nyc – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Gun Detection Tech The Gun Detection Tech Firm Said Wouldn’t Work In NYC Subways Doesn’t Work In NYC Subways

from the another-feather-in-the-mayor's-cap dept

What are the odds.

Evolv, a gun detection tech firm contracted by the city of New York to handle fare jumping by scanning for guns, told everyone — including its investors — that deploying its tech in NYC subways wasn’t exactly a great idea. It made this statement even as Mayor Adams was telling people he was going to save the city by adding this tech to the swarm of police officers and National Guardsmen already patrolling the underground.

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”

On March 28, 2024, Mayor Adams was telling the city that deploying this tech would be a historical moment in the annals of public safety… or space exploration… or something.

[Following] the death of a man who was pushed onto the subway tracks in late March, Adams announced that Evolv’s gun-detection scanners would be tested in the city’s train stations. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”

Weird. Someone being pushed onto subway tracks isn’t the sort of problem that can be solved with gun detection tech. And it certainly can’t be solved with gun detection tech even the CEO of the company providing the tech says won’t reliably detect guns in this particular application.

Of course, it’s possible it would not have detected guns no matter where Evolv’s scanners were placed. A prior test run at a Bronx hospital didn’t net many guns, but it did manage to generate an 85% false positive rate during the seven-month pilot program.

Given this astounding lack of success — along with the company’s admission the tech was not well-suited to handle electrical interference from subway tracks — you’d think the mayor would have started courting other government contractors. But he didn’t do that because he liked a lot of the people who worked for Evolv. Both Mayor Adams and his then-deputy mayor Philip Banks (both of whom are subjects of current FBI investigations) were NYPD officers. So was Evolv’s regional sales manager, Dominick D’Orazio. And the company’s CEO — the same one quoted above saying the tech won’t work reliably in subways — has used the company’s ties to the NYPD to pitch it to other cities and law enforcement agencies.

Evolv’s connection to the NYPD is something George, Evolv’s CEO, has used to market the company’s technology. “About a third of our salespeople were former police officers,” George said at a conference in June 2022. “The one here in New York was an NYPD cop, and he’s a really good sales guy because he understands who we’re selling to. He has the secret handshake.”

Here’s what NYC residents are paying for, mainly because Mayor Adams hasn’t met a cop-involved grift he’s not willing to support:

A pilot program testing AI-powered weapons scanners inside some New York City subway stations this summer did not detect any passengers with firearms — but falsely alerted more than 100 times, according to newly released police data.

Through nearly 3,000 searches, the scanners turned up more than 118 false positives as well as 12 knives, police said, though they declined to say whether the positive hits referred to illegal blades or tools, such as pocket knives, that are allowed in the transit system.

WTF. At best, the gun detection system detected 12 knives. At worst, the gun detection system did nothing more than sound the alarm a dozen times when fully-legal items passed through its scanners.

The mayor’s office can’t spin this, especially not now when it has much bigger problems to deal with (like a corruption investigation that seems to involve pretty much every one of Mayor Adams’ appointees). This is an objective failure. And it’s exactly the kind of failure the CEO of the Evolv made clear might be a real possibility if the tech was used in the NYC subway system.

Hopefully, this will be the end of this experiment. But who knows what might happen if Mayor Adams manages to walk away from this corruption investigation unscathed. He’s apparently willing to keep throwing money at his cop buddies despite their lack of success. And he’s the kind of cop who believes the only reason some new invasive tech hasn’t worked so far is because it hasn’t been deployed hard enough or often enough to reduce false positive percentages to a level where they might not make national headlines as quickly.

Evolv has gun detectors to sell. And, in Mayor Adams and those with the same “deploy first, evaluate later” mentality, they have a market that’s probably not nearly as limited as we might hope it would be. This stuff isn’t going away. It’s just going to get better PR and possibly a better set of customers that aren’t on the verge of having “disgraced” and “former” added to their title of “NYC Mayor.”

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gun detection, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv

The FBI Has Apparently Spent A Year Trying To Crack NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ Personal Phone

from the MAYOR-BEATS-FEDS dept

The spectacular collapse of the Mayor Adams’ administration is still in progress. Pretty much everyone with ties to the ex-cop, current mayor has either been informed of an ongoing investigation or managed to infer that following multiple raids by the FBI.

The mayor’s handpicked police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned shortly after these raids occurred, most likely because he was on the receiving end of one of these raids. So were First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, Phil Banks’ brother, David Banks, who is the schools chancellor, and Timothy Pearson, the mayor’s adviser.

Edward Caban issued a “get out of accountability free” missive to the NYPD as he left the building. He was replaced by former FBI Special Agent Michael Donlon… whose own house was also raided by the FBI.

In the middle of all this raiding and resigning, the Mayor’s PR people came forward to say the mayor was shocked, shocked! to discover there might be some sort of corruption-laden city government with himself at the center of all of it. The issued statement wasn’t quite the exoneration it was meant to be:

“As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

You know who doesn’t have to say that kind of thing repeatedly? Someone who oversees a bunch of people who have expressed no interest nor engaged in acts that might potentially violate the law. No honest politician/advisor/political appointee/police chief needs to be “repeatedly” reminded to “follow the law.” It just comes naturally to most people.

But Mayor Adams’ people are not most people. A lot of them are also former cops. Perhaps that explains all the corruption.

Mayor Adams himself isn’t immune to this ongoing investigation. In fact, he experienced his own personal raid a year before the onslaught of recent raids that have made headlines around the nation. Now that the mayor is under indictment, court filings are starting to expose a lot of details that were deliberately kept out of public view as the FBI engaged in its investigation.

One of those details is the fact that the FBI executed a search warrant targeting multiple phones used by Mayor Adams. However, his personal phone was not among those seized. A subpoena was issued ordering the mayor to turn over his personal phone (which is alleged to be the device the mayor used to “communicate about the conduct described in this indictment”). Mayor Adams complied. Sort of. He gave the FBI his phone. What he didn’t give the FBI was a way to see the phone’s contents, according to this report by Gaby Del Valle for The Verge.

When Adams turned in his personal cellphone the following day, charging documents say, he said he had changed the password a day prior — after learning about the investigation — and couldn’t remember it.

Sure looks like an attempt to withhold and/or destroy evidence. The fact that this happened the day after the FBI seized the mayor’s other phones isn’t going to work out well for him in court. His excuse — that he couldn’t remember it — is no more believable than his office’s assertion that everyone engaged in legal behavior because they were repeatedly told not to violate the law.

But both of those statements are far more believable than the mayor’s explanation of the post-FBI visit password changing:

Adams told investigators he changed the password “to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone,” the indictment alleges.

LOL

Keep in mind, this was the mayor’s personal phone. Pretending staffers had routine and easy access to it or its contents beggars belief. And the simplest way to prevent staffers from “accidentally” deleting evidence of alleged criminal actions would be to maintain possession of the phone on your person or throw it in a safe or lock it in a desk drawer or do literally anything other than change a password and immediately “forget” what it was.

Again, none of this is going to reflect well on the mayor as he faces these charges in court. Any judge will see it the way the rest of us see it: a deliberate attempt to thwart a federal investigation.

Even so, let’s hope this doesn’t result in any stupid precedent motivated by the mayor’s apparently willful attempt to obstruct this investigation. There’s some potential here for rulings that might negatively affect Fifth Amendment rights and/or give the feds leverage to agitate for compelled assistance from phone manufacturers.

Because there’s a chance it might do any of these things. The FBI has had the phone for a long time. And it still hasn’t managed to access its contents. The FBI insists (without supporting evidence, obviously) that this is a BIG DEAL that might BREAK THE CASE.

During a federal court hearing, prosecutor Hagan Scotten said the FBI’s inability to get into Adams’ phone is a “significant wild card,” according to a report from the New York Post.

I want to believe that might be true. But only because I want the feds to deliver a ton of incriminating evidence that takes down Mayor Adams and anyone else in his administration who engaged in corruption. On the other hand, the FBI always claims any phone it can’t get into must be loaded with incriminating evidence capable of producing slam-dunk prosecutions. The FBI’s anti-encryption agitation relies on its fervent belief that the best and most incriminating evidence is always found on encrypted devices, therefore courts should force companies (or accused persons) to decrypt the contents so special agents can open and close investigations without ever leaving their desks.

I’m definitely here for the fallout. I’m guessing these raids will lead to a string of resignations, a cooperating witness or two, and a few wrist slaps for ex-law enforcement officials. But if someone’s going to burn for this, it should be the person at the top of the city food chain. And as much as I’d like to see that happen, I’d much rather it was accomplished without collateral damage to Ccnstitutional rights or the security and privacy provided by strong encryption.

Filed Under: 5th amendment, doj, encryption, eric adams, fbi, nyc, phone searches

NYC Proudly Announces Rollout Of Gun-Detecting Tech Even Tech Producer Says Won’t Reliably Detect Guns

from the here's-something-else-doomed-to-fail! dept

There’s nothing more self-congratulatory than a government announcing it’s DOING SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING. That’s the New York City government at the moment, lauding its efforts to reduce crime in the city’s subways by installing tech even the tech manufacturer has stated isn’t capable of doing what’s being asked of it.

In mid-May, Mayor Eric Adams and the city government told New Yorkers something was being done. And that “something” was the installation of gun detection tech. Eric Adams (and I’m sure some city residents) appears to believe the city’s subways are awash in a flood of criminal activity, apparently forgetting the city actually has seen much, much worse over the years.

In addition to scrambling National Guardsmen to subway stations to police (state) passengers, the city has done a whole lot of handwringing over a perceived uptick in subway-related crime. It has also claimed the spike in fare jumpers presents an existential threat to city funding, which is a weird thing for an entity that has always paid for stuff with other people’s money to be saying.

The latest proposal is gun detection tech produced by Evolv. The problem with this supposed solution is that even Evolv says deploying its tech in subways is going to be of extremely limited utility. Georgia Gee’s scathing report for Wired on the tech and the company’s ties to Mayor Adams and several current and former NYPD law enforcement officials made several things clear.

First, this seems to have less to do with keeping subway passengers safe and more to do with pleasing people with high-level connections in the New York government, including the nation’s largest police force.

Second, this tech isn’t going to do what Mayor Adams and other city officials claim it will:

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the [Evolv’s] CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.

Not great! And it’s not entirely clear any future failures should be blamed on the rails. As Gee’s reporting for Wired notes, a previous test run at a Bronx hospital resulted in an 85 percent false positive rate.

But this is what New York’s getting, whether it wants it or not. And whether it works or not. More details here, via reporting by Ana Ley and Hurubie Meko for the New York Times.

New York City officials will begin testing gun-detecting scanners inside subway stations in the coming days in what they say is an effort to address riders’ concerns about crime.

The weapon-detection devices, produced by Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts-based start-up, roughly resemble the metal detectors often found at the entrances of courthouses and concerts. Representatives for Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the pilot, said that a single set of roving scanners would be used to search for weapons at various stations throughout the subway system for one month beginning Thursday or Friday. City Hall officials later corrected Mr. Adams and said that the pilot would begin on an unspecified date.

Speaking of not great, it’s kind of a problem when the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know when these devices will be rolled out. What’s worse is they’re being rolled out without guardrails. The city apparently has nothing in place to track the hit rate of these scanners. Nor does it seem immediately interested in engaging in any form of oversight that might let city residents know whether or not their money is being wasted.

It was not immediately clear how the city would gauge the pilot’s efficacy and whether there were plans to deploy the gadgets more widely. A representative for the mayor said that the city had not entered into a contract with Evolv and that it was not spending any money on the gadgets for the pilot. Officials have said that they are only experimenting with Evolv and that they are still seeking proposals from other companies with similar products.

While this may be a trial run of a proposed “solution” to what is only a perception of an increase in violent crime, there’s nothing in this statement that indicates the city won’t move forward with Evolv even if it does nothing to lower crime rates or even the perception itself.

Trials of products by government agencies generally involve some form of tracking to ensure the product delivers what’s been promised. In New York City, these baselines have been replaced by shrugs and vague assertions about “experiments.” But the word “experiment” means something. (Or, at least it used to.) It’s a scientific term that means current results will not only be tracked, but retained and compared to similar offerings from other companies.

But what’s being said here appears to be nothing more than vague assurances meant to stop journalists from asking further questions, rather than solid assurances that this is the beginning of a thorough process that will ultimately result in the best solution for the subway safety problem, even if that means walking away from gun detection tech entirely.

The most likely outcome is that Evolv will become a permanent part of the subway ecosystem. The company’s incestuous relationship with NYPD officials and the mayor himself strongly suggests the “experiment” will be deemed a success and the company granted a long, lucrative contract. And with nothing having been tracked during the supposed trial run, it will be impossible for anyone to claim Evolv’s system adds nothing to the security of the city’s subways. And that part is definitely by design.

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gun detection, new york city, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv

Gun Detection Tech Co.: This Won’t Work In Subways; NYC Mayor: We’re Putting It In The Subways!

from the electorate-isn't-sending-us-their-best dept

Oh, man. There’s so much going on here. The headline is only part of it.

We’ll get to it (and through it) as efficiently as possible but expect multiple stops along the way. Georgia Gee’s reporting on this for Wired is devastating. There’s so much stupidity and wrongness going on here, the article almost reads like extremely dark satire.

A little background: for whatever reason, the current mayor and law enforcement officials believe the subways are more dangerous than ever, possibly because they’ve completely forgotten the solid two-decade run of horrific crime that began in the 1970s and only began declining to current rates in the mid-1990s.

Then there’s the transit authority, which seems to believe that it’s dealing with an epidemic of fare-jumping — one never before witnessed by an agency suffering from the same sort of long-term memory loss.

This has culminated in calls for AI to do everything from recognizing fare jumpers to detecting weapons carried by paying passengers and fare jumpers alike. The state government also surged some National Guard troops to man the perimeter (and interior), giving riders the added bonus of police state vibes as they headed towards certain doom by entering a subway car.

History has been forgotten, replaced by histrionics. Sure, it’s almost spelled the same but only one has any footing in reality.

And speaking of reality, this is where the mayor begins to detach from it. Mayor Eric Adams wants to test-drive gun detection AI created by a company called Evolv in New York subways. And he wants to do it despite company officials making it clear its AI will not perform well under these circumstances.

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”

Nonetheless, this is the product Mayor Adams prefers. And it’s not entirely his fault. The company’s CEO may have been brutally honest about his tech’s chances in an undesirable environment, but the company’s PR reps were far less concerned. In fact, they were downright cheery, proclaiming Evolv to be a “mission-driven company” that welcomed the opportunity to fail publicly during a test drive in the United States’ most-used mass transit system.

That cheeriness also downplays previous tests of Evolv’s gun detection system in New York City, which haven’t exactly gone well.

Evolv’s technology was used to screen visitors in a city-run Bronx hospital, where a man had been shot inside the emergency room in January 2022. This wasn’t very successful—the scanners produced false positives 85 percent of the time during the seven-month pilot.

So, here we have a product that didn’t function well in an environment that had never been referred to by Evolv’s CEO as non-optimal. And we have a direct statement from the CEO that seems to suggest he’d rather test this tech anywhere else but the NYC subway system.

And then we have the mayor, who has ignored all of this to portray this tech roll-out as win not just for New Yorkers, but possibly for all mankind. I am not even kidding.

Despite this, following the death of a man who was pushed onto the subway tracks in late March, Adams announced that Evolv’s gun-detection scanners would be tested in the city’s train stations. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”

Jesus. I could probably do 10,000 words on the statement alone. I won’t. But I’m still going to do several.

Where do you start? Mayor Adams comparing himself to one of the most beloved presidents/starfuckers to ever hold office? The comparison of looking for guns on a subway to one of the greatest achievements ever in the human race?

How about the fact that the Space Race was originally about asserting dominance? That the space program became more useful scientifically doesn’t erase its origin as a dick-measuring contest between us and the Red Menace. We needed to show them we could do everything better, if only to keep the mutually-assured-destruction temperatures down as much as possible during the Cold War.

Is the mayor comparing subway scofflaws to the USSR? Is he insinuating that ensuring the safety of subway passengers is on par with putting US boots on the lunar ground?

What would installing more metal detectors be portrayed as? Sending animals into orbit? Or does Mayor Adams think that might be a bad idea? After all, police officers are at least as willing to kill dogs as commie scientists.

Or is it this: does he consider AI policing of mass transit a similar scientific achievement? “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can put an algorithm in a turnstile!” What even the fuck.

And does the mayor really want to detect all the guns? Let’s not forget (as Mayor Adams surely has), this city loves a good guy with a gun. Bernie Goetz was treated as a hero for going all vigilante in a subway car. If you detect those guns, you might find yourself on the wrong side of history. (But that probably doesn’t matter when you can’t even be bothered to remember it.)

Self-aggrandizement aside, there’s probably another reason Mayor Adams is so hot for a product even the company’s CEO expects to disappoint in these conditions. The short answer is Adams like himself, likes cops, and likes anyone willing to let him still be (sort of) a cop while he’s officially the mayor. More great report from Wired’s Georgia Gee:

Back in 2022, Adams tasked New York’s deputy mayor, Philip Banks III, with finding a gun-detection solution. Before joining the administration, he served as NYPD’s chief of department, but resigned in 2014 amid a federal bribery and corruption investigation in which he was later named as an unindicted coconspirator. (Banks was never charged.)

While Adams said in May 2022 that he found Evolv online, Ozerkis from Evolv tells WIRED that the NYPD had contacted Evolv “to explore and test the possibility of using our screening solution around the city as part of their multi-pronged plan to curb violent crime.”

There was a lot of overlap with former members of the NYPD. Adams and Banks came up together as police officers—as did a then-account-executive of Evolv, also name-dropped by Chitkara in the email to the mayor’s staff. Dominick D’Orazio, who had been Evolv’s sales manager in the northeast US before being promoted to regional manager in April, was a commander in Brooklyn South whose reporting line included Banks—who was, at the time, deputy chief of patrol for Borough Brooklyn South. (Banks has denied meeting D’Orazio in his capacity as an Evolv employee.)

THE ARISTOCRATS!

Yeah, it’s all deeply incestuous. And, because of that, it’s deeply stupid. The tech has failed frequently, including its deployments in schools. It’s gun detection tech that apparently can’t detect guns. But because the mayor and his buddies are deeply involved, it’s being portrayed as the next best thing to martial law by someone currently being completely consumed by his own hubris.

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gunshot detection, new york city, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv

New York’s Transit Authority Banned From Using Facial Recognition Tech To Identify Fare Jumpers

from the maybe-it's-the-fares,-not-the-jumpers dept

The most populous city in the United States has a crime problem. What kind of problem depends on who you ask. The DEA will say it’s fentanyl. The NYPD will claim it’s terrorism. The former Manhattan DA will say it’s device encryption (not actually a crime!). But the Metropolitan Transit Authority — which oversees the city’s subway system — will claim it’s something else: a problem too big to be handled without subjecting every passenger to a bit of biometric harvesting.

New York City subway and bus riders who skip paying fares are threatening the fiscal health of the nation’s largest public transportation provider and its ability to improve service, the transit authority’s chief executive said Wednesday.

“This is a fundamental, existential threat to our ability to provide first-class public transit and make it better, more frequent, more reliable,” Janno Lieber said during the agency’s monthly board meeting. “And so we got to push back.”

Ah, the ol’ “existential threat.” When this phrase has been used to describe everything from international terrorism to social media moderation, it kinds of loses all meaning. Normally, existential threats describe something serious, not the easily expected outcome of a public service pricing itself out of the market.

Now, we call all argue over things like whether a publicly-subsidized service should be more affordable or whether it’s ok to just not pay for government services if they seem to be too expensive, but we probably agree that fare jumping — while not desirable — is not an “existential threat.” For it to be an actual threat, it would have to target things that aren’t paid for with public funds and are extremely unlikely to be shut down just because they’re not bringing in as much money as city officials would prefer.

On top of that, the MTA seems to feel there are plenty of other, far more real threats, that need to be addressed. If fare jumping was the real issue, the city probably wouldn’t have deployed the National Guard to subway hubs to perform bag searches or otherwise make city residents feel the martial law so strongly desired by former mayor Mike Bloomberg is one step closer to reality.

The MTA doesn’t appear to have any good ideas on how to beat back the fare jumpers (I mean, short of possibly literally beating them), but it still had an idea. “Can’t AI do it?” the MTA asked, without bothering to consult the public that would not only be subjected to it, but expected to pay for it.

While it is using AI as a “counting tool” to add up the total “lost” to fare jumping, it won’t be able to use another favorite tool of the “Can’t AI do it?” crowd, as Stephen Nessen reports for Gothamist.

Buried in the new state budget is one sentence with major implications for the future of MTA fare enforcement: a ban on the use of facial recognition.

The new law requires the MTA to “not use, or arrange for the use, of biometric identifying technology, including but not limited to facial recognition technology, to enforce rules relating to the payment of fares.”

State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani of Queens told Gothamist the measure was added to the budget to protect New Yorkers and their privacy.

“There has long been a concern [facial recognition] could invade upon people’s lives through expanded surveillance and through the criminalization of just existing within the public sphere,” Mamdani said.

Like every government budget bill everywhere, the New York state budget is a great place to hide law revisions you don’t want the public to discover until the bill has been passed. The same thing happened here, except this one somehow managed to benefit the public, rather than the MTA or the domestic surveillance hawks in the state legislature.

This MTA-targeting ban resulted in the MTA delivering a statement that was as unnecessary as it was empty and meaningless.

An MTA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency has never used facial recognition in its expanding surveillance system. The agency is in the midst of installing cameras in every subway station and some train cars.

Ok, then. So this changes nothing about the current state of affairs vis-à-vis MTA passenger surveillance. But it does change things about its future plans, which most likely included (prior to the passage of the budget bill) other options for policing fare jumping. And since the NYPD gets to use facial recognition, the MTA would not be out of line to assume it would enjoy the same privileges… unless something prevented it from doing so… which is what has happened here.

How long this will last is still up in the air. But, for now, the MTA will have to use less intrusive surveillance options to combat this “existential crisis.” Hopefully, if it asks for this moratorium to be lifted in the future, state leaders will at least allow the public to participate in the discussion, rather than hide a couple of lines in a must-pass budget bill.

Filed Under: facial recognition, fare jumping, mta, new york, nyc

NYC Officials Are Mad Because Journalists Pointed Out The City’s New ‘AI’ Chatbot Tells People To Break The Law

from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept

Fri, Apr 5th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

Countless sectors are rushing to implement “AI” (undercooked language learning models) without understanding how they work — or making sure they work. The result has been an ugly comedy of errors stretching from journalism to mental health care thanks to greed, laziness, computer-generated errors, plagiarism, and fabulism.

NYC’s government is apparently no exception. The city recently unveiled a new “AI” powered chatbot to help answer questions about city governance. But an investigation by The Markup found that the automated assistant not only doled out incorrect information, it routinely advises city residents to break the law across a wide variety of subjects, from landlord agreements to labor issues:

“The bot said it was fine to take workers’ tips (wrong, although they sometimes can count tips toward minimum wage requirements) and that there were no regulations on informing staff about scheduling changes (also wrong). It didn’t do better with more specific industries, suggesting it was OK to conceal funeral service prices, for example, which the Federal Trade Commission has outlawed. Similar errors appeared when the questions were asked in other languages, The Markup found.”

Folks over on Bluesky had a lot of fun testing the bot out, and finding that it routinely provided bizarre, false, and sometimes illegal results:

There’s really no reality where this sloppily-implemented bullshit machine should remain operational, either ethically or legally. But when pressed about it, NYC Mayor Eric Adams stated the system will remain online, albeit with a warning that the system “may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content.”

But one administration official complained about the fact that journalists pointed out the whole error prone mess in the first place, insisting they should have worked privately with the administration to fix the problems cause by the city:

If you can’t see that, it’s reporter Joshua Friedman reporting:

At NYC mayor Eric Adams’s press conference, top mayoral advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin criticizes the media for publishing stories about the city’s new Al-powered chatbot that recommends illegal behavior. She says reporters could have approached the mayor’s office quietly and worked with them to fix it

That’s not how journalism works. That’s now how anything works. Everybody’s so bedazzled by new tech (or keen on making money from the initial hype cycle) they’re just rushing toward the trough without thinking. As a result, uncooked and dangerous automation is being layered on top of systems that weren’t working very well in the first place (see: journalism, health care, government).

The city is rushing to implement “AI” elsewhere in the city as well, such as with a new weapon scanning system tests have found have an 85 percent false positive rate. All of this is before you even touch on the fact that most early adopters of these systems see them are a wonderful way to cut corners and undermine already mistreated and underpaid labor (again see: journalism, health care).

There are lessons here you’d think would have been learned in the wake of previous tech hype and innovation cycles (cryptocurrency, NFTs, “full self driving,” etc.). Namely, innovation is great and all, but a rush to embrace innovation for innovation’s sake due to greed or incurious bedazzlement generally doesn’t work out well for anybody (except maybe early VC hype wave speculators).

Filed Under: automation, eric adams, hype, ingrid lewis-martin, innovation, language learning models, nyc, tech

In The Midst Of Multiple Controversies Of His Own Making, NYC Mayor Adams Decides The Real Problem… Is Social Media

from the stupid-moral-panics dept

It seems that if anything has gone wrong in the world, ignorant and foolish politicians have a readymade scapegoat: it’s all social media’s fault.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams is facing a pretty big list of crises, some of his own making. He’s facing what appears to be a pretty serious corruption investigation. He’s cutting a ton of budget from schools and libraries — but not from his former police colleagues. Speaking of the police, he vetoed a widely supported bill that would have added more transparency to police interactions with the public. And, frankly, it feels like a large percentage of New Yorkers are embarrassed to even talk about their mayor.

But have no fear. In his state of the city address this week, Adams zeroed in on what he says is the real problem in New York City: social media.

Mayor Adams’ version of “look, squirrel!” is to make a big part of his speech being the evidence free declaration that social media is “toxic.” Incredibly, right before claiming that social media is toxic, he talks about how an internet tool that the city set up to help kids was useful, not realizing that this is a form of social media itself:

We know academic preparation is essential to our children’s future, but so is mental health. We are proud of all we have done to promote mental health, in and out of the classroom. Last year, we launched Teenspace to help young people connect with a licensed therapist over phone, video, or text. So far, over 1,500 children have used this free service, and we will continue to get our students the help they need in a way that works for them.

And then immediately turns around and makes bizarre, unsubstantiated, and unsupported claims about the “harms” of social media.

We also need to protect our students from harm online, including the growing dangers presented by social media. Companies like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook are fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features. We cannot stand by and let Big Tech monetize our children’s privacy and jeopardize their mental health.

That’s why today, Dr. Ashwin Vasan is issuing a Health Commissioner’s Advisory, officially designating social media as a public health hazard in New York City. We are the first major American city to take this step and call out the danger of social media like this. Just as the surgeon general did with tobacco and guns, we are treating social media like other public health hazards and ensuring that tech companies take responsibility for their products. You’ll be hearing more about this soon.

This is ridiculous on multiple levels. First off, last year we had a big post detailing why any comparison between social media and “toxins” like lead paint or tobacco is inherently stupid. Those are things that are known to cause real harm.

With social media, that’s just not true. We’ve gone through this over and over and over again, but the actual science simply does not support the claim that social media is inherently harmful to kids.

What it finds is that, for many kids, social media is quite helpful. It’s a way for them to communicate with friends, to educate themselves, to explore new ideas, and more. In some cases, it can be life-saving. For a very large group, social media is neither good nor bad. It’s just a tool.

For a very small percent, however, there does appear to be some level of danger. And that’s nothing to ignore. But, even there, the relationship is complicated. Some of the evidence suggests that the causal part is in the opposite direction (i.e., those kids who are already dealing with mental health issues for other reasons retreat to social media, which can then be dangerous for them).

The right way to deal with this, according to tons of experts, is to look for ways to help that small percentage of kids who are at risk, where social media exacerbates problems.

But declaring social media, universally, to be a “public health hazard” like it’s toxic waste or second-hand smoke is, not just wrong and ignorant, but literally counterproductive. Given that some of the recent research suggests that the real cause of the teen mental health crisis is the lack of spaces for teens to be teens without parents hovering over them, declaring all of social media as a “public health hazard” will only lead to shutting down the spaces that many, many teens use to connect with their friends (most of whom can do so healthily).

Again, social media seems like a convenient scapegoat — especially for a mayor dealing with cascading controversies (some of which may lead to criminal penalties) — but declaring it a public health hazard like tobacco is not only stupid, but directly counterproductive.

Indeed, the incredible part is that for all the headline grabbing of social media now being a “public health crisis,” and Dr. Vasan publicly announcing that he’s declared social media to be a “toxin,” the actual report he released doesn’t support any of that, and instead suggests some common sense approaches to using social media in a healthy manner.

If it were truly a “toxin” you don’t issue a report that is mostly focused on how to use it smartly. We don’t have public health officials talking about how kids can have a healthy relationship with tobacco, or lead paint, or alcohol. With actual toxins, you protect the community from them.

Instead, the actual advisory is mostly focused on being aware of the risks and using social media appropriately. Which is perfectly good advice, but is entirely different than calling it a “public health crisis” and a toxin.

Indeed, the advisory notes the benefits many kids get from social media (imagine a similar advisor for lead paint or cigarettes?).

Adults who interact with children and youth, including caregivers, health care providers, educators and school staff, community-based organizations, and youth development staff, should take opportunities to promote use of social media in a manner that is protective of youth mental health. This includes: a. Implementing tech-free times and places in relevant settings that encourage in-person connection; b. Discussing social media use in an open-minded way with children and youth, and providing support when they identify concerns; and c. Modeling healthy social media use, including sharing use practices and how to be thoughtful with use

And, uh, yeah. Like that’s just generally good advice. It’s also common sense. But it’s difficult to square common sense language like that with “toxin!” or “public health crisis!” Most of the recommendations in the document are along those lines. Be thoughtful about social media use. Parents should talk to their kids about it. Teachers should teach good use of social media based on approved curricula.

I mean, all of those are perfectly reasonable, good suggestions. There is a silly nod towards the end about state and federal laws (many of which are being passed, though all are getting thrown out as unconstitutional), but what’s so stupidly striking about this is that the language Adams and Vasan are using is fear mongering moral panic nonsense. Whereas, the actual “advice” they’re giving is… not at all consistent with their hyperbolic language.

But, of course, being calm and reasonable doesn’t get headlines. And Adams and Vasan want headlines. The headlines they get, though, will mislead the public and create real harm. Because most parents, teachers, and school administrators aren’t going to read the details. They’re going to hear “toxic” and try to ban the usage outright, even as that’s been shown to create very real harms in kids.

In other words, it’s yet another move by Adams that gets headlines but creates a real mess for actual NYC residents.

Elect better people.

Filed Under: ashwin vasan, eric adams, nyc, public health hazard, social media

A Volunteer Army Is Deploying Dirt Cheap Broadband In NYC

from the do-it-yourself dept

Mon, Oct 2nd 2023 05:29am - Karl Bode

A few years ago during one of our Greenhouse forums, activist Terique Boyce wrote about how an all-volunteer army had been spending their days deploying free broadband to NYC residents. It’s the latest example of frustrated communities building their own infrastructure after decades of being ripped off and underserved by powerful, local broadband monopolies.

NYC Mesh is a sort of guerilla activist project that installs wireless mesh networking antennas and routers on the top of buildings to deliver affordable (sometimes free) broadband.”

CNET has done a good profile piece on the project, which charges users a $50 fee for the installation and a pay-what-you-can monthly donation to keep the network operating. DIY’ers can install the service for free. Subscribers are encouraged to share their connections with other locals. The organization says it never disconnects users for non-payment.

These aren’t the kind of next-gen fiber connections you want to run a business off of, but they do provide essential access to marginalized neighborhoods that can’t afford broadband from their regional monopoly (in NYC that’s usually Charter/Spectrum or Verizon):

“NYC Mesh is not an internet service provider, but a grassroots, volunteer-run community network. Its aim is to create an affordable, open and reliable network that’s accessible to all New Yorkers for both daily and emergency internet use. Santana says the group’s members want to help people determine their own digital future and “bring back the internet to what it used to be.”

Around a thousand U.S. communities have built some flavor of community-owned and operated broadband network, whether it’s something like NYC Mesh, fiber deployed by the city-owned utility, a local cooperative, or a direct municipal broadband build. As always, these communities wouldn’t be deploying their own networks if not for market failure at the hands of regional monopolies.

“ISPs are always trying to maximize profits. We are just trying to connect our members for the lowest cost possible,” says Brian Hall, one of the lead volunteers and founders of NYC Mesh.

Federal policymakers talk a lot about the “digital divide,” yet routinely fail to address the core reason for it: we turned broadband into a luxury good dominated by a handful of extremely political powerful regional monopolies, hellbent on nickel-and-diming customers trapped by a lack of competition. We didn’t block mergers, we didn’t hold them accountable, and we somehow act surprised at the result.

Instead of directly tackling monopoly power (in fact the folks at the FCC under both parties routinely can’t even admit there’s a problem in public facing statements), we enjoy throwing billions in taxpayer subsidies at said monopolies in the hopes that this time, our “bad luck” will finally change.

Meanwhile, a growing list of communities countrywide have grown tired of waiting for competent federal broadband policy, and continue to take matters into their own hands. Often with zero messaging or policy support from federal regulators purportedly dedicated to “bridging the digital divide.”

Filed Under: broadband, high speed internet, mesh networking, nyc, nycmesh, wireless

MTA Website Doles Out Rider History Data With Just A Credit Card Number

from the watching-you,-watching-me dept

Fri, Sep 1st 2023 05:29am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted for years how there’s no limit of companies and organizations that over-collect data on your daily movement patterns, then fail to adequately secure that data. Whether it’s your mobile phone carrier, your smartphone maker, your favorite app, or a rotating crop of dodgy data brokers, our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era is the gift that keeps on giving.

A lack of regulatory oversight of data collection has normalized lazy data practices everywhere you look. Case in point: Joseph Cox at 404 Media discovered that in NYC, the MTA’s OMNY contactless payment system easily spews out a rider’s detailed subway ridership history if you plug in a user’s credit card number, which can often be obtained via the dark web:

“Obviously this is a great fit for abusers who live with their victims or have physical access, however brief, to their wallets,” Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and who has extensively researched how abusive partners use technology, told 404 Media. “​​Credit card info is not a goddamn unique identifier.”

This could have easily been avoided with a simple PIN or password. While OMNY users can sign up for a password protected account, the system defaults to the no password, no authentication option. 404 Media points to a 2019 study by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) that expressed concerns that the payment system could be easily abused:

“Given how often government agencies, including the New York Police Department (‘NYPD’), have abused surveillance data to target ethnic and religious minorities and how for- profit corporations face overwhelming pressure to monetize user data, OMNY has the potential to expose millions of transit users to troubling repercussions”

New York City is also taking heat for its longstanding Wi-Fi kiosk program LinkNYC, which still non transparently over-collects the data of users and passersby alike despite years of complaints by privacy activists.

There are two major reasons we don’t have even a basic privacy law for the internet era that holds governments, organizations, and corporations accountable for lazy security practices. One, the data collection is immensely profitable to just an ocean of companies and industries which lobby against reform in unison. Two, it routinely allows the government to avoid having to get pesky warrants.

It’s not clear how many privacy scandals we need to bear witness to before real reform actually occurs, but it’s abundantly clear we’re going to be waiting a long while.

Filed Under: location data, mta, nyc, privacy, security, subway
Companies: mta

ACLU Says NYC’s Half-Baked WiFi Kiosks Still A Privacy Mess

from the more-of-the-same dept

Mon, Aug 7th 2023 03:43pm - Karl Bode

In 2014, NYC officials decided to replace the city’s dated pay phones with “information kiosks” providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by “context-aware” ads based on a variety of data collected from kiosk users and NYC residents just passing by.

It… didn’t go well.

Within a few years, reports emerged that the company hired to deploy the kiosks (CityBridge) had only deployed 1,900 of an originally promised 7,000 kiosks. And the kiosks they had deployed were being used to watch porn. The program has also been long criticized for over-collecting user data and being completely non-transparent about what data was being collected or who access was sold to.

By 2020 CityBridge still owed the city $75 million. In 2021, an audit by New York State’s Comptroller found LinkNYC failed completely to meet its deployment goals, failed to adequately maintain existing kiosks, failed to turn on many already deployed kiosks, and had fallen well short of projected ad revenues.

It’s now 2023, and the ACLU of New York says that the lion’s share of the dodgy, privacy-violating tracking undertaken by the kiosk system still hasn’t been meaningfully addressed. And the city and its partners still refuse to provide full transparency on what’s being collected from passing city residents, whether they use the kiosks or not:

Beyond issues with the privacy policy, there is still a lot we don’t know about what information LinkNYC kiosks are sucking up. We also don’t know who has access to that information, how CityBridge is utilizing other third-party data to target people, and what’s being done with that treasure trove of personal data.

I wrote about this for Vice’s Motherboard last fall and absolutely nothing has really changed. The ACLU suggests that one alternative to this privacy-invading stopgap effort is for the city to actually deliver affordable fiber broadband to all city residents so they don’t need to huddle in the street in the first place:

“We need a publicly funded and controlled municipal broadband program that ensures every New Yorker, regardless of who they are or how much money they have, can enjoy high-speed, reliable Internet access. This program must put our privacy rights front-and-center so they aren’t traded away to the highest bidder.”

If you recall, NYC Mayor Eric Adams dismantled the city’s already underway plan to build a city-wide open access fiber network. That network would have boosted city broadband competition and driven down broadband access costs for all city residents, but it was unceremoniously dismantled, much to the surprise of folks that had been working on it for years.

The Adams administration insisted that the privacy-invasive undercooked kiosk system was good enough, likely because a city-owned municipal network would understandably upset regional mono/duopolies Verizon and regional cable giant Charter Communications (Spectrum).

As a substitute, the Adams administration also embraced a program dubbed Big Apple Connect. Under Big Apple Connect, the city decided to pay Charter $30 million a year for three years to give free broadband to around 400,000 folks living in public housing around the city.

Here’s the thing: this program will cost the city $90 million to temporarily fix a problem caused by the company it’s partnering with. That money will be thrown at a local monopoly directly responsible for high prices through its attacks on competition to temporarily lower costs. And the program only runs three years, after which those limited participants are out of luck and prices revert to their normal high.

In contrast, New York City’s original master plan called for spending 156milliontobuildanopenaccessfibernetworkthatalllocalISPscouldcompeteforbusinessover.Theresultingcompetitionwouldhaveloweredbroadbandaccesscostsforeveryoneinrange.That156 million to build an open access fiber network that all local ISPs could compete for business over. The resulting competition would have lowered broadband access costs for everyone in range. That 156milliontobuildanopenaccessfibernetworkthatalllocalISPscouldcompeteforbusinessover.Theresultingcompetitionwouldhaveloweredbroadbandaccesscostsforeveryoneinrange.That90 million being thrown at Charter could have gone a long way toward getting that network off the ground and inspiring other cities.

There’s a reason cities everywhere are building their own broadband networks, whether they’re municipal, cooperatives, or via the city-owned utility. It’s because data routinely show that treating broadband as an essential utility not only results in better, faster, and cheaper broadband, but also locally-owned networks are more easily to hold accountable for privacy and other competitive shenanigans.

This data-backed argument that broadband should probably be a publicly-owned utility understandably doesn’t make regional predatory telecom monopolies (or the endless federal, state, or local politicians that coddle them) particularly happy.

Filed Under: broadband, eric adams, high speed internet, kiosks, linknyc, new york city, nyc, telecom, wifi, wireless
Companies: aclu, citybridge