this dangerous pseudoscience before it leads to wrongful arrests and convictions.   

Protect Our Privacy “POP” Act (Police Drone Ban) (Kim A5251/Ramos S4162)

  • Bans police use of drones except for search and rescue operations. 

Biometrics Ban (González-Rojas 2021-22 A10036/Salazar)

  • Prohibits police biometric surveillance, such as facial recognition, and establishes a biometric surveillance regulation task force. Facial recognition software is biased, broken, and antithetical to a democratic society. It is up to 100 more likely to misidentify women of color than white men. Numerous people, disproportionately Black, have been wrongly arrested after being misidentified through facial recognition.

 Cell Site Simulator Ban (Carroll A6143/Brisport S5825)

  • Prohibits cell-site simulators, which let police track large numbers of phones at protests and other sensitive sites. 

OMNY Privacy Act (TBD/Fernandez S6142)

  • Prohibits New York transit authorities and their vendors from sharing fare payment data with police without a warrant. It also requires a cash payment option for transit cards in each station with a capped cost, protecting unbanked New Yorkers from a proposed a privacy/poverty tax.  

Surveillance technology is harming New Yorkers and wasting billions of dollars. It’s long past time for New York to put an end to the documented failures and brazen misuse of unreliable surveillance technologies, including facial recognition, geofence warrants, and unregulated municipal DNA indices, all of which lead to terrifying and life-altering consequences for overpoliced communities. I urge you to co-sponsor these ten bills.