Planet Money · Friday, October 23, 2026
Jerome Greco of the Legal Aid Society discusses an ongoing lawsuit requiring the NYPD to make historical surveillance contracts public. The litigation has begun to uncover millions in expenditures on private cameras and biometric tracking systems previously hidden in filing cabinets.
“In response to our lawsuit, part of what they said was that it would be a Herculean effort to provide us with all these documents that they'd have to go through because it was 165,000 pages of documents.”
“So now you can see that the NYPD paid $45 million to SecureWatch24 for their cameras. Or that they paid $11.5 million to MorphoTrack for improving the identification of biometrics...”