Court Ends Dragnet Electricity Surveillance Program in Sacramento
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.
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/victory-court-end-dragnet-electricity-surveillance-program-sacramentoOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
Land of the free.
Who will get in trouble for ten years of this? No one.
Who loses? Only the citizens. Even though the program (they paid for) was stopped, their money will be used to continue to violate their rights in some new and creative manner. It's what authoritarians do.
Fight for your privacy.
Good news. I wonder if this ruling will have other implications for dragnet surveillance we're seeing lately. Flock cameras, etc.
Does anyone know what other mass surveillance operations are going on in Sacramento specifically? This program only ended due to public scrutiny, so it would be good to shine light on these other programs if they exist.
I know Sac PD has a program where camera operators can sign up to give them at-will access to the feed without a warrant. But, unfortunately I'm not sure how well it could be challenged due to being voluntary.
Sadly it will not. The EFF wrote this in the linked article:
As with any lawsuit, the plaintiffs (two SMUD customer and the Asian American Liberation Network, aided by EFF lawyers) filed multiple possible claims for why SMUD is breaking the law. As is often the case, if the judge finds that one of the claims will prevail, then they often might not closely consider the other claims, since the plaintiffs already win anyway.
In this case, with regards to the claim that SMUD's actions violated the state constitution, this is what the judge wrote:
This is, IMO, disputable. But it can also suggest that the court was narrowly focusing in on how aggregated the search was, which produces only a single number. It can suggest that the judge would have ruled differently if, say, SMUD was producing per-day data, or anything more granular than a single value. It doesn't close the door on the overall question of whether dragnet surveillance is permitted like this in California, but the specific question from this lawsuit is closed, unless plaintiffs want to appeal that one point, which they can do even though they've already won their relief.
So consuming a lot of electricity and for hours long at a time, and possible at night? That sounds like the exact pattern that would show up when charging and Electric Vehicle at home.