A California judge has ruled to end a decade-long surveillance program in which Sacramento’s utility provider shared granular smart-meter data on 650,000 residents with police to hunt for cannabis grows. The ruling, delivered by the Sacramento County Superior Court, determined that the 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. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with its co-counsel, represented three petitioners in the case: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They argued that the program created significant privacy harms, including the criminalization of innocent people, the creation of menacing encounters with law enforcement, and the disproportionate harm to the Asian community.
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. The court explained that the 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 found that SMUD violated its obligations of confidentiality under a data privacy statute.
In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police