"NYPD Bypassed Facial Recognition Ban to ID Pro-Palestinian Student Protester", 18 July 2025

A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology. 

Details of the arrangement emerged in a recent decision by a Manhattan criminal court judge and in a lawsuit seeking information from the FDNY filed this month by the Legal Aid Society, which represented the protester, Zuhdi Ahmed, now a 21-year-old pre-med CUNY student going into his senior year of college.

Police identified Ahmed after searching for a young man accused of hurling what they said was a rock at a pro-Israeli protester during an April 2024 skirmish at Columbia. Thanks to the FDNY’s assistance and its use of Clearview AI software, the police were able to identify Ahmed...

...The FDNY began using Clearview AI in December 2022 and has an annual contract with the company, according to a spokesperson.

The fire marshal also accessed documents from the Department of Motor Vehicles that are typically unavailable to the police, court records show. 

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Ahmed with a felony, assault in the third degree as a hate crime, which was later reduced to a misdemeanor of second degree aggravated harassment. A criminal court judge in June dismissed the case against Ahmed and in a lengthy ruling raised red flags about government surveillance and practices that ran afoul of law enforcement’s own policies.

“Where the state routinely gathers, searches, seizes, and preserves colossal amounts of information, transparency must remain a touchstone, lest fairness be lost,” the judge, Valentina Morales, wrote...The NYPD has used the technology in the past but now forbids its use under a 2020 facial recognition policy that limits image searches to arrest and parole photos...  

...“The NYPD keeps using these incredibly disturbing companies to spy on New Yorkers, while hiding that surveillance from the public and violating New York City law in the process,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “The FDNY is clearly being complicit in enabling these NYPD abuses.”

The NYPD referred THE CITY to FDNY for comment. An FDNY spokesperson said in a statement that approved fire marshals have access to Clearview AI and work closely with the NYPD to investigate crimes...

...Shane Ferro, Digital Forensics Unit staff attorney at Legal Aid, who had represented Ahmed, sought to learn more about facial recognition technology operated by the FDNY, but requests made under the New York Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, went nowhere. Legal Aid filed a lawsuit last week seeking to obtain the information....The judge dismissed the case precisely because of the serious questions surrounding how Ahmed was identified, Ferro noted...