Your comment made me look. I haven't read all of the following.
http://observer.com/2010/12/the-original-wikileaker/
This may not be specifically what you had in mind, but perhaps it pertains:
https://archinect.com/features/article/149956364/the-whistle...
The Whistleblower Architects: surveillance, infrastructure, and freedom of information according to Cryptome (part 2)
Nicholas Korody By Nicholas Korody
Jul 7, '16 12:15 PM EST
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Credit: Cryptome
Credit: Cryptome
This is the second half of a two-part interview with Cryptome, an online repository of leaked government secrets and other documents relevant to contemporary surveillance and its infrastructure. Cryptome is run by the architects Deborah Natsios and John Young, who live and work in New York City (any use of the first person is from Natsios' perspective). Part one, which you can read here, delves into their backgrounds and motivations. Part two deals more with their views on the contemporary city and the politics of information access.
I was hoping you could draw something like a sketch of the city as you see it today, perhaps using New York, where you both live and work, as an example. How does surveillance operate in the city? How does information become a mechanism of control? I'm thinking a bit about your recent postings on Twitter of surreptitious surveillance cameras.
Our place of work overlooks a long stretch of historic Broadway, the city's oldest north-south thoroughfare and a former native trail. Broadway charts a diagonal exception to the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which famously overlaid a rectangular grid as a rationalizing technique to discipline wild Manhattan's island topography.Vibrant democracy has to make public space available for the unexpected, the creative, the dissenting without fear of reprisal
Broadway's everyday percussion of taxis, fire engines, ambulance sirens, garbage trucks, barking dogs and toddler tantrums that reach our windows confirms that, in spite of the grid, eruptions of near-chaos have always been part of the creative hardscape. It's only when we join the anarchic materiality of street-level democracy as autonomous, anonymous or social pedestrians that we feel truly embodied in the living city. Vibrant democracy has to make public space available for the unexpected, the creative, the dissenting without fear of reprisal.
Not visible from our upper aerie is the concealed architectonic of municipal grids superimposed in recent decades onto legacy disciplines of 1811. We cannot see vast information infrastructures that encode processes of worldwide economic restructuring whose capital, symbols, goods and bodies flow through the local interests of our relentlessly global city. Harnessing informational flows falls under the trending rubric of municipal 'smart' policies.
Metropolitan governance has widely embraced market-driven best practices derived from global risk management approaches, as David Lyon notes. Their privatizing regimes are anticipating and controlling urban outcomes through risk calculations that mine big data from myriad sources. Most provocative are analytics gleaned from ubiquitous watching and tracking of bodies that make up the city's far-flung, mobile and diasporic populations. We are increasingly visible to invisible regimes. Cryptome's library for information equality works in small, daily increments to invert this diagram.We are increasingly visible to invisible regimes.
As part of modest efforts to do our part to help shore up the diminishing public domain, Cryptome has been documenting in recent weeks the block-by-block smart upgrading of New York City's obsolete public telephony system. Trenches are being chopped along the street, rope pulled through underground innerduct, rebar placed to receive poured concrete, galvanized steel pedestals positioned with orange power cable and fiber poking out of conduit.
Credit: Cryptome
Credit: Cryptome
Installed onto the legacy footprint of the city's former sidewalk payphone system, 7,500 to 10,000 'Structures' of the dispersed LinkNYC system will broadcast 'relevant' ads on 55” HD screens to subsidize the kiosks' free gigabit-speed Internet service, free public wi-fi, free domestic phone calls, free USB phone-charging outlets and a 911 emergency call button.
Assemblages like these undergird smart cities that are consolidating around us, with boosterish zeal, for the supposed benefit of municipal efficiency, convenience and social equity. Big data collection technologies that enable the Internet of Things (IoT) are embedding into larger scale urban infrastructures towards that end.
But can smart space be democratic public space when speech and acts are ubiquitously recorded and reported? Are apps 'free' when they harvest vast troves of personal data without consent? can smart space be democratic public space when speech and acts are ubiquitously recorded and reported?Wi-fi hotspots are notoriously insecure. Smartphones exude communications trails and geolocational clues. LinkNYC's multiple onboard sensors include microphones and concealed pinhole cameras that capture ambient data for 24/7 delivery to downstream analytics.
Surveillant practices capture and process our digital traces as abstracted New Yorkers, fragmenting personal data into simulated identities stored in various databases or resold to data brokers. Jury pool lists, marriage licenses, voting records, civil disobedience misdemeanors, rifle permits and police dossiers––analog bureaucratic records that constituted an earlier idea of civic modernity––are now logged electronically. They coordinate with other databases, both commercial and municipal, through powerful data-mining analytics that reinforce the social partitions and economic divisions of the inequitably stratified city, as Lyon warns.
During the 1960s, Jane Jacobs advocated 'eyes on the street' as a citizen-directed management of public space that invited watchful caring of neighbors and strangers. New Yorkers could make 911 calls seeking emergency assistance from the analog payphone system first installed in the 1920s.
Credit: Cryptome
Credit: Cryptome
After 9/11, the NYPD deputized New Yorkers as para-policing informants, urging them to act on fear and suspicion: 'if you see something say something'. The vintage payphone system had fallen into disuse. Post-9/11 visualization and reporting regimes revealed risk management-style policing coordinating with command-and-control technologies developed for military battlespace and cyberwar. Preemptive war-gaming targeted Muslim neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Pakistani communities along Coney Island Avenue, public housing in the South Bronx and Bangladeshi enclaves in Kensington.
A company that produces military mission control systems manufactures LinkNYC kiosks through a spin off entity. Installed along public sidewalks at a granular coverage of every 200 feet or so, the devices introduce an unprecedented urban apparatus: the coordinated automation and privatization of neighborhood-scale sensing and reporting derived from military command-and-control technology. Has LinkNYC been tracking Cryptome's movements through the city?LinkNYC joins stop-and-frisk policing and Lower Manhattan's Ring of Steel security cordon as one of the city's premier sensing and reporting technologies....