The NYPD quietly used a tool from a California defense contractor to run fake social media accounts, revealed in disclosure documents the police sent to the city late last year and posted online without a public announcement.
The department has been running covert online personas with software built by NTREPID, a contractor better known for Pentagon work. The detail did not come in a press briefing or whistleblower leak but surfaced inside routine disclosure files shared quietly with city officials.
The program is tucked behind a bland label: “Internet Attribution Management Infrastructure.” That ten-page PDF describes software able to create fictitious online identities that are meant to be untraceable back to the police, a capability that raises obvious civil liberties and oversight questions.
City documents describe a multi-million-dollar relationship between the NYPD and NTREPID, though the department has declined to disclose the exact figure. Civil rights groups immediately demanded action, and the mayor’s office said it was still gathering information, buying time while questions mount.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, now 34 years old, has a history with this issue. As a state Assembly member he sponsored the Stop Fakes Act in 2023, legislation intended to ban police creation of fake social accounts, and he co-wrote a column in City & State New York criticizing police social media infiltration and opposing what he called mass gang sweeps.
Those earlier statements included sharp language: he described the NYPD as “racist” and a “rogue agency.” After winning the mayoralty he dialed that rhetoric back, apologized for the tone, and kept Jessica Tisch in place as NYPD Commissioner rather than making an immediate personnel shakeup.
When reporters pressed the administration about the NTREPID software, Sam Raskin, a mayoral spokesman, said the city was still collecting details. The man who wrote the bill to stop police fake accounts is now the man in charge of the department running them. His first move was to ask for more time.
The NYPD defends the tools as necessary. A department spokesperson called them “critical security and counter-terrorism tools,” and the disclosure file states these programs “may only be used by NYPD personnel for legitimate law enforcement purposes or other official business of the NYPD.”
Those assurances come without public examples. An unnamed NYPD source claimed the tools helped uncover terror plots “from here to England to Germany,” but no specific cases, dates, or court filings were provided to back that assertion. The lack of concrete, documented instances makes oversight harder and fuels skepticism among watchdog groups.
Jerome Greco, the digital forensic director at the Legal Aid Society, flagged the department’s vagueness as particularly problematic. He warned that the NYPD’s language weakens the city’s Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology law, known as the POST Act, which was passed in 2020 and strengthened in 2025 to require vendors be named when surveillance tools are deployed.
This episode poses two straightforward questions that voters and officials should expect answers to: how often are these fake accounts used and under what rules, and why was the relationship with a defense contractor kept low-profile while the tools were operational? The combination of secretive procurement and broad, unspecific claims from the department makes those questions especially urgent.
Whatever legitimate counterterrorism needs exist, transparency and accountability are core to democratic policing. New Yorkers deserve clear rules that balance security with privacy and civil rights, and they should see how the technologies their police use fit within that framework.
