Thread by @doctorow

The lockdown was a chaotic time for "smart cities." On the one hand, the most prominent smart city project in the world - Google's Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto - collapsed thanks to the company's lies about privacy and land use coming to light.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/jus…

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On the other hand, the standalone vendors that promise smart city SERVICES that you can graft onto your "dumb" city saw their fortunes surge, as the world's great metropolises sleepwalked into a surveillance nightmare.

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From license plate cameras to facial recognition to fake cellphone towers to location data harvested from vehicles and mobile devices, city governments shoveled billions into the coffers of private-sector snoops in the name of crimefighting and technocratic management.

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The smart city has long been criticized as a means of quietly transforming public spaces of democratic action into private spaces of technological surveillance and control. Recent books like @jathansadowski's "Too Smart" (2020) make the case in depth.

jathansadowski.com/book

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Books can set out a long argument and cite examples in support of it, but those examples need to be updated regularly and the critique likewise because the field is moving so quickly - as is the critical response.

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This month, Harvard's @BelferCenter published "Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition)," a long report by Rebecca Williams that revisits the smart city nightmare in light of the mass protests, lockdowns and other high-intensity events of 2020/1.

belfercenter.org/publication/wh…

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As Williams writes, the smart city always starts with the rejections of participatory dialogue ("What would we like in our neighborhood?") in favor of technocratic analysis ("They will design data collection that will inform them to what they will do with our neighborhood").

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Technocrats don't want dialogue about surveillance because the dialogue always leads to a rejection. The Sidewalk Labs consultations in Toronto were overwhelmingly dominated by people who didn't want a giant American monopolist spying on their literal footsteps 24/7.

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Detroiters roundly rejected a $2.5m project to put cameras at their city's intersections. When Apple asked Iphone owners whether they wanted to be tracked by apps (switching from opt out to opt in) 96% of users said NO.

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The commercial surveillance industry runs #ConsentTheater - whether that's grey-on-white 8-point warnings that "Use of this site indicates consent to our terms of service" or discreet signs under street cameras: "This area under surveillance."

onezero.medium.com/consent-theate…

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Plans for urban technological surveillance don't survive real public consultation. The people just don't know what's good for 'em, so the vendors and the officials cutting checks to them have to instrument the city for spying on the down-low.

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This secrecy festers, and the harms it brings are not limited to spying on people and chilling democratic protest. Secrecy also allows vendors to get away with overcharging and underdelivering.

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CBP procured facial recognition spycams that analyzed 23m people in public spaces and never caught a single bad guy, while Chicago PD murdered a Black child called Adam Toledo after Shotspotter falsely reported a gunshot at his location.

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Secret procurements for defective technology wastes money and puts communities of color at risk - but they also create systemic, TECHNOLOGICAL risk, because they embed janky garbage software from shitty surveillance vendors right in the urban fabric.

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Vendors who lie about how well their facial recognition or gunshot triangulation works also lie about their information security, and these tools get hacked on the reg, leaking sensitive personal information about millions of city-dwellers to identity thieves.

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This defective, sloppy spyware is also a dark, moist environment perfectly suited to harboring ransomware infections, which can see vital services from streetlights to public transit frozen because some "smart city" grifter added a badly secured surveillance layer to it.

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Because smart cities are inherently paternalistic (because they always bypass democratic dialog in favor of technocratic fiat), they replicate and magnify society's biases and discrimination, with a coating of empirical facewash: "It's not racism, it's just math."

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Williams cites many 2020/1 examples of this, from Baltimore's 25:1 ratio of CCTVs in Black neighborhoods to white neighborhoods, to Tampa and Detroit's use of surveillance tech for "safety" in public housing.

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Meanwhile, in Lucknow, India, the technocratic solution to an epidemic of sexist street harassment was to surveil women ("to protect them") rather than the men who perpetrated the harassment.

perma.cc/FU62-NBQF

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All of this is driven by private companies who mobilize investor capital and profits to sell more and more surveillance tech to cities. The antidemocratic, secret procurement process leads to more antidemocratic forms of privatization.

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Democracy is replaced with corporate decision-making; constitutional protections are replaced by corporate policy; and surveillance monopolies expand their footprint, fill their coffers and sell more surveillance tech.

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And far from making police accountable, surveillance gear on its own simply gives corrupt cops a broader set of tools to work with - as in Mexico City, where the C5 CCTV project let corrupt cops blackmail people and extort false confessions.

perma.cc/87QK-3HZG

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Williams ends with a highly actionable call to arms, setting out a ten-point program for analyzing smart city proposals and listing organizations and networks (like the Electronic Frontier Alliance) that have been effective at pushing back.

eff.org/fight

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/pos…