The NYPD has been operating fake social media accounts to investigate New Yorkers — using software built by NTREPID, a California defense contractor previously known only for its work with the Pentagon. The revelation surfaced not through a press conference or a whistleblower, but through disclosure documents the department quietly sent to the city late last year and posted online last week without any public announcement.

According to the Daily Mail, the program was buried among roughly 40 documents, tucked inside a ten-page PDF under the sterile label "Internet Attribution Management Infrastructure." The software enables the creation of fictitious online personas that cannot be traced back to the police.

Sources describe the NYPD's contract with NTREPID as multi-million-dollar, though the department has declined to make the actual figure public.

Civil rights groups want Mayor Zohran Mamdani to act. His office says it's still gathering information.

The author of the bill to stop this is now in charge

Before becoming New York's 34-year-old democratic socialist mayor, Mamdani was a state Assembly member who sponsored the Stop Fakes Act in 2023 — legislation designed to ban police from creating fake social media accounts altogether. That same year, he co-authored a column in City & State New York criticizing police social media infiltration and opposing what he described as massive gang sweeps. He called the NYPD "racist" and a "rogue agency."

Then he won the mayor's race.

He apologized for the rhetoric. He softened his tone. He kept Jessica Tisch — an Adams administration holdover — as NYPD Commissioner. And when the Daily Mail contacted his office about the NTREPID revelations, his spokesman, Sam Raskin, said the administration was still gathering information on the tools.

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.

What the NYPD says and what it leaves out

An NYPD spokesman described the tools as "critical security and counter-terrorism tools." The department's own disclosure document states these programs "may only be used by NYPD personnel for legitimate law enforcement purposes or other official business of the NYPD."

An unnamed NYPD source went further — denying that the tools target any ethnic or religious groups and claiming they've helped uncover terror plots domestically and overseas, "from here to England to Germany." No specific cases, dates, or details accompanied that claim.

That vagueness is precisely the problem, according to Jerome Greco, the digital forensic director at the Legal Aid Society. He told the Daily Mail that the NYPD's language undermines the POST Act — the city's Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology law, passed in 2020 and strengthened in 2025 to require the naming of vendors.

The POST Act was supposed to be the fix. The City Council passed it to force the NYPD to disclose its surveillance programs. The 2025 update specifically required the department to identify the companies behind the tools. And yet the disclosure documents arrived late, were posted without fanfare, and required civil liberties groups to dig through dozens of PDFs to find the NTREPID contract buried inside.

Compliance designed to exhaust is not transparency.

No warrant, no subpoena, no trace

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project — known as STOP — is pressing the issue hardest. Executive director Michelle Dahl told the Daily Mail that fake social media profiles sidestep the judicial process entirely. No warrant. No subpoena. Just a fabricated identity engaging with real people online.

STOP spokesman William Owen drew a direct comparison to the NYPD's post-9/11 infiltration of Muslim communities — a chapter in the department's history that generated years of litigation and political fallout. Owen also pointed to NTREPID specifically as a surveillance tool and invoked the Stop Fakes Act that Mamdani himself had sponsored.

NTREPID's pedigree makes the domestic application especially notable. The firm's only previously known client was U.S. Central Command, which used the software to create untraceable online personas for overseas operations. That same capability is now deployed against residents of the five boroughs.

And NTREPID isn't the only name that surfaced

The disclosure dump also revealed the NYPD's use of Voyager Labs, a social media monitoring firm that claims to predict "extremism." Meanwhile, the NYPD's Domain Awareness System — a sprawling surveillance network controlling more than 18,000 security cameras across the city — continues to expand in the background.

This is the ecosystem Mamdani inherited, the one he campaigned against, and the one that — six weeks into his mayoralty — he has done nothing to curtail.

The progressive governance paradox

Mamdani's situation illustrates a pattern that repeats every time a progressive campaigner meets the machinery of actual governance. The slogans are easy. The NYPD is a "rogue agency." Surveillance is oppression. Gang sweeps "ruin young people's lives." Those lines win endorsements from civil liberties groups and energize a base that views policing with inherent suspicion.

But cities are dangerous, and counter-terrorism is real. The NYPD didn't acquire these tools on a whim — it acquired them because threats exist, and the public expects the department to find them before they materialize. The question was never whether the NYPD should have investigative tools. The question is whether those tools operate under meaningful oversight, with clear legal boundaries, and with genuine accountability when those boundaries are crossed.

Mamdani had years to think about that question from the outside. He chose the easy answer: ban it all. Now he's inside, and the answer is harder. An exodus of officers preceded his inauguration. He kept Tisch, the commissioner most associated with the surveillance architecture. His administration is not dismantling anything — it is "gathering information."

The left's approach to policing consistently crashes into this wall. It's one thing to stand outside the precinct with a megaphone. It's another to sit behind the mayor's desk and tell the counter-terrorism unit to stop tracking people who might be planning the next attack. The rhetoric never survives contact with responsibility.