Court Ends Dragnet Electricity Surveillance Program in Sacramento (eff.org)
- Reference: 0180173935
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/22/0115215/court-ends-dragnet-electricity-surveillance-program-in-sacramento
- Source link: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/victory-court-end-dragnet-electricity-surveillance-program-sacramento
> 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 [2]represent three petitioners in the case : the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They [3]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.
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> 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. [...]
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> 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. [...] 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.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/victory-court-end-dragnet-electricity-surveillance-program-sacramento
[2] https://www.eff.org/cases/asian-american-liberation-network-v-smud-et-al
[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/when-your-power-meter-becomes-tool-mass-surveillance
Seems crazy (Score:3)
that it took 10 years. Especially given from the article, "the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its “obligations of confidentiality” under a data privacy statute." How hard is that to follow? Can the customers of SMUD sue them for privacy violations? Seems reasonable. And perhaps even find the upper management of SMUD be held criminally for the violation. Seems clearcut.
Re: (Score:2)
We have the same exact thing with Flock ALPRs. Flock is going strong and growing. It takes time for a class of victims to be able to prove their case in court. The wheels of justice turn slowly.
Re: (Score:3)
The fact that more people are not worried about Flock and Ring is truly disturbing on a whole new level.
Re: (Score:2)
Courts move at a snail's pace. Ten years is a bit on the long side of that, but it's not unheard of. People forget that the SCO vs IBM lawsuit started I. 2003 and was still going over a decade after that. After that point a lot of it was mostly just dealing with appeals, but the case was still ongoing in some form [1]until 2021 when it was settled out of court. [slashdot.org]
[1] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/11/09/0022228/last-of-original-sco-v-ibm-linux-lawsuit-settled
You can't really sue an electric utility (Score:2)
The Electric Utility share holders are guarenteed an 11%-13% return on their capital investment. The rate varies from place to place but was set a hundred years ago when the electric grid was built. If the people of Sacramento successfully sue SMUD, the public regulator will just raise the electric rates to everyone in Sacramento, such that SMUD in the long run still makes the same profit. So in the end all that would happen is lawyers would get paid but no SMUD customers would see any releif.
lucky me (Score:2)
Good thing I'm not in SMUD territory. I use 2 sigma out of electricity, because I use a lot of electric heaters despite having a gas-fired furnace. I would have had some visits from the SS.
Re: They showed up for my Ethereum Mine (Score:2)
If you were in California it might be time to revisit it. See if a lawyer is interested
Re: (Score:2)
Which is all the more reason to get rid of "qualified immunity." If these fucks were held personally responsible for their mistakes, you can bet they'd do a much better job of investigating their "tips" before rolling out the SWAT teams. Pushing the culpability onto the local government gives cops a license to be abject assholes and trample our rights and property.
Re: (Score:2)
This sounds like a case perfect for the Institute for Justice. [1]https://ij.org/ [ij.org] Check with them because they love this kind of stuff.
[1] https://ij.org/
Re: They showed up for my Ethereum Mine (Score:1)
nice fiction, AC. Never happened.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice cerative writing exercise.
Wasted resources and money (Score:4, Interesting)
Just imagine the cost of this over the course of a decade. The utility seems to have borne the brunt of the work, having to analyze and filter this data multiple times per year. That cost would have been passed onto customers - I'm sure it's appreciated that everyone's power bill was just a bit higher to fund this fishing expedition by law enforcement.
Then of course the investigators would be tied up digging through the 33,000 "tips" this data produced. Literally, law enforcement had to review 33,000 potential customers who met this profile, checking them for warrants or other known crimes giving them some excuse to surveil or even search that residence. Pretty extreme when you think about it - and that is just to catch people growing weed of all things. Not the dangerous drugs killing people or contributing to the homeless population on so on.
Finally, the fact that this generated so many potential leads shows how stupid the concept is in general - the "profile" they were going after regarding power usage. I can think of a hundred of other things that would cause higher power usage 24/7 that has nothing to do with growing weed.
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah you're not really supposed to think about how expensive the drug war is versus just giving people support and addiction treatment.
America especially is really into punitive and revenge-based Justice. I wonder if it will start to fade if religious extremism continues to fade. It's not hard to draw a line between puritanical bullshit and wanting to do as much harm as possible to people who commit crimes or do drugs.
Another problem with smart meters (Score:2)
The readings are downloaded frequently and have a granularity of less than a day. So if your electricity usage suddenly drops this can be noticed.
All it takes is a sysadmin type under financial pressure (divorce, gambling debts, medical bills, ...) who needs cash. S/he will be prey to crooks who can get them to do some SQL queries, or similar, to identify usage drops and pass them to the crooks - these addresses are prolly empty as the inhabitant may be away on holiday -- a great place to send a burglar.
The
Re: (Score:2)
> The readings are downloaded frequently and have a granularity of less than a day.
My meter is granular down to 5 minute intervals.
Who thought this was a good idea? (Score:3)
How many people did they get to harass just because they were having electricity usage, that they are paying for, which was "too high?" Some peoples' usage is going to be higher just because they work from home, enjoy their air conditioning, and maybe have a server farm or something.
Re: (Score:2)
> Who thought this was a good idea?
Well, pretty sure the cops thought it was a great idea.
Re: (Score:2)
> How many people did they get to harass just because they were having electricity usage, that they are paying for, which was "too high?" Some peoples' usage is going to be higher just because they work from home, enjoy their air conditioning, and maybe have a server farm or something.
Consider this additional California-flavored extra-special stupidity; it's currently legal for grown-ass adult homeowners to grow their own fucking weed in their own home. Even being caught with a massive grow is a misdemeanor.
So they really went out of their way to annoy the shit out of taxpayers already paying through the nose for electricity. And California wonders why it was forced to charge an exit tax.