Though currently ended, it’s a wonderful example of how this data tracking gets abused, and for financial gain. Asset forfeiture is the driving force that seems to corrupt government and law enforcement officials to take shortcuts, violating people’s privacy and protections under the law. Consequently, if you ran some Bitcoin miners you could have ended up with a military style raid by law enforcement, illegally looking at your power consumption. And, I had a post about this abuse in Sacramento previously with significant sums involved, and a post yesterday about a worker targeted for his suspicious driving pattern due to most likely ALPR camera surveillance. And I’ve had many posts on the Flock ALPR cameras being installed everywhere violating privacy and not requiring court orders to access. And there is even a post about how lazy law enforcement used Flock ALPR cameras to accuse an innocent person of theft. Today they’re looking for criminals, but tomorrow it will people going against the government like we see in the UK.
By Mario Trujillo
A California judge ordered the end of a dragnet law enforcement program that surveilled the electrical smart meter data of thousands of Sacramento residents.
The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents’ electrical usage data with narrow exceptions. For more than a decade, SMUD coordinated with the Sacramento Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing.
EFF and its co-counsel represent three petitioners in the case: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They argued that the program created a host of privacy harms—including criminalizing innocent people, creating menacing encounters with law enforcement, and disproportionately harming the Asian community.
The court ruled that the challenged surveillance program was not part of any traditional law enforcement investigation. Investigations happen when police try to solve particular crimes and identify particular suspects. The dragnet that turned all 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects was not an investigation.
“[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation,” the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its “obligations of confidentiality” under a data privacy statute.
Granular electrical usage data can reveal intimate details inside the home—including when you go to sleep, when you take a shower, when you are away, and other personal habits and demographics.
In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police “developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement.” Multiple times a year, the police asked SMUD to search its entire database of 650,000 customers to identify people who used a large amount of monthly electricity and to analyze granular 1-hour electrical usage data to identify residents with certain electricity “consumption patterns.” SMUD passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police.
While this is a victory, the Court unfortunately dismissed an alternate claim that the program violated the California Constitution’s search and seizure clause. We disagree with the court’s reasoning, which misapprehends the crux of the problem: At the behest of law enforcement, SMUD searches granular smart meter data and provides insights to law enforcement based on that granular data.
Going forward, public utilities throughout California should understand that they cannot disclose customers’ electricity data to law enforcement without any “evidence to support a suspicion” that a particular crime occurred.
EFF, along with Monty Agarwal of the law firm Vallejo, Antolin, Agarwal, Kanter LLP, brought and argued the case on behalf of Petitioners.