ACLU Sues Concord NH Housing Authority Over In-Unit Sensors

ACLU Sues Concord NH Housing Authority Over In-Unit Sensors

Civil rights lawyers filed a putative class action in Merrimack County Superior Court on September 2, 2026, alleging the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority placed roughly 300 always-on sensors inside public housing apartments. No court has ruled on any of it.

Information last verified on September 7, 2026.

Status: Filed, undecided. New Hampshire Legal Assistance, the ACLU of New Hampshire and the ACLU filed this class action complaint on September 2, 2026 in Merrimack County Superior Court. The filed copy we reviewed carries a blank docket line, and the case page we opened on September 7, 2026 lists only two documents, the complaint and a motion for class certification, both dated September 2, 2026. Nothing here has been adjudicated. Everything below that describes the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority is an allegation by the plaintiffs, and CHRA has not filed an answer in any court record we opened. CHRA has responded publicly: its executive director, Julie Palmeri, said in a statement reported by the Concord Monitor on September 3, 2026 that "we deeply respect the privacy of our residents, and our use of these sensors is strictly limited to protecting health, safety, and property compliance," that the devices "only register whether noise exceeds a specific decibel threshold continuously for 10 minutes," and that "Concord Housing does not utilize the devices' crowd-monitoring capabilities."

Jurisdiction scope: This article covers New Hampshire state constitutional law and a single Merrimack County Superior Court filing. It does not address federal fair housing claims, HUD administrative remedies, or the private landlord rules that govern most rentals. Article 2-b is a New Hampshire provision, so a claim built on its text does not transfer automatically to a state whose constitution lacks a comparable informational privacy clause.

What Happened

On September 2, 2026, tenants Mark LaValley and Terri King, represented by New Hampshire Legal Assistance, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a class action complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief against the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority. The caption on the complaint's own first page reads "Mark LaValley and Terri King, individually and on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated v. Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority," in the New Hampshire Superior Court for Merrimack County. The docket line on that page is blank, which is normal for a complaint at the moment of filing. The plaintiffs propose a class of "all current and future tenants of CHRA who have or will have Minut Monitor devices installed in their units" (Compl. para. 242), which the complaint estimates at around 300 units and around 500 tenants (Compl. para. 244).

The complaint alleges that in the spring of 2024 CHRA's board approved Resolution #1416, allocating $46,060 to buy 329 Minut Monitor devices and monitoring service, and that CHRA signed a commercial agreement with the Swedish manufacturer Minut, Inc. on May 3, 2024 (Compl. paras. 25, 55, 60, 63). The complaint dates the start of installation to the fall of 2024, though it elsewhere says the process began in the summer of 2024, and alleges the last property, Parmenter Place, was fitted on or around January 15, 2026 (Compl. paras. 3, 79, 82, 93). As of June 22, 2026, the complaint alleges around 299 CHRA owned and administered units had a device installed, including 105 in the Crutchfield Building and 82 in the Kennedy Building (Compl. para. 94).

According to the complaint, the devices return temperature and humidity at a sample rate of one measurement per minute and noise in decibels at up to one measurement per minute, log motion continuously using a passive infrared sensor, and log Bluetooth events typically once every 30 minutes while operating (Compl. paras. 36 to 40, 208; for the named plaintiff's own device, paras. 137, 140). The plaintiffs allege that a records request under RSA chapter 91-A produced 74 GB of data across 213,026 CSV files (Compl. para. 204), and that between October 21, 2024 and June 8, 2026 the devices logged tenant decibel levels more than 134 million times (Compl. para. 207). The complaint alleges more than 19 million motion events across nearly 300 units between October 21, 2024 and June 7, 2026 (Compl. para. 205), and more than 2.5 million Bluetooth events across 198 apartments between March 14, 2025 and June 9, 2026 (Compl. para. 208). For the named plaintiff Mark LaValley, the complaint alleges 64,944 motion events between November 15, 2025 and June 9, 2026 (Compl. para. 141).

The notice allegations are the center of gravity. The complaint alleges CHRA gave tenants an entry notice that stated "We will be doing this whether you are home or not" (Compl. para. 97), and that some but not all tenants received a second "Capabilities Notice." The complaint quotes that notice as follows:

"What: These devices are sensors that measure and detect smoking, excessive noise levels and temperature inside your unit. It's camera-free and it doesn't record any sound or listen in to what you say or do. If smoking or excessive noise is detected inside your unit, it is reported to management. . . ." Compl. para. 101 (quoting CHRA's Capabilities Notice)

The plaintiffs' objection to that language is precise. They allege CHRA "obfuscated its description of the devices' sound sensor capabilities by claiming they do not 'record any sound' (when the devices do indeed record sound decibel levels)" (Compl. para. 107), and that CHRA never meaningfully disclosed that the units contain active motion and Bluetooth sensors (Compl. para. 188). The complaint further alleges that no decibel threshold was disclosed in any notice and that thresholds moved between 75, 80, 83, 85 and 90 decibels at different times and across different apartments (Compl. paras. 174, 181 to 183). It also alleges CHRA had drafted no data retention policy as of January 2026, leaving retention to the vendor (Compl. paras. 201, 202).

Counts I and II plead Part I, Article 2-b and Part I, Article 19 of the New Hampshire Constitution. The prayer for relief asks the court to certify the class, declare that CHRA violated tenants' constitutional rights, enjoin CHRA from installing and maintaining the devices, enjoin adverse actions based on the data they collect, order deletion of the collected data and request that Minut, Inc. do the same, and award fees and costs. The ACLU of New Hampshire case page we opened on September 7, 2026 describes the same relief and lists the court as Merrimack County Superior Court.

What the Law Actually Says

Part I, Article 2-b, New Hampshire Constitution. The official text is one sentence: "An individual's right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent." The provision is titled "[Right of Privacy.]" on the state's official Bill of Rights listing, which dates it December 5, 2018. It reached the constitution through CACR 16 of the 2018 session, sponsored by Rep. Kurk and Rep. Cushing, which directed that the amendment "be submitted to the qualified voters of the state at the state general election to be held in November, 2018," and provided that it takes effect on the governor's proclamation if approved by two thirds of those voting.

Two things follow. First, Article 2-b is textually about information, not about places or containers, which is why a claim about sensor data can be pleaded under it at all. Second, it is young and thinly construed. In State v. Clegg, 2026 N.H. 11, the New Hampshire Supreme Court had both Article 19 and Article 2-b in front of it and wrote at paragraph 13: "Because we conclude that the defendant prevails under Part I, Article 19, we need not address his claim under Part I, Article 2-b." An appellate court that reaches the older provision and stops has not told anyone how far the newer one goes.

Part I, Article 19. The provision opens: "Every subject hath a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions." The official listing dates it June 2, 1784, amended in 1792 to change the order of words. Clegg restates the operating rule at paragraph 14: under Article 19 "a warrantless search or seizure is per se unreasonable, and evidence derived from such a search or seizure is inadmissible, unless the search or seizure falls within the narrow confines of a judicially crafted exception to the warrant requirement," and "[t]he State bears the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that a warrantless search or seizure falls within one of these exceptions."

Why the landlord here is different. A constitutional search claim needs a government defendant. Under RSA 203:4, in each New Hampshire municipality "there is hereby created a public body corporate and politic to be known as the housing authority of the municipality," and RSA 203:8 provides that "[a]n authority shall constitute a public body corporate and politic, exercising public and essential governmental functions." That is the statutory basis for treating a housing authority as a state actor, and the complaint pleads it directly (Compl. paras. 20, 260). A private landlord doing the identical thing would face contract, statutory and tort theories, not Article 19. If you rent from a private owner, the operative rules are the ordinary entry, notice and lease provisions that govern New Hampshire rentals, not the state constitution.

A decibel sensor is not a recording device, and that distinction is doing real work here. Most of the landlord surveillance questions we cover involve cameras or microphones. Our coverage of New Hampshire surveillance camera laws and of what the state's two-party consent rule means inside a rental unit turns on capturing images or the content of conversations. This case involves neither, on the plaintiffs' own account.

New Hampshire's wiretapping and eavesdropping chapter is built around content. RSA 570-A:1, III defines "[i]ntercept" as "the aural or other acquisition of, or the recording of, the contents of any telecommunication or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device." RSA 570-A:1, VII defines "[c]ontents" to include "any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication," and RSA 570-A:1, II defines "[o]ral communication" as "any verbal communication uttered by a person who has a reasonable expectation that the communication is not subject to interception, under circumstances justifying such expectation." RSA 570-A:2, I makes it a class B felony to willfully intercept a telecommunication or oral communication "without the consent of all parties to the communication," subject to the exceptions in that chapter.

A reading of ambient loudness in decibels, taken once a minute, does not on its face capture the substance, purport or meaning of anything anyone said. Neither does a passive infrared motion count or a Bluetooth device tally. That is a plausible reason the complaint pleads two constitutional counts and no wiretap count at all: the New Hampshire two-party consent rule is aimed at the contents of communications, while Article 2-b is aimed at "private or personal information" as such. It also explains why the plaintiffs spend so many paragraphs on inference rather than on eavesdropping. Their theory is that minute-by-minute loudness and motion, tied to a labeled unit number, reveals when a person wakes, when they leave, when they have company and when their night is unusual (Compl. paras. 8, 40, 145, 146, 209, 211). Sensors that capture no words at all can still, on that theory, be information about a person.

The administrative search question. The complaint anticipates CHRA's likely defense and addresses the administrative search exception, citing State v. Gness, 166 N.H. 1 (2014) for the three criteria and Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523 (1967) for the proposition that searching a home is different from inspecting a regulated business (Compl. paras. 238 to 240). We have not independently reviewed those opinions this run, so treat that framing as the plaintiffs' characterization. The baseline Clegg restates, in the criminal suppression posture, is that the state carries the burden of fitting a warrantless search into a recognized exception. Whether that same allocation governs a civil declaratory and injunctive claim against a housing authority is itself unlitigated here.

What Happens Next

Nothing in this case has been decided, and the next events are procedural. The complaint's certificate of service states that a copy was sent by first-class mail to CHRA's counsel, Peter Callaghan, Esq., on September 2, 2026, so the first thing to watch for is CHRA's response, whether an answer or a motion to dismiss. No response appears in any record we opened as of September 7, 2026, and no docket number has issued: both filed documents carry a blank docket line.

Three further steps are visible on the face of the filings. The plaintiffs ask the court to certify the class "[p]rovisionally or permanently" and to appoint their counsel as class counsel (Compl., Prayer for Relief, para. 1), and a separate motion for class certification was filed the same day as the complaint; that motion is undecided. The prayer also seeks "preliminary and/or permanent" injunctions against installing and maintaining the devices and against adverse actions based on the data they collect (Compl., Prayer for Relief, paras. 3, 4), so a ruling on preliminary relief could come before any decision on the merits. And the two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys who signed the complaint appear with a note that a pro hac vice application is forthcoming.

The events that would turn this from a pending complaint into decided law are a ruling on class certification, a ruling on any request for preliminary injunctive relief, a decision on a dispositive motion, or a final judgment. The one with reach beyond this dispute would be a ruling construing Part I, Article 2-b in a government surveillance setting, a question neither Clegg nor Zarella reached. This article does not predict any of those outcomes.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The interesting thing about this filing is not the volume of data, it is the category of device. The tenant surveillance disputes we cover have overwhelmingly been about cameras in hallways, doorbell units pointed at a neighbor's door, or a microphone somewhere it should not be. Those cases have a well worn body of law behind them, including two-party consent statutes that were written with a recognizable act in mind, namely capturing what a person said. Ambient sensing sits outside that frame. A device that only ever reports a number, 62 decibels at 3:04 a.m., 14 motion events in an hour, three Bluetooth beacons nearby, does not intercept a communication under a statute like RSA 570-A, because there is no content to acquire.

One wrinkle cuts against the cleanest version of that distinction. The complaint alleges the vendor's terms of service told CHRA that machine learning is used to train the monitors to detect certain events, including "specific types of noise" (Compl. para. 71), and that the platform records categories CHRA itself cannot see (Compl. para. 47). Classifying a type of sound is a step beyond reporting a loudness number, though the complaint still alleges no capture of what anyone said.

That gap is exactly where a provision like Article 2-b is aimed. The text protects "private or personal information," not conversations and not places. Whether a stream of decibel readings tied to an apartment number is "private or personal information" within the meaning of that clause is a genuine open question in New Hampshire, and it is open in part because Clegg, decided this March, resolved the case under Article 19 and expressly set Article 2-b aside. The provision is not wholly unconstrued. In State v. Zarella, 2025 N.H. 20, No. 2024-0066 (N.H. May 1, 2025), the New Hampshire Supreme Court construed Article 2-b in a criminal case about a defendant's access to confidential records held by private counseling and medical providers, holding that the provision displaced the standard that had governed such requests. That is a different setting from a government agency collecting sensor readings inside a home, so Zarella establishes Article 2-b as an operative source of privacy rights without answering the question this case raises.

There is a second reason this filing is worth watching beyond New Hampshire. Consent is doing enormous work in the ordinary landlord surveillance analysis, and consent is the weakest link when the landlord is also the housing of last resort. The complaint alleges that tenants were told installation was mandatory before any addendum existed, and that the addendum arrived afterward with lease termination language attached (Compl. paras. 114, 115, 118, 226). Whether that amounts to voluntary agreement is the question the court will have to reach if it reaches the merits, and it is the same question every jurisdiction faces as sensor hardware gets cheap enough to deploy building-wide.

Finally, the transparency allegations matter independent of the constitutional counts. A monitoring program whose threshold allegedly changes without notice, as this one is alleged to have done, is one a tenant cannot comply with even in good faith, because the rule is unknowable. That is an argument about fair notice rather than about privacy, and it does not depend on which constitutional provision wins.

None of this predicts an outcome. CHRA has not filed an answer in any court record we opened, class certification has not been decided, and the litigation record consists of one side's pleading. CHRA has publicly disputed the plaintiffs' characterization of the devices, saying they register only whether noise exceeds a set decibel threshold for a sustained period and that it does not use their crowd-monitoring capability.

How This Affects You

If you are a tenant anywhere, the general lesson is that "it has no camera and does not record audio" answers a narrower question than most people hear in it. A device can be camera-free and microphone-content-free and still generate a continuous, timestamped record of activity in a home. When a landlord or housing authority describes a device, the useful follow-up questions are which sensors are physically present and active, what sampling rate each one runs at, who can see the output, how long it is kept, and what threshold triggers an adverse action.

If you live in housing owned or operated by a public housing authority or another government body, a state constitutional analysis is available in a way it is not to tenants of private landlords. Subsidized is not the same as government owned. Many subsidized properties are privately or nonprofit owned, and whether a constitutional claim reaches them turns on who owns and controls the property. The complaint here has to plead that point directly for one of the two named plaintiffs, whose building is a Low-Income Housing Tax Credit property owned by a nonprofit corporation but managed by CHRA (Compl. para. 13). That does not make any particular program unlawful, and it does not mean an individual tenant should refuse entry or remove a device; the complaint itself describes fines and an eviction notice following alleged tampering, though it also alleges those fees were ultimately waived and the eviction not pursued once counsel got involved (Compl. paras. 154 to 163). Documenting what you were told, and when, is a more useful step than self-help.

If you rent privately, the governing rules are ordinary landlord-tenant and recording law rather than state constitutional law, and the analysis depends heavily on what a given device actually captures. Whether a state's consumer privacy statute reaches sensor data varies, and New Hampshire's own approach to consumer data privacy obligations depends on that statute's own applicability thresholds rather than on landlord status.

Lease clauses authorizing monitoring are negotiated at the moment a person most needs the unit. That timing is the reason courts examine whether an agreement in a lease is a real waiver, and it is a fair thing to read carefully before signing rather than after a dispute starts.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. It covers New Hampshire state constitutional law and a single pending Merrimack County Superior Court case, and reflects sources verified on September 7, 2026. The case is undecided and the allegations are unproven. Laws change and this story is developing; consult a lawyer licensed in New Hampshire about your specific situation.

Related articles

• Recording rules inside a New Hampshire rental unit
• New Hampshire surveillance camera laws
• How New Hampshire handles consumer data privacy
• Entry, notice and lease rules for New Hampshire rentals

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Last updated: 2026-09-07. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-09-07.