Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.)

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) is a New York City–based 501(c)(3) civil rights and legal advocacy organization founded in 2019 by Albert Fox Cahn to challenge the expansion of mass surveillance by local governments. Using a combination of impact litigation, legislative campaigning, research, community education, and grassroots coalition organizing, S.T.O.P. is the primary civil-society anchor for biometric surveillance accountability in New York State and leads the coalition that has driven the state's most significant facial recognition transparency legislation. Its work focuses especially on the communities most affected by algorithmic surveillance: Muslim Americans, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Indigenous people, and Black and Brown New Yorkers.

Founding and structure

Albert Fox Cahn, a lawyer, technologist, and TED Fellow, started S.T.O.P. in 2019 from his apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with the conviction that emerging surveillance technologies posed an unprecedented threat to civil liberties, equity, and democratic governance. The organization has grown into a staff-and-counsel nonprofit with an operating budget of approximately $977,800 and total annual revenue of $1.6 million as of fiscal year 2024. A defining feature of S.T.O.P.'s model is pairing its attorneys with New York's largest law firms to handle both impact litigation and direct legal services cases at no cost to clients — amplifying organizational capacity through pro bono partnerships. The MacArthur Foundation is among its established funders; Justice Catalyst Partnerships and the New York Community Trust have also provided grants. S.T.O.P. received the 2026 Spark Prize, awarded by the Brooklyn Paper, recognizing its community impact.

POST Act advocacy

S.T.O.P.'s first major legislative win was the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, New York City's foundational surveillance transparency law. S.T.O.P. was among the core advocacy organizations that built sustained multi-year pressure culminating in the New York City Council voting 44 to 6 to enact the POST Act on June 18, 2020, requiring the NYPD to publicly disclose the surveillance tools it uses and the safeguards protecting civil liberties. When the NYPD subsequently exploited the law's disclosure flexibility to withhold meaningful information, S.T.O.P. continued pressing for enforcement and expansion. In April 2025, three bills strengthening the POST Act passed the NYC Council, tightening language the NYPD had used to sidestep transparency and adding new reporting requirements. The POST Act campaign is S.T.O.P.'s archetype for its broader model: community-anchored legislative advocacy pursued through city-council relationships, public education, and sustained coalition pressure until structural accountability is in law.

Ban the Scan coalition

S.T.O.P. organizes and leads the Ban the Scan coalition — a multi-organization civil rights coalition campaigning for a statewide ban on biometric surveillance by both law enforcement and private businesses in New York City and New York State. Coalition partners include Amnesty International, the ACLU / New York Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, the National Action Network, the Legal Aid Society, the Immigrant Defense Project, Warriors in the Garden, the Surveillance Resistance Lab, and more than twenty additional organizations. The coalition simultaneously runs two tracks: Senate Bill S79, which would ban police biometric surveillance including facial recognition statewide — advanced by the New York Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2025 — and Council Member Shahana Hanif's Ban the Scan (Int. 213), which would prohibit businesses open to the public from collecting or using customers' biometric information for surveillance. In August 2026, the coalition staged a high-profile rally outside Madison Square Garden — with musicians, lawmakers, and community advocates — demanding City Council passage of the public-accommodations bill. The coalition's civil rights framing centers the disproportionate impact of biometric surveillance on communities of color: a 2022 joint study with Amnesty International found that non-white residents in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens — neighborhoods most subject to stop-and-frisk policing — faced disproportionately higher concentrations of NYPD surveillance cameras, grounding the campaign's equity arguments in geographic evidence.

Litigation portfolio

S.T.O.P.'s litigation work advances surveillance accountability in the courts alongside its legislative campaigns. Its caseload has included suits targeting NYPD facial recognition use, NYPD cell phone searches, and MTA facial recognition deployment on transit infrastructure. In November 2025, S.T.O.P. and Amnesty International jointly filed a lawsuit revealing systematic NYPD surveillance abuses, establishing a collaborative model that pairs S.T.O.P.'s local legal infrastructure with Amnesty's investigative capacity and international profile. On the private-sector side, S.T.O.P. has pursued biometric surveillance class action cases against companies including Starbucks and Amazon for unlawful collection and use of customers' biometric information, applying the same accountability framework across law enforcement and commercial surveillance. The pro bono law firm partnership model means S.T.O.P. can maintain an active docket well beyond what its staff size alone would support.

Role in the movement

S.T.O.P. fills a specific niche in the algorithmic accountability ecosystem: it is the primary community-anchored, litigation-forward organization dedicated exclusively to surveillance technology accountability at the local and state level in New York — the city with the most extensive urban police surveillance infrastructure in the United States. Where national organizations like the ACLU and EFF engage surveillance as part of a broader civil liberties portfolio, S.T.O.P.'s singular focus on New York's surveillance apparatus enables longer campaigns, deeper community relationships, and direct conversion of investigative findings into legislation and litigation. Its model — pairing legal firepower with coalition organizing and public education, centered on the communities most harmed by algorithmic policing — has produced the most durable state and local biometric surveillance accountability wins in the US, and established a template for the community-anchor shape of the movement's local organizing layer.