In the fall of 2024, the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority began installing a small device that looks, from across a room, like an ordinary smoke detector. It is not an ordinary smoke detector. The Mînut Monitor — roughly 300 of them, at a total cost of $46,060 — uses a machine-learning model trained on cigarette smoke, marijuana smoke, incense, and, the manufacturer's own documentation notes, presumably to manage expectations, burnt toast, to flag violations from inside the private apartments of public housing tenants. It also tracks decibel levels every sixty seconds, logs motion continuously, and scans for nearby iPhones to estimate how many people actually live in a unit. Even now, two years into the rollout, tenants say nobody told them the sensor did any of that.
What The Machine Was Actually Counting
One plaintiff's apartment alone generated more than 140,000 logged motion events over seven months — north of 700 a day, a figure that would be impressive for a Silicon Valley pedometer startup and is considerably less charming when the thing being tracked is a person's bathroom schedule. CHRA's board approved the devices to catch indoor smoking and pin down noise complaints, two goals that, on paper, sound almost reasonable. In practice, per the lawsuit, the system quietly accumulated hundreds of millions of data points on sound, movement, and occupancy across the properties it manages, all retained indefinitely and pulled up by staff on demand, with no tenant opt-out and no meaningful way to know what the algorithm thought it saw.
Sources Within the Tenant Community Confirm the Obvious
Mark LaValley and Terri King, residents of CHRA housing, are now the named plaintiffs in a class action filed September 2 in Merrimack County Superior Court, backed by the ACLU, the ACLU of New Hampshire, and New Hampshire Legal Assistance. "This is the government putting a surveillance device operating 24 hours a day, minute by minute, into people's homes," said the ACLU's Nathan Freed Wessler, a sentence that would sound like hyperbole if the housing authority's own procurement records didn't back it up line by line. Fair Housing Project director Christopher Schott put the practical stakes more plainly: "No one should worry that an assistance animal, a television, or other routine household sound could trigger penalties simply for living their life." One presumes the algorithm has, at some point, mistaken a barking dog for something worse.
The Fine Print Nobody Read
The complaint alleges CHRA told residents the devices had no cameras and could not record conversations — true, as far as it goes — while omitting that they tracked motion, counted occupants by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signal, and came with the manufacturer's own warnings about the AI's accuracy, warnings tenants say were never passed along. Lease terms threatened $300 fines for damaging or disabling a unit, which is one way to guarantee compliance without bothering to secure consent. Advocates note the arrangement is particularly dangerous for domestic violence survivors and stalking victims, for whom a government-readable log of exactly when someone is home is not a hypothetical risk — and no lease anywhere has a box to check for that.
What Comes Next
The lawsuit asks the court to order CHRA to delete everything it has collected and to bar the agency from disciplining tenants based on sensor data while the case proceeds, arguing the setup violates the New Hampshire Constitution's bans on both unreasonable searches and, under a 2018 amendment, government intrusion into private information. CHRA did not respond to requests for comment. The devices, as of this writing, are still running.
Sources: ACLU — ACLU and New Hampshire Legal Assistance Sue Housing Authority Over Electronic Surveillance of Residents · NHPR — Concord Housing Authority put high-tech sensors in rentals. Lawsuit claims it's surveillance. · Concord Monitor — Concord Housing Authority faces lawsuit over in-home surveillance devices
