Don Thompson
Associated Press
Commercial marijuana grown under lights (photo via instagram.com/staewet)
Sacramento, Calif. (AP) — Excessive electricity usage has long been a sign of illegal grow houses producing thousands of marijuana plants hidden in seemingly ordinary homes.
But the lawsuit filed by the data privacy watchdog alleges that a Northern California utility went too far in racially profiling Asian communities because it routinely provided customers’ electricity usage information to police without a warrant or any Suspected of misconduct, which violates state law.
The lawsuit alleges that the data disclosure deliberately targeted Asian-Americans, resulting in disproportionate penalties for Asian-Americans.
The lawsuit illustrates a hot spot in law enforcement’s crackdown on illegal drugs.
In 2018, federal and state law enforcement officers seized about 100 Northern California homes they claimed were purchased by a Chinese criminal organization with money wired into the U.S., one of many such operations targeting alleged Asian-American criminals. one.
Earlier this year, Asian Americans filed at least two lawsuits against the Siskiyou County sheriff alleging racial bias, particularly against the Hmong community, as his department struggles to crack down on widespread illegal marijuana cultivation.
The Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) searched the Sacramento Police Department for electricity usage information throughout the zip code but found no homes in the predominantly white neighborhood, the lawsuit said.
A police analyst removed non-Asian names from a list provided by the utility and only retweeted Asian-sounding names for more investigation, the lawsuit said.
The utility will hand over a list of customers who use more than a certain threshold of energy in a month, the lawsuit said. For example, while a typical home may use less than 1,500 kWh of electricity in a month, the lawsuit says the utility will disclose that the home uses more than 3,000 kWh of electricity.
The massive disclosure “turned its entire client base into a potential lead for a police pursuit,” the lawsuit said. It said the utility “publicly disclosed” customers’ Social Security, driver’s licenses and phone numbers.
SMUD and Sacramento police said they could not comment on the pending lawsuit, but SMUD spokeswoman Lindsay VanLaningham denied any wrongdoing.
“We agree that our customers’ use of data should (and) be treated with care,” she said Thursday, though she said state law allows and sometimes requires information to be shared with law enforcement.
“We share information about specific properties to deter what we have identified and believe to be electricity theft, and when local law enforcement asks us to assist them in their investigations,” she said in an email.
“Once the legal process is over, we look forward to being able to ask questions,” said Sacramento Police Sgt. Zach Eaton said.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday by regulator Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of nonprofit Asian American Liberation Network and SMUD client Khurshid Khoja, who is described as an Asian-American Sacramento resident, cannabis industry attorney and cannabis rights advocate. .
Megan Sapigao, the network’s co-executive director, said: “The mass surveillance program is illegal, fuels harmful stereotypes, and has an overwhelming impact on Asian communities.
“It is unacceptable that two public agencies would carelessly flout state law and the privacy rights of utility customers, let alone targeting specific communities in doing so,” she said in a statement.
EFF senior attorney Aaron Mackey said the foundation is not aware of any other California utility sharing data in the same way as SMUD.
He said private utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric are prohibited from disclosing customer utility data to law enforcement without a court order under state law and the California Public Utilities Commission.
Utilities like SMUD aren’t regulated by the board, but state law prohibits them from “disclosing the value of community-wide data to law enforcement without a court order or an ongoing investigation,” McKee said.
SMUD is the sixth-largest community-owned electric service provider in the United States, serving more than 600,000 customers, the lawsuit said.
Southern California Edison’s policies often require a warrant or subpoena to share information with law enforcement. The other two major private utilities did not immediately respond to AP inquiries about whether they have similar information-sharing programs, and the California Public Utilities Commission did not comment.
The lawsuit comes as officials work to curb illegal marijuana cultivation, which has hampered the growth of legal, licensed recreational marijuana production approved by California voters in 2016.
The camouflage of illegal marijuana farms in ordinary homes became common nearly 20 years ago as authorities destroyed outdoor plots they could spot from helicopters and other surveillance flights.
Law enforcement authorities often find illegal grow houses because they use electricity so much to run high-intensity lights, ventilators and other equipment to grow thousands of cannabis plants that they can often be harvested several times a year.
Occasionally, when a house catches fire due to an illegal electrical connection, a reminder is given.
Sacramento officials estimated in 2017 that there may be as many as 1,000 illegally grown homes in the California capital city.
The foundation said the crackdown was “very lucrative” for Sacramento because a 2017 city ordinance allowed police to hand out hefty fines to property owners who found marijuana.
The foundation said the city issued nearly $100 million in fines in just two years, about 86 percent of which targeted Asian Americans.
Privacy violations are exacerbated by the proliferation of “smart” meters that send electricity usage information to utility companies multiple times a day. The information, collected at intervals of 15 minutes or less, can provide a “detailed picture of what’s going on within the home,” the foundation said. “It can provide inferences about private daily life, such as which devices are being used, when, and how they are changing over time.”
