How to Stop Cops From Using Your Utility Meter to Spy on You

You probably never agreed to let cops monitor your sleeping habits, but if you have a smart utility meter in your house, they can. And they don't even need a warrant because that little gray box logs your daily routine in minute-by-minute detail. And law enforcement is pulling this data from across the US.

I'm Jeff Hampton, the people's lawyer, and in today's video, I'm going to show you how your electricity usage is being spied on by the cops without your knowledge or your consent. And they don't even need a search warrant. But stick around to the end because I'm going to show you exactly how to protect yourself and the specific steps you can take to stop cops from spying on your smart meter.

We've all heard of smart meters. Smart meters are advanced digital electric meters that utilities installed to monitor electricity consumption in near real time. Now look, utility providers promote them for efficiency and grid management, but their constant monitoring, it comes with a privacy cost. We all remember the old days with the traditional analog meters where they could only really be read once a month. Well, now under the new smart meters, you have utility companies being able to check real-time usage within 30, 15, sometimes every 5 minute interval. And in fact, some utility companies have smart meters that are able to detail exactly the uh actual power usage you are consuming by a minute-to-minute detail. This means power companies aren't just tallying how much power you use. They're able to see exactly how you're using your power on a minute-by-minute notice.

Now, if you think about this, this detail paints a pretty vivid picture of exactly what's going on in your home. Utility companies admit that each appliance in your home and device has a distinct electrical signature, which is a pattern of power that is drawn when it turns on, it runs, and it turns off again. By matching your utility consumption with the actual signature that appliances give off, utility companies admit they can figure out exactly what you're doing minute by minute inside your home. For example, a spike in usage at 6:30 in the morning would indicate an occupant waking up and turning on lights or kitchen appliances. But an absence of spikes during weekdays from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. may suggest that no one is home because you're at work. Whereas consistent usage at those times could imply occupancy. Maybe someone's working from home or a stay-at-home family member. In other words, power companies admit they can determine all kinds of things about how you're living and what you're doing in your home. Things like your sleeping patterns, your actually appliance usage and your lifestyle and your habits. As one expert said, smart meters may reveal occupants' daily schedules, times when they're at home, away or asleep, whether the home has an alarm system, if they own expensive electronics like plasma TVs, or if they use certain medical equipment. Smart meters are basically a detailed diary of household life.

Now, if cops get their hands on this kind of data, this is disturbing because in the words of the Seventh Circuit, this type of data, quote, reveals intimate details about what's going on inside the home that would otherwise be unavailable to the government without a physical search.

So, we now know why utility companies want to use smart meters to improve efficiency and track usage. But who else do you think is interested in your minute-to-minute details of what's going on in your home? You guessed it, not only cops, but also the government. Within the last few years, both police and governmental agencies have wanted to use this data to both track people as possible digital evidence, but they also want to see your energy usage to see exactly what you're doing inside your home. And here's the shocking part. Cops have a loophole where they can obtain this evidence of your energy usage via subpoena and not a warrant.

You say, "Wait a minute. What's the difference between a subpoena and a warrant?" Well, a search warrant requires a judge to review evidence through what's known as a search warrant affidavit, where cops have to present enough evidence to establish probable cause that they have any reason to be looking at your data. However, a subpoena requires no judicial oversight. A judge doesn't have to review anything. There's nothing really that is required in order to show why they're looking for it. So, it basically gives a complete backdoor entrance to gain access to your data.

But why a subpoena? How do cops get away with this? Well, believe it or not, under US law and Supreme Court standard, information you share with the third party, aka your utility company, is no longer protected under the Fourth Amendment. This so-called third party doctrine now allows police officers to get around the Fourth Amendment search warrant requirement by just filing for a subpoena. And now they don't have to really provide any evidence whatsoever that you've done anything wrong. And it gives them a complete cart blanche authority to spy on your home.

You say, "But wait a minute, what is the basis for this so-called subpoena?" Well, in the context of smart meters, basically what you have here is authorities, police officers will claim that your utility records are nothing more than a business record they can make a request for. Utility companies have admitted that they receive these requests from law enforcement all the time, and they routinely comply with customers having no idea that was ever requested. For example, San Diego Gas and Electric disclosed that in a recent year it received 480 law enforcement subpoenas for smart meter data on homes and businesses. In fact, this utility company turned over customer energy data to agencies ranging from local police and sheriffs up to the FBI and even ICE. Most of these demands never involved a judge, never had any accountability, and were merely requested through an administrative subpoena.

You say, "Okay, Jeff, maybe this is something that's just happening in California." Unfortunately, no. Take Ohio for example. In central Ohio, police routinely pull electricity records to hunt for illegal indoor cannabis farms. Law enforcement in one jurisdiction filed about 60 subpoenas per month for home energy use records of suspected marijuana growers. A DEA agent even admitted that if traditional undercover methods don't work out, quote, utility consumption records can be sought to establish probable cause. You say, "Well, what exactly would they be looking for?" DEA agents admit they're looking for a sudden 24-hour increase in power usage or maybe an increase in month-over-month power usage. The problem with all of this, it can lead to false suspicions and people's homes being raided. This same DEA agent admitted that following these electricity pattern evidence they were looking for, they actually raided a man's home that turned out to only be a server farm, not a cannabis farm. What about Texas? This same strategy of looking for marijuana or something that might be illegal inside the house, has been used by cops in cooperation with Austin Energy for years now. I already covered how this is happening in California, but the crazy part is California actually has a very strong privacy law that prohibits utility companies from sharing this data with cops except for very narrow exceptions. But it doesn't matter because cops have found this loophole and they just find their way around it. For example, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District took the violation of your privacy rights even further. They began to proactively analyze all customers' data to flag quote suspicious power usage and tip off police without any specific request or warrant. In fact, over the past decade, SMUD supplied more than 33,000 tips about quote high usage houses to law enforcement, ostensibly trying to sniff out illegal cannabis growers. Here's the crazy part. Their threshold, SMUD to rat you out to the police, went from originally 7,000 kilowatt hours per month back in 2014 to now only 2800 kilowatt hours per month in 2023. This means even normal power usage could now trigger police attention. And that's exactly what has happened. Internal emails from SMUD began to actually show that they were labeling homes suspicious simply for using 4,000 kilowatt hours and noting that the home occupant was quote Asian. Innocent people started getting swept up one by one. In fact, one Sacramento area man, an immigrant from Vietnam who had had a spinal cord injury. He was actually raided by sheriff's deputies after his high electricity use home medical equipment and air conditioning got flagged. He had absolutely no cannabis plants. Yet, officers showed up. They accused him of running a cannabis farm and threatened him if he didn't admit admit to what was going on.

But it's not just state and local police spying on your smart meters. It's also federal agencies and federal investigators. Everywhere from the DEA to all other federal agencies are routinely spying on your smart meter usage. For example, in San Diego, the DEA used what's called administrative subpoenas where there was no judge sign-offs required whatsoever to obtain thousands of customer records from the utility department. And immigration authorities, ICE, has sought energy data to locate specific people for deportation. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, law enforcement agencies have taken this data to the extreme. They have used utility data to verify alibis or claims in various investigations. And in one case, they used water usage data to see if someone had likely washed away evidence. I want you to think about this for a second. In all of these cases, no search warrant, no Fourth Amendment, just an administrative subpoena with no judicial overview. And now cops, local, state, and federal authorities can have access to all the intimate details of everything you have been doing in your home. As the ACLU recently observed, they said, and I quote, "Current laws allow the government, both federal and state, to get hold of records of our personal lives from companies without showing probable cause before a judge."

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Now, before I get into exactly what you need to do and the steps you can take to opt out of all of this and make sure cops can no longer spy and invade your privacy with your smart meter, I want to cover a question people are going I know people are going to ask, which is, Jeff, I get this. This is all in theory, but can you give me some specific examples where cops have used this type of data to try to take away someone's freedom or limit their rights?

Let's start with a murder investigation in Bentonville, Arkansas via a water meter. Bentonville police officers were investigating a 2015 murder case where a man was found dead in a hot tub. The suspect's home was equipped with a smart water meter. When detectives checked it out, they discovered an unusual spike of 140 gallons of water usage between 1 and 3:00 a.m. on the night of his death. This was far higher than any normal usage of water during these hours. Investigators decided to link the idea that this use of water had to have been by the homeowner who was using water to wash off blood and other evidence so that it wouldn't be found by the police later. Police used this data point and other evidence they collected from his Amazon Echo device. And they charged him with murder, believing that this evidence linked him to the cover-up. The crazy part, this case was later dropped for insufficient proof by the prosecutor. However, it didn't stop this man from going through all of the hardship and trial of being arrested, charged with a crime, having to hire a lawyer, all because his utility data was testifying against him.

What about the famous case of US versus Kylo? In this famous Supreme Court case, a federal agent believed a man was actually growing marijuana, a cannabis farm, illegally, in his home. So instead of getting a warrant, he used this loophole and he used a subpoena to seek utility records to see if his actual power usage was abnormally high. Now the Supreme Court didn't rule on the use of that subpoena uh to obtain that those records because that was standard practice at the time. The case was ultimately thrown out because the cops took it even further. They started using thermal imaging to see what else was going on inside of this man's home and the court later ruled that to be unconstitutional and a Fourth Amendment violation. The point of this though is that the Supreme Court knows that law enforcement is using subpoenas and not warrants to gain access to your smart meter data and they're allowing it currently to be used against people in court.

Which brings us to the next use cops love to do when it comes to you giving a timeline of where you were or what you were doing or an alibi establishing you did nothing wrong. For example, let's say cops come and question you. They think you were involved in something illegal and they ask you what time you went to sleep that night. And if you're not smart and you decide to instead of exercising your right to remain silent, if you decide to start talking to these cops, and let's say you tell them you went to sleep at 10 p.m., but then cops use this loophole to grab a subpoena to get access to your actual smart meter records and they find out that TVs were on or maybe appliances were playing or being used at that particular period of time. They can now try to use this to bust your timeline or your claim of what you were doing. In fact, in one Pennsylvania case observed by the Brennan Center, data from a Fitbit, which is an old-style wearable device, was used to disprove a claimed timeline in a criminal case. In that case, police admitted during actual testimony that they see smart homes as a potential witness on their list of full available data that they can use against anyone, even if it might be taken out of context.

And finally, under recent disclosures showing the procedures ICE is using during their immigration control, one of the things that's been learned is they will routinely seek federal subpoenas in order to determine if the number of people claimed to be in a home match the power usage. If they don't think it matches, they now believe that can provide enough evidence to establish there are illegals being hidden in someone's home. They can use that as a basis to try to enforce and launch an investigation.

I think we're all clear now. Your utility meter is snitching on you and they have no problem acting as a party to help out the cops even if you've done nothing wrong. It may feel like an uphill battle and it may feel like all of our privacy rights are completely gone. But I'm going to give you some specific steps you can take right now to take back control of your data in your privacy and stop cops from spying on you.

Step number one, it's time for you to opt out of smart meters or at least opt out of the data collection process. The very first thing we must do to stop all of this is to see if your state allows you to opt out of smart meter usage or data collection process throughout the whole thing. I'm going to start by giving you both a map as well as a list of states that provide either complete and total opt-out programs or at least limited opt-out programs that allow you to stop cops from snooping on you, whether it's the federal agencies or maybe it's state and local. Because I want you to think about this as I show you this data. I want you to realize it starts this way. Now, but I've had videos in the past where I've talked about uh actually keeping a social credit score on you to see if you're in compliance, like in China, with all the other requirements that they want you to do, like don't use so much energy. We've got to worry about the greenhouse gases and those sort of things. They may come in and begin to actually monitor how much energy you're using that could affect in the future a potential social credit score like you see in China. So, here is the list of states that we know for a fact you have some rights currently to be able to hopefully opt out of these programs. First, I want you to see the map on the screen. Notice the maps that are listed. Those that are in the blue are statewide opt-out policies that are in place that you can opt out completely. The yellow have a case-by-case opt-out program that allows the data to be limited. And then there are specific other uh states like Pennsylvania that have unique statewide policies. So, here's our comprehensive list of states currently that have some type of opt-out program: Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Wyoming, New Jersey, Vermont, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington.

Step number two, use of a local energy storage. One cutting-edge solution is to install a home battery system or even a smart electric vehicle charger that can act as a buffer between your home and the grid. By strategically charging and discharging a battery, you can flatten out the load profile seen by the smart meter and obscure the details of individual appliance use. You say, "Wait a minute, Jeff. I don't understand this." And by the way, if you know this even better than I'm explaining it, don't hesitate to put some information in the comments so that we can all learn from this. But essentially, the battery draws power from the grid in a steady way and supplies your home's variable needs internally. This hides the spikes of device usage so that now both the power company as well as police can't just draw whatever conclusions they want.

Step number three, energy management and noise. One strategy that has been used by privacy experts is to schedule your appliances to run at odd times or distribute usage in ways that doesn't actually reflect your actual routine. For example, one privacy expert said specifically that he actually schedules his dishwasher or other devices to charge or run at random times, even late at night, which then introduces quote noise into your usage pattern. Privacy experts refer to this strategy as like pulling in the curtains. Essentially, it's not total privacy, but it is obscuring the view of the government from snooping on your power usage or law enforcement trying to claim they think you were doing something you didn't do.

And option number four, which I don't really refer to as a step for you to take because I'm really only talking about this as a precautionary measure because it can get you in trouble, is shielding or jamming the actual signal of the data being transferred. Now, I bring this up because this is all over forums out there where people say they could put a Faraday cage or like something around the actual smart meter to limit the transmission of the data to the actual utility company so that they are able to be monitored. Be very careful with this approach. In many jurisdictions, interfering with the utility's metering device is illegal under anti-tampering laws, and it could result in fines or your service being cut off. Plus, blocking data transmission doesn't actually stop the data from being recorded. It's just stored and uploaded later. So, you've got to be careful here. I never recommend illegal tampering, but I wanted to mention this here because so many people are using this as a concern that it's just a lot easier for you to opt out of the program than it is to try to hide the data.

And finally, I want you to be on the lookout for emerging privacy tech meters. For example, some pilot programs are now offering privacy-preserving smart designs. This is used through a process known as homomorphic encryption or secure aggregation. This allows a meter to send only the necessary billing info or aggregated neighborhood load without exposing individual granular data for the prying eyes of the police. In fact, some pilot programs in Europe have tested approaches where the utility will only see coarse data unless there's a grid emergency.

So, overall, the point is this. Your data through your smart meter will snitch on you, and you could be accused of things you never did. You need to opt out of these programs, know your state laws, and always stand up for your rights. Your home is supposed to be your castle, a place of privacy away from the prying eyes of the government. But now, smart meters allow cops and the government to watch every flick of the light switch and to scrutinize every move, every device that you use and determine whether or not you might be suspicious. Ultimately, I have to ask this question. Do you control your home or does your home's data control you?

Now, we just covered how to stop cops from using your utility meter to spy on you. But did you know that cops have another way they can get around this process? And it's through your Wi-Fi. Check out this next video where I break down the exact steps you can take to stop cops from spying on you through your Wi-Fi.