Privacy Fears Grow as Cities Increase Surveillance

OAKLAND, Calif. — Federal grants of $7 million awarded to this city were meant largely to help thwart terror attacks at its bustling port. But instead, the money is going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town — from gunshot-detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city’s upscale hills.

Federal grants of $7 million, initially intended to help thwart terror attacks at the port in Oakland, Calif., are instead going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data.

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The new system, scheduled to begin next summer, is the latest example of how cities are compiling and processing large amounts of information, known as big data, for routine law enforcement. And the system underscores how technology has enabled the tracking of people in many aspects of life.

The police can monitor a fire hose of social media posts to look for evidence of criminal activities; transportation agencies can track commuters’ toll payments when drivers use an electronic pass; and the National Security Agency, as news reports this summer revealed, scooped up telephone records of millions of cellphone customers in the United States.

Like the Oakland effort, other pushes to use new surveillance tools in law enforcement are supported with federal dollars. The New York Police Department, aided by federal financing, has a big data system that links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists. Police in Massachusetts have used federal money to buy automated license plate scanners. And police in Texas have bought a drone with homeland security money, something that Alameda County, which Oakland is part of, also tried but shelved after public protest.

Proponents of the Oakland initiative, formally known as the Domain Awareness Center, say it will help the police reduce the city’s notoriously high crime rates. But critics say the program, which will create a central repository of surveillance information, will also gather data about the everyday movements and habits of law-abiding residents, raising legal and ethical questions about tracking people so closely.

Libby Schaaf, an Oakland City Council member, said that because of the city’s high crime rate, “it’s our responsibility to take advantage of new tools that become available.” She added, though, that the center would be able to “paint a pretty detailed picture of someone’s personal life, someone who may be innocent.”

For example, if two men were caught on camera at the port stealing goods and driving off in a black Honda sedan, Oakland authorities could look up where in the city the car had been in the last several weeks. That could include stoplights it drove past each morning and whether it regularly went to see Oakland A’s baseball games.

For law enforcement, data mining is a big step toward more complete intelligence gathering. The police have traditionally made arrests based on small bits of data — witness testimony, logs of license plate readers, footage from a surveillance camera perched above a bank machine. The new capacity to collect and sift through all that information gives the authorities a much broader view of the people they are investigating.

For the companies that make big data tools, projects like Oakland’s are a big business opportunity. Microsoft built the technology for the New York City program. I.B.M. has sold data-mining tools for Las Vegas and Memp

Oakland entered into a a contract with the Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, to build its system. (In late September, that company was renamed Leidos Holdings.)

The company’s contract to help modernize the New York City payroll system, using new technology like biometric readers, resulted in reports of kickbacks. Last year, the company paid the city $500 million to avoid a federal prosecution. The amount was believed to be the largest ever paid to settle accusations of government contract fraud. A representative of SAIC, now Leidos, declined to comment.

Even before the initiative, Oakland spent millions of dollars on traffic cameras, license plate readers and a network of sound sensors to pick up gunshots. Still, the city has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country. And an internal audit in August 2012 found that the police had spent $1.87 million on technology tools that did not work properly or remained unused because their vendors had gone out of business.

The new center will be far more ambitious. From a central location, it will electronically gather data around the clock from a variety of sensors and databases, analyze that data and display some of the information on a bank of giant monitors.

The city plans to staff the center around the clock. If there is an incident, workers can analyze the many sources of data to give leads to the police, fire department or Coast Guard. In the absence of an incident, how the data would be used and how long it would be kept remain largely unclear.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article included outdated information on Oakland’s contractor for its surveillance system. While the contract to build the system was with the Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, that company was renamed Leidos Holdings in late September. Oakland’s contract is now with Leidos, not SAIC.

Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times A self-driving car at Carnegie Mellon. Researchers have been contemplating how cities could change if our cars start driving for us, including having narrower streets because parking spots might not be necessary.

SAN FRANCISCO — By now, seeing one of Google’s experimental, driverless cars zipping down Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, or parking itself on a San Francisco street, is not all that unusual. Indeed, as automakers like Audi, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz make plans for self-driving vehicles, it is only a matter of time before such cars become a big part of the great American traffic jam.

While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”

Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.

A test of Google’s self-driving car.

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.

“What automation is going to allow is repurposing, both of spaces in cities, and of the car itself,” said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who specializes in robotics and drones.

Harvard University researchers note that as much as one-third of the land in some cities is devoted to parking spots. Some city planners expect that the cost of homes will fall as more space will become available in cities. If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities.

The Autonomous Intersection Management project, created by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, imagines cities where traffic lights no longer exist but sensors direct the flow of traffic. Although a video showing off the automated traffic intersection looks like total chaos, the researchers insist that such intersections will reduce congestion and fuel costs and can allow cars to drive through cities without stopping.

Of course, getting to a utopian city will take a little longer than circling the block looking for a spot. A spokesman for Audi said a fully automated car would not be available until the end of the decade. And the regulatory issues to be addressed before much of this could come true are, to put it mildly, forbidding.

But the pieces are starting to fall into place, at least enough to excite future-minded thinkers. Last year, Jerry Brown, the governor of California, signed legislation paving the way for driverless cars in California, making it the third state to explicitly allow the cars on the road. And federal agencies are starting to consider their impact. In May the Transportation Department made its first formal policy statement on autonomous vehicles, encouraging cities to allow testing of driverless cars.

But to some, this promise — or overpromise as the case may be — sounds familiar.

“The future city is not going to be a congestion-free environment. That same prediction was made that cars would free cities from the congestion of horses on the street,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a member of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “You have to build the sewer system to accommodate the breaks during the Super Bowl; it won’t be as pretty as we’re envisioning.”

Mr. Smith has an alternative vision of the impact of automated cars, which he believes are inevitable. Never mind that nice city center. He says that driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home.

“I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work,” he said. “My time spent in my car will essentially be very different.”

“Driverless cars won’t appear in a vacuum,” Mr. Smith said. Other predictions for the future city imagine fewer traditional-looking cars. Taking their place will be drones and robots that deliver goods.

Oh, and that food-delivery car double-parked outside? That, Mr. Calo said, will be replaced by a delivery drone.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Unboxed: N.Y.U. Center Develops a ‘Science of Cities’

THE notion of a “science of cities” seems contradictory. Science is a realm of grand theory and precise measurement, while cities are messy agglomerations of people and human foible. But science is precisely the ambition of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Founded last year, the center has been getting under way in recent weeks, moving into new office space and firing off its first project proposal to the National Science Foundation.

The center’s director is Steven E. Koonin, a Brooklyn native and graduate of Stuyvesant High School, who came to N.Y.U. after a stint in the Obama administration as the under secretary for science in the Department of Energy. He is both a theoretical physicist and science policy expert. The center shouldn’t lack for intellectual rigor.

The initiative at N.Y.U. is part of a broader trend: the global drive to apply modern sensor, computing and data-sifting technologies to urban environments, in what has become known as “smart city” technology. The goals are big gains in efficiency and quality of life by using digital technology to better manage traffic and curb the consumption of water and electricity, for example. By some estimates, water and electricity use can be cut by 30 to 50 percent over the course of a decade.

Cities from Stockholm to Singapore are deep into smart city projects. The market looms as big, lucrative business for technology companies. “The Smart City movement,” according to a report this month from IDC, a technology research firm, “is emerging and growing as a significant force of innovation and investment at all levels of government.” The N.Y.U. center’s partners include technology companies like I.B.M., Cisco Systems and Xerox, as well as universities and the New York City government.

City governments, like other institutions, have collected data for years to try to become more efficient. There have been some notable achievements, like CompStat, the New York Police Department’s system for identifying crime patterns, introduced in the mid-1990s and later widely adopted elsewhere.

What is different today, says Dr. Koonin, is that digital technologies — sensors, wireless communication, storage and clever software algorithms — are advancing so rapidly that it is becoming possible to see and measure activities in an urban environment as never before.

“We can build an observatory to be able to see the pulse of the city in detail and as a whole,” Dr. Koonin explains.

Dr. Koonin’s digital “observatory” of urban life raises questions about privacy. He is keenly aware of that issue, and vows that the center is engaged in science rather than surveillance. For example, individuals’ names or tax identification numbers would be stripped from personal records.

The collected data, he says, will be the raw material for modeling outcomes — say, the steps required to reduce electricity consumption in a high-rise office building or in an individual apartment. Those modeled predictions, he adds, can guide policy or inform citizens.

“I’d like to create SimCity for real,” Dr. Koonin says, referring to the classic computer simulation game.

To help, Dr. Koonin is forging partnerships with government laboratories to tap their expertise in building complex computer simulations, like climate models for weather prediction.

The path to SimCity will come step by step, through tackling specific projects. The first one is a program to monitor and analyze noise. The largest single cause of complaints to New York’s 311 phone and online service is noise. It is a quality-of-life issue, Dr. Koonin says, and one related to health, especially when noise disrupts sleep.

The 10-member project team includes music professors, computer scientists and graduate students. The group will use the city’s 311 data, but also plans to employ wireless sensors — tiny ones outside windows, noise meters on traffic lights and street corners, perhaps a smartphone app for crowdsourced data gathering. To inform policy choices, data on noise limits for vehicles and muffler costs might be added to the street-level noise readings. Then, computer simulations could predict the likely effect of enforcement steps, charges or incentives to buy properly working mufflers for vehicles without them.

The project, Dr. Koonin says, might also pull in data on traffic flows, garbage pickup times and building classifications. For example, he says, a 2 a.m. garbage pickup could be routed to a neighborhood with little residential housing.

Big Sean & E-40 Clash For Their Cities: "[You] Must Be High Off Bath Salt"

Tuesday, Oct 23, 2012 11:20AM

Written by Cyrus Langhorne

The World Series trash talk has officially begun as West Coast rapper E-40 has told Detroit-bred emcee Big Sean his San Francisco Giants will beat the Tigers in the best of seven match-up.

Although he respects the city of Detroit, E-40 let the world and Big Sean know the 2010 World Series champs are back for more.

"Let me make my self clear! I love the city of Detroit like I love the bay but my SF Giants gone beat that aaasssss!!!," he tweeted Monday (October 23) night moments before the Giants won a Game 7 after rallying from a 3-1 series deficit to beat the St. Louis Cardinals.

"Hey @BigSean you know i love yo city my nig but me & my @SFGiants Finna " WIN THIS THANG BREH ""

"Lol @BigSean you seen that cold demonstration we put down! This the Yay & I ain't talkin bout Kanye ha ha!" (E-40's Twitter)

Standing behind his Detroit Tigers, Sean downplayed E-40's proclamation.

"U must be high off bath salt RT @E40: Hey @BigSean you know i love yo city my nig but me & my @SFGiants Finna " WIN THIS THANG BREH "" (Big Sean's Twitter)

Last night, St. Louis' Nelly congratulated 40 after seeing his team fall to the Giants.

"Congrads to San Fran !!!hats off they did they thing!!!congrads og @E40 go gettem!!!!!!"

"Wtf they beat us!no hate in my blood!!i played sports allmy life wen u get out played u give it up!we choked #fact so what!!cya #nextyear" (Nelly's Twitter)

The Detroit Tigers are expected to have a slight advantage of winning the World Series.

The early odds at Las Vegas sportsbooks suggest the Tigers have a 60 percent chance of winning the World Series, said RJ Bell, president of handicapping information website Pregame.com. Detroit is a -160 money line favorite, meaning a winning $160 wager would return $100. The Giants opened at +140, so a winning $100 bet would yield a $140 profit. (SF Gate)

The World Series is slated to start Wednesday, October 24th night in San Francisco.