California Court Ends Smart Meter Dragnet Surveillance Program

According to the EFF, the Sacramento County Superior Court has determined that a surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and the police is illegal.

The program saw SMUD searching through countless customers’ data, looking for “high usage” households and submitting over 33,000 tips to police. They were using high energy usage as an indicator that they were growing illegal amounts of cannabis.

SMUD analysts have admitted that such “high” power usage could come from houses using air conditioning or heat pumps or just being large. And the threshold of so-called “suspicion” has steadily dropped, from 7,000 kWh per month in 2014 to just 2,800 kWh a month in 2023. One SMUD analyst admitted that they themselves “used 3500 [kWh] last month.”

They had also been targeting Asian customers specifically.

SMUD analysts deemed one home suspicious because it was “4k [kWh], Asian,” and another suspicious because “multiple Asians have reported there.”

The Asian American Liberation Network was also involved in the lawsuit alongside the EFF because of the unfair racial targeting.

As we see with these surveillance programs, mostly innocent civilians are targeted based on bad information.

The lawsuit represents a win for the peace of mind of Californians and another example of the failures of mass surveillance.