The nation's largest police force has been running a covert online operation using sophisticated software to build fictitious social media personas — and the self-described democratic socialist who now runs New York City appears in no hurry to shut it down.
Buried among 40 documents in long-mandated POST Act filings, quietly posted on the city's website with no public announcement, was a revelation that should have landed like a bomb: the NYPD has been using technology from California firm NTREPID to create fake online identities — so-called "sock puppet" accounts — to track targets across the internet.
The Daily Mail reported that the disclosures were sent to the city late last year. They surfaced last week. Nobody in City Hall bothered to tell the public.
The ten-page PDF, titled "Internet Attribution Management Infrastructure," states that the NYPD uses NTREPID "to manage digital footprints" for covert investigations. A multi-million-dollar contract, according to sources. A Department of Defense contractor, now embedded in domestic policing.
Here's where this gets interesting. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist who swept into Gracie Mansion promising to rein in the NYPD, isn't just a casual observer of this issue.
As a state legislator in 2023, he sponsored the Stop Fakes Act — legislation designed to ban police from using fake social media accounts entirely. He co-authored a column in City & State New York that same year specifically criticizing police infiltration of social media.
So when the Daily Mail asked his office about the NTREPID revelations, what did the mayor do?
He punted. Spokesman Sam Raskin offered this:
"We are gathering more information about these tools."
The man who wrote the bill to ban the practice is now "gathering more information" about it. This is the pattern with progressive politicians who discover that governing requires more than op-eds.
An NYPD spokesman defended the technology as "critical security and counter-terrorism tools." An unnamed source within the department went further, denying any targeting of ethnic or religious groups and insisting the technology targets "people who want to kill New Yorkers." That source also claimed the tools have "uncovered plots from here to England to Germany in the past couple years."
Maybe so. Counter-terrorism is serious work, and the NYPD operates in the number-one target city in America. Nobody credible disputes that law enforcement needs digital tools to monitor genuine threats.
But the issue isn't whether the NYPD should have investigative capabilities. The issue is whether creating entirely fake human beings online — complete personas with manufactured histories and digital footprints — constitutes the kind of surveillance that demands judicial oversight.
And whether burying that disclosure in a document dump nobody was told about constitutes the transparency the POST Act was supposed to guarantee.
The POST Act was passed by the City Council in 2020 for one explicit purpose: forcing the NYPD to disclose its surveillance programs to the public. In 2025, legislators strengthened it further, requiring the department to name its vendors. The NYPD technically complied — and rendered the compliance meaningless by dumping the information without announcement.
Jerome Greco, the digital forensic director at the Legal Aid Society, told the Daily Mail:
"Vague language undermines the purpose of the POST Act."
He's not wrong on the mechanics. When a disclosure law produces documents that obscure more than they reveal, the law has been neutralized without being repealed. That's a trick older than the internet — bury the answer in the volume of the response.
Meanwhile, the filings also revealed a new NYPD contract with Voyager Labs, a social media monitoring firm that claims it can predict "extremism." That's a separate concern worth its own scrutiny, but it underscores the scale of what's happening: the NYPD isn't dabbling in digital surveillance. It's industrializing it. The Domain Awareness System alone controls more than 18,000 security cameras across the city.
This is the first real test of Zohran Mamdani's tenure — and by every indication, he's failing it on his own terms.
This is a mayor who once called the NYPD "racist" and a "rogue agency." He later apologized for those remarks. He kept Jessica Tisch — an architect of the department's surveillance infrastructure — as commissioner. He wrote legislation to ban the exact tools his own police department is now using under his authority.
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) isn't letting him off the hook. Spokesman William Owen urged Mamdani to "continue rejecting NYPD's fake friend requests." Executive Director Michelle Dahl argued that fake profiles allow the NYPD to "sidestep judicial process."
From a conservative standpoint, there are two things happening here that deserve separate scrutiny.
First: a domestic police force is using military-grade persona software developed by a defense contractor to operate fake identities against American citizens — and the oversight mechanism designed to catch this produced a document dump that nobody read. Conservatives who care about the Fourth Amendment and government overreach should not shrug at this because the NYPD claims it's only targeting terrorists. That's what every surveillance state says. The question is always about the guardrails, and right now, those guardrails look like suggestions.
Second: the progressive establishment in New York is once again demonstrating that its principles evaporate upon contact with power. Mamdani didn't just casually oppose police surveillance. He made it a legislative priority. He wrote columns about it. He built political identity around it. And now? He's "gathering information."
This is what always happens when the left governs. The rhetoric is radical. The governance is managerial. The accountability is nonexistent. Mamdani ran as the antidote to the NYPD's surveillance state, and now he's its landlord.
None of which means counter-terrorism tools should be abandoned. It means that a city government that spends millions on covert digital personas while burying the disclosure in a Friday document dump has earned precisely zero trust — from the left, from the right, from anyone who thinks the Bill of Rights applies in the five boroughs.
The NYPD needs tools to stop people who want to kill New Yorkers. It does not need a blank check to fabricate human beings online with no judicial oversight and no meaningful public disclosure. Those two things can be true simultaneously.
Mamdani knows this. He wrote legislation saying exactly that. Now he runs the city where the opposite is happening, and his spokesman is buying time with boilerplate.
The sock puppets are still online. The mayor is still gathering information.
