through social scoring as done in China, where tests for a social credit system have
already begun to control the social behavior of citizens by rewarding compliant
behavior and sanctioning breaches of compliant behavior (Keller 2018a; Blank
2018; Trentmann and Qinhuangdao 2015). Street lamps with covert video cameras
may turn every citizen passing these lamps into a potential suspect (Keller 2018b).
A particularly unpleasant example for illegitimate joint spying activities of
authorities and big corporations by Smart City Technology has been the Lower
Manhattan Security Coordination Center jointly staffed and operated by the
New York Police Department (NYPD) together with the biggest Wall Street
companies – those companies being investigated in 50 states for hypothecation
and enforcement fraud who are widely believed to have brought about the economic
breakdown of the nation (Martens 2012). This center – equipped with thousands of
panning, tilting, and rotating cameras to track individuals – had been operated
around the clock doing warrantless surveillance on hundreds of thousands of
law-abiding citizens all over Manhattan involving live feeds simultaneously analyzing pictures by AI to search for certain clothing colors and human characteristics,
e.g., searching for a suspicious person based on a search for a red shirt (Martens
2012). This mass surveillance and mass aggregation of data on persons has been
widely criticized by the New York Civil Liberties Union and civil rights attorneys
(Martens 2012).
In contrast, a positive example for the right balance between security and privacy
are the cameras developed and currently tested by the Fraunhofer Institute in
Mannheim, Southern Germany (Töngi 2018). These high-tech cameras are equipped
with AI, alerting the police in suspicious situations indicating crimes, accidents, or
heart attacks. They do this, however, without any face recognition and sound
recordings, and the cameras are deliberately not installed all over the city but only
at crime hot spots. The images are sent encrypted by fiber-optic cable to the police
station and are deleted after 72 h (Töngi 2018). The same can be said of the program
ThinThread developed by NSA
15 elite official William Binney – an elaborated
legally compliant and privacy-friendly program with encrypted data able to filter
irrelevant information out of metadata while being investigatively most efficient in
the field of counter-terrorism – in contrast to inefficient later programs like
Stellarwind making the NSA literally “drown” in a flood of data while allowing
unconstitutional surveillance (Gorman 2006; O’Cleirigh 2018).
Beyond posing a major obstacle in their setup for the average consumer due to the
many hub devices needed for most lighting and sensor systems, creating difficulties
of pairing new devices to a Wi-Fi network, and annoying the inhabitants by
stereotype commands (Newman 2016; Heargreaves et al. 2017; Higginbotham
2015; Hill and Mattu 2018), smart devices in Smart Homes as well as ultra-modern
Wi-Fi devices peering through walls (Khandelwal 2015) have the potential to take
away people’s last private retreat, allowing the average citizen even less privacy than
15 National Security Agency, the USA’s national intelligence agency, leading the US government in
cryptology including Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and cybersecurity (NSA/CSS 2018).
13 The Role of Smart Cities for the Realization of. . .
237
already begun to control the social behavior of citizens by rewarding compliant
behavior and sanctioning breaches of compliant behavior (Keller 2018a; Blank
2018; Trentmann and Qinhuangdao 2015). Street lamps with covert video cameras
may turn every citizen passing these lamps into a potential suspect (Keller 2018b).
A particularly unpleasant example for illegitimate joint spying activities of
authorities and big corporations by Smart City Technology has been the Lower
Manhattan Security Coordination Center jointly staffed and operated by the
New York Police Department (NYPD) together with the biggest Wall Street
companies – those companies being investigated in 50 states for hypothecation
and enforcement fraud who are widely believed to have brought about the economic
breakdown of the nation (Martens 2012). This center – equipped with thousands of
panning, tilting, and rotating cameras to track individuals – had been operated
around the clock doing warrantless surveillance on hundreds of thousands of
law-abiding citizens all over Manhattan involving live feeds simultaneously analyzing pictures by AI to search for certain clothing colors and human characteristics,
e.g., searching for a suspicious person based on a search for a red shirt (Martens
2012). This mass surveillance and mass aggregation of data on persons has been
widely criticized by the New York Civil Liberties Union and civil rights attorneys
(Martens 2012).
In contrast, a positive example for the right balance between security and privacy
are the cameras developed and currently tested by the Fraunhofer Institute in
Mannheim, Southern Germany (Töngi 2018). These high-tech cameras are equipped
with AI, alerting the police in suspicious situations indicating crimes, accidents, or
heart attacks. They do this, however, without any face recognition and sound
recordings, and the cameras are deliberately not installed all over the city but only
at crime hot spots. The images are sent encrypted by fiber-optic cable to the police
station and are deleted after 72 h (Töngi 2018). The same can be said of the program
ThinThread developed by NSA
15 elite official William Binney – an elaborated
legally compliant and privacy-friendly program with encrypted data able to filter
irrelevant information out of metadata while being investigatively most efficient in
the field of counter-terrorism – in contrast to inefficient later programs like
Stellarwind making the NSA literally “drown” in a flood of data while allowing
unconstitutional surveillance (Gorman 2006; O’Cleirigh 2018).
Beyond posing a major obstacle in their setup for the average consumer due to the
many hub devices needed for most lighting and sensor systems, creating difficulties
of pairing new devices to a Wi-Fi network, and annoying the inhabitants by
stereotype commands (Newman 2016; Heargreaves et al. 2017; Higginbotham
2015; Hill and Mattu 2018), smart devices in Smart Homes as well as ultra-modern
Wi-Fi devices peering through walls (Khandelwal 2015) have the potential to take
away people’s last private retreat, allowing the average citizen even less privacy than
15 National Security Agency, the USA’s national intelligence agency, leading the US government in
cryptology including Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and cybersecurity (NSA/CSS 2018).
13 The Role of Smart Cities for the Realization of. . .
237