The New York City Police Department (NYPD) actively monitors public activity in New York City, New York, United States. Historically, surveillance has been used by the NYPD for a range of purposes, including against crime, counter-terrorism, and also for nefarious or controversial subjects such as monitoring political demonstrations, activities, and protests, and even entire ethnic and religious groups. Following the September 11 attacks, the NYPD developed a large and sophisticated array of surveillance technologies, generating large collections of data including billions of license plate readings and weeks of security footage from thousands of cameras. This data is now used in the department's day-to-day operations, from counter-terrorism investigations to resolving domestic violence complaints. The system consists of an interconnected web of CCTV cameras, license plate readers, physical sensors, machine learning software, data analytics dashboards, and mobile apps. Now centered around the Microsoft-built Domain Awareness System, the NYPD surveillance infrastructure has cost hundreds of millions of US dollars to produce and maintain. Many of its core components are being sold to or emulated by policing departments across the world. The NYPD has credited surveillance systems as preventing numerous terrorist attacks on the city and helping to provide evidence for hundreds of criminal cases. Unlike intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the NYPD does not disclose the budget or funding sources for its surveillance system. However, this may change in December 2020 when the POST Act goes into effect. History The NYPD has been involved in numerous surveillance activities of NYC throughout its history. Black Panthers and the Handschu Agreement Between the 1950s and 1970s, the NYPD conducted extensive surveillance on the Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam, the Young Lords, suspected communists, and other individuals of interest. The surveillance was conducted by the then anti-communist division known as "The Red Squad", which has since become the more general purpose Intelligence Bureau. The red squad surveilled and recorded information about targets day to day behaviors on index cards which were then stored at police headquarters. These routine behaviors included granular detail such as which table individuals were seated at during a fundraiser dinner, and how much they paid for the meal. In 2016, 520 boxes of notecards were discovered in a Queens warehouse. The city records department has yet to release these boxes to the public but has stated it is working on rules to allow access. Since the 1980s the surveillance records