Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

The extent to which mass urban surveillance will be tolerated in smart cities will differ around the world. Government, with varying degrees of citizen input, will need to strike a balance between the costs of intrusion and the benefits of early detection. In the European Union, for instance, strong legal protections for the privacy of personal information draw clear lines (for companies at least) on how data can be collected, stored, and reused. In much of urban Asia, historically speaking, privacy is a new luxury. The differing reactions to surveillance in China’s wealthy coastal cities and its industrializing core are as different as what you’d expect between San Francisco and Boise. Governments will play their hands differently. Autocratic elites like those that rule much the Persian Gulf region look at surveillance and data mining as a force multiplier that gives them leverage over terrorists, criminal organizations, oppressed minorities, and guest workers. Americans seem resigned to muddle through, leaving the courts to settle conflicts over digital surveillance and privacy on a case-by-case basis.

Mass surveillance, designed to protect smart cities, may actually put their residents at great risk. Once assembled, stockpiles of personal data are a honeypot for criminals. Theft of personal data is now endemic and epic in scale—just a single breach of security in April 2011 led to the theft of over 75 million user records from the Sony PlayStation Network, an online community for computer gamers. The stolen data included users names, addresses, passwords, credit-card numbers, and birth dates.

Even the surveillance specialists seem overwhelmed. At the peak of the Carrier IQ scandal, information surfaced that much of the tracking was being done by extra code inserted by phone manufacturers. Carrier IQs executives were flummoxed to find their software had been hacked by their own customers. “Were as surprised as anybody to see all that information flowing,” remarked Carrier IQ marketing director Andrew Coward.63 As Slates Farhad Manjoo put it, “these innocent explanations are exactly why you should worry that your phone is secretly invading your privacy: Between the manufacturer, the carrier, the O.S. maker, and all the other hands that touched your phone, there are more than enough opportunities to add software that overreaches, either benignly or with some malicious purpose.”64

Private surveillance systems that connect to the cloud are open targets too. Trendnet, a company that provides surveillance solutions for homes and businesses, was compromised in early 2012. Links to live streams from thousands of its cameras were posted to hacker sites. As one report described the breach, “Some of the more interesting camera feeds included a laundromat in Los Angeles, a bar and grill in Virginia, living rooms in Korea and Hong Kong, offices in Moscow, a Newark man watching the football game in a Giants jersey, and the inside of a turtle cage.”63

If all of this summons thoughts of George Orwell’s fictional dystopia 1984 , you’re not alone. In an August 2011 ruling that blocked the US government’s attempted warrantless seizure of subscriber location data from Verizon Wireless during a criminal investigation, federal judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote, “While the government’s monitoring of our thoughts may be the archetypical Orwellian intrusion, the government’s surveillance of our movements over a considerable time period through new technologies, such as the collection of cell-site-location records, without the protections of the Fourth Amendment, puts our country far closer to Oceania than our Constitution permits.”66

Take Cisco’s vision of Songdo (and by extension the new China), an urban civilization powered by ubiquitous two-way video screens, and fold in the latest in biometrics. It would be hard to design a more flawless replica of Orwell’s “telescreen,” which pumped out propaganda while watching vigilantly for hints of dissent. As Orwell wrote in 1984, “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.” Peaceful Chongqing is just a warm-up for Cisco. The market for surveillance products in China is growing at double-digit rates. It’s a future where police, bureaucrats, employers, and hackers may look out from every screen we look into.

We’d like to think of smart technology as a benevolent omniscience, always acting in our interests. That’s certainly the pitch by technology giants, governments, and start-ups alike. But the proliferation of surveillance mechanisms isn’t an accident. Governments, who ought to be the ones drawing a line to protect us, can’t keep themselves away from the stuff. It’s so tempting that even after Congress shut down the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program in 2003, the National Security Agency went on to build a clandestine version of the same monitoring system, even borrowing some of TIA’s own prototype technology.69 As the Brookings report on Peaceful Chongqing concluded, “Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available.”70 The study purported to deal only with authoritarian states, but it might just as easily have included the United States.

In our rush to build smart cities on a foundation of technologies for sensing and control of the world around us, should we be at all surprised when they are turned around to control us?

Thinking About the Unthinkable

Every day, we are doubling down on a bet that technology will solve the problems of twenty-first-century urbanization, from traffic to crime to energy. But what if smart cities do turn out to be buggy, brittle, and bugged? Its unthinkable. But it may come to pass anyway. Considering worst-case scenarios is painful, but it can lead to drastically different conclusions and actions.

Consider US strategy during the Cold War. In the early 1960s, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union entered a new and alarming phase. At first, American strategy was based on deterrence. By matching Soviet buildup, the United States could ensure that nuclear war would cause such total annihilation that it would be an unthinkable option for the enemy. But some thinkers, led by Herman Kahn at RAND, didn’t buy the “mutually assured destruction” doctrine. In a controversial 1962 treatise, titled Thinking About the Unthinkable , published after he left RAND to found his own group, the Hudson Institute, Kahn argued that not only was a nuclear war winnable, but “the living would not envy the dead” as conventional thinking held. Many, if not most of the population, would survive. Life would continue. Kahn’s simple point—that the overly simplistic assumption of total annihilation prevented the consideration of other possible scenarios— had huge impacts on US strategy. A good defense against nuclear weapons was suddenly as important as using them offensively. If the United States could show that it could survive a Soviet sneak attack and launch a counterstrike, deterrence would be more effective.

Thinking about the unthinkable dictated a whole new approach to building cities. By concentrating population, infrastructure, and industrial capacity in nice, big, juicy, megaton-sized targets, they had become a liability in the nuclear age. As early as 1950, none other than the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, wrote in Life magazine, “The decentralization of our cities on the spots on which they stand, plus the release of our whole communications system from the threat of a disastrous tie-up, are reforms which are long overdue.... For a city is primarily a communications center, serving the same purpose as a nerve center in the body.” While suburbanization was driven by broader economic and technological forces, defense planners certainly welcomed and encouraged the decentralization of population. The federal government was much less subtle with businesses, intensively studying and promoting “industrial dispersion” throughout the 1950s.