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When Zohran Mamdani was a New York state assembly member, he sponsored the Stop Fakes Act, which would have prohibited law enforcement from creating fake electronic communication service accounts and collecting users’ account information.
“Digital dragnet surveillance is widespread and dangerous, yet it continues to go unregulated,” Mamdani co-wrote in a 2023 City & State op-ed. “Although the NYPD claimed in a Department of Justice report to keep detailed records of its undercover accounts, the department refuses to provide any documentation of its social media surveillance policies or practices for public review.”
The Stop Fakes act failed, and the battle over the New York police department’s (NYPD) use of surveillance technology has continued. Only now Mamdani is the city’s mayor, and as a democratic socialist backed by an enthusiastic leftwing coalition, his every move is closely scrutinized – especially when it comes to law enforcement.
On 4 February, the NYPD disclosed that it used “internet attribution management infrastructure” from the technology company Ntrepid to “allow its personnel to safely, securely and covertly conduct investigations and detect possible criminal activity on the internet”. In other words, to create the sort of “sock puppet” online identities that Mamdani had once sought to prevent.
As mayor, Mamdani can presumably now stop the police department from using such a tool. But wielding actual power is complex. After previously using anti-police rhetoric, since launching his mayoral candidacy, Mamdandi has been more supportive of the NYPD.
So the question is: will he neglect an issue he was once passionate about or block investigators from using such technology and risk alienating the police, whose help he needs to run a city with 8.4 million residents?
“Mamdani was a strong partner in the fight against mass surveillance while an assembly member,” said Will Owen, communications director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a non-profit that aims to outlaw such practices in New York. “Stop will continue to hold him accountable, and we are cautiously optimistic that he will continue that fight.”
Mamdani’s office did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.
Around the peak of the Defend the Police movement in 2020, Mamdani posted on what was then Twitter: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”
But after a police officer was killed in a July 2025 mass shooting in Manhattan, Mamdani, then the Democratic nominee for mayor, said police played a “critical role” in public safety.
“I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police,” he said.
When asked about his Twitter post, Mamdani said he made such comments “amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd”.
Once elected, Mamdani also decided to retain the police commissioner, the billionaire Jessica Tisch, and said he “admired her work cracking down on corruption in the upper echelons of the police department, driving down crime in New York City and standing up for New Yorkers in the face of authoritarianism”.
Despite that praise, the NYPD has continued to face criticism over its surveillance tactics.
In 2020, in response to concerns about the NYPD’s use of facial recognition technology, drones and other surveillance devices, the city council passed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (Post) Act, which requires the department to disclose the capabilities of its tools and rules, processes and safeguards to protect information collected.
Since then, the NYPD has not complied with the law, according to Stop and the Legal Aid Society.
In 2022, the New York City inspector general determined that the department had not provided enough detail to allow that office to conduct full annual audits.
The NYPD’s disclosures used “boilerplate language that fails to provide sufficiently specific information about the nature of the technologies”, the inspector general stated.
The Legal Aid Society filed an open records request in 2020 with the NYPD seeking its contracts for confidential surveillance products and services. The police denied that request, claiming that the volume of the documents and the necessary redaction of confidential information made it “unduly burdensome”.
The case reached the appellate division of the state supreme court, which ruled that the department must turn over such records quarterly on a “rolling basis”.
“The NYPD made no effort to contend with the seismic shift caused by the Post Act,” the court opinion stated.
More than a year after the court order, the police department has provided less than 600 of 165,000 pages concerning such contracts, according to the Legal Aid Society, which offers free representation to low-income New Yorkers.
“The NYPD has done everything it could to prevent any sort of transparency,” said Jerome Greco, the organization’s digital forensic director. “At the current pace, it will take decades to receive the estimated 165,000 pages.”
In a separate report published earlier this month, as mandated by the Post Act, the department disclosed its use of Ntrepid.
The company has offered so-called “sock puppet” software that creates fake online identities. In 2011, the Guardian reported that the US military worked with Ntrepid to manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
Greco is concerned about the NYPD hiring Ntrepid because the department stated that it uses such tools for “legitimate law enforcement purposes or other official business”.
“There is a real question about what other official business the NYPD could be using fake online accounts for that don’t relate to legitimate law enforcement purposes,” Greco said.
Ntrepid’s AI agents allow “police departments to collect, analyze, and infer much more information much more quickly than having an individual officer sit and review social media posts”, said Emile Ayoub, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “The increased scope and speed of surveillance that these tools offer undermines the central aim of the fourth amendment, which as the supreme court recognized was ‘to place obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance’.”
Owen, of Stop, also argues that the police could use such a tool to target Black and Latino residents. He pointed to the NYPD’s previous disclosure that if someone “makes a comment such as ‘Happy Birthday’ on the Facebook page of a gang member”, they could be considered a “known associate” and added to its criminal database, according to an inspector general report.
“This technology is highly biased and racist in how it flags New Yorkers on social media and how it flags supposedly suspicious content,” Owen said.
The NYPD and Ntrepid did not respond to requests for comment.
Even if Mamdani does not address the NYPD’s use of Ntrepid, state lawmakers could. A group of Democrats have again proposed the Stop Fakes bill.
Despite their concerns, Owen and Greco appear to be giving Mamdani the benefit of the doubt – for now.
“We are aware that the mayor’s administration is still pretty new, and he has a lot on his plate,” Greco said. Given his sponsorship of the Stop Fakes bill, “we are hoping that he will continue to support that position”.
