Archinect - News

White House seeks public help on AI risks to labor conditions

2023-05-16T11:48:00-04:00

The White House has announced that it is seeking the public’s help in understanding the risks posed by artificial intelligence to labor conditions. The public request for information (RFI), led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is centered on how AI tools are “used by employers to surveil, monitor, evaluate, and manage workers.”

“Employers are increasingly investing in technologies that monitor and track workers, and making workplace decisions based on that information,” the White House said in a statement announcing the RFI. “While these technologies can benefit both workers and employers in some cases, they can also create serious risks to workers.”

Among labor concerns cited by the White House were nurses being required to wear RFID badges to track their location and proximity to other hospital workers or patients, rideshare and delivery drivers having their speed, location, and acceleration monitored, office workers having software on their computers re...

Architecture firm HDR is reportedly surveilling the activists who oppose their controversial projects

2021-08-18T17:02:00-04:00

According to documents obtained through a public records request and provided to Motherboard, a subsidiary of Vice, architecture and design firm HDR Inc. has been working with the government to monitor the social media of activist groups opposed to plans calling for the construction of jails and highways.

Through HDR’s STRATA team, a division that “leverages large data sets to visually display social and political risk nationwide”, it’s been revealed that the company has surveilled both public and private Facebook groups run by activists opposed to its projects, including those against a proposed $2 billion highway that would cut through the sacred Moahdak Do’ag mountain in Arizona.

Motherboard notes that the company also generated an “influencer” report, which is an analysis of public sentiment on social media platforms. It includes a geospatial analysis that places communities into categories such as “ethnic enclaves”, “barrios urbanos”, “scholars and patriots”, and “American dre...

Forensic Architecture is now combating an Israeli spyware giant with the help of Edward Snowden

2021-07-12T15:11:00-04:00

Two giants of activism have acquired a new target in their ongoing fight for online privacy rights in the digital age.

Forensic Architecture is pairing with Edward Snowden to take on an Israeli spyware company called NSO Group that has been behind hacks of journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists across the globe since its founding in 2010.

Courtesy of Forensic Architecture.

Decrying a campaign of “digital violence” resulting from a spyware product authored by the company called Pegasus, Forensic Architecture, which has targeted NSO in the past, is once again taking aim in the form of an open-source investigation meant to raise awareness of the ongoing abuses that have been allowed to continue despite a slate of legal challenges.

The group’s lead researcher Shourideh Molavi pointed to the psychological toll taken by hacking victims as the reason behind the group’s condemnation of Pegasus and other similar technologies it charges as having an outsized role in a system of “sta...

Architect Alison Killing has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her Chinese internment camp investigations

2021-06-29T15:14:00-04:00

This year’s Pulitzer Prize committee has named an architect a winner in its International Reporting category, marking the first time someone in the field has won the prestigious journalism award in an area outside of criticism.

Alison Killing has been awarded the prestigious prize for an ongoing project using satellite imagery to track internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region. The sites are said to be harboring up to a million Muslim detainees made up of Uyghur and other minority groups that have been subject to brutal government repression for decades. Killing has been featured in Archinect before for a related project exploring a dialogue between death and architecture.

Related on Archinect: The architecture of death and dying

Killing was cited alongside BuzzFeed staffers Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek to orchestrate a hunt for physical evidence of the camps using a Google Earth-like Chinese search engine called Baidu. Using the search engine, Killing’s team was able to...

Archinect's Virtual Event Guide for the week of March 17-24, 2021

2021-03-17T16:39:00-04:00

This week's featured virtual event happenings, from Archinect's Virtual Event Guide, are highlighted by Exhibit Columbus' Design Presentations kicking off this Friday. Other events to tune into address topics such as decolonization, surveillance, automation, public and domestic placemaking, healthy communities, and design experience.

Are you hosting a virtual lecture? Presentation? Tour? Interview? Happy Hour? Submit it for consideration by clicking here.

Are you an expert in an arena that's especially important right now? Let us know if you would like to work with Archinect to host an online event.

Sharon E. Sutton: Decolonizing the City-Making Professions: Learning from the Dreams and Defeats of the 1960s
Wednesday, March 17, 2021 | 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM EDT
Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton, FAIA is a distinguished visiting professor of architecture at Parsons School of Design and has also served on the faculties of Columbia University, Pratt Institute, the University of Cincinnati, the Univer...

What is it like to live in an Alexa-powered smart-home community?

2019-11-11T13:48:00-05:00

Living in a smart home neighborhood, the Fergusons experience both convenience and surveillance. And that's typical in Black Diamond, where Lennar Homes offers smart homes as part of a 4,800 unit development that includes other builders. This neighborhood isn't a one off. There are smart home developments in suburbs outside of cities such as Miami and San Francisco. Lennar is making Amazon tech standard on each of the 45,000 homes it builds this year.

Families in a Lennar Homes development in the Seattle suburb of Black Diamond are settling into their newly built and Amazon smart technology-equipped homes — some to their excitement, others fearing constant surveillance.

"In this community, there are smart homes on one side of the street and houses without the technology on the other," KUOW's Joshua McNichols and Carolyn Adolph tell in their Primed podcast episode about the Amazon smart homes in Black Diamond. "The smart homes all have Ring doorbells, with video cameras. Kelli Ferguson says when she walks down her street, she crosses over to the side without the smart homes. She wants to avoid popping up her neighbors’ cameras."

Face-scanning to make Olympic debut at 2020 Tokyo games

2019-09-18T13:15:00-04:00

Intel is collaborating with NEC to provide "a large-scale face recognition system for the Olympics," said Ricardo Echevarria, general manager of Intel's Olympics program. The system is designed to let Olympics organizers "ensure smoothly secure verification for the over 300,000 people at the games who are accredited," he said. People using it will register with photos from government-issued IDs, he added.

Facial recognition will be used by the organizers to keep track of athletes, staff, volunteers, and other individuals involved with the event. The general public will not be involved in the effort.

The 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo will mark the first time that the event makes wide-spread use of facial recognition software.

Hong Kong protestors take aim at Chinese urban surveillance infrastructure

2019-08-26T13:00:00-04:00

Widespread protests focused on countering China's quasi-colonial reign over Hong Kong continued over the weekend, as demonstrators began to take aim at the city's widespread surveillance infrastructure, The Guardian reports.

Organizing in response to reports that Chinese authorities are using smart lampposts to collect personal information, including facial recognition data, on Hongkongers, protesters over the weekend trained their efforts on removing some the city's new smart city infrastructure as local police fired tear gas. Australian news outlet ABC News reports that 400 of the smart lampposts are due to be installed in four of the city's urban districts, including 50 lampposts in the Kwun Tong area, the site of this weekend's protests. During a march this weekend, protestors used electric saws to destroy several of the lampposts, while others topped the lights with ropes.

Protestors in Hong Kong are cutting down facial recognition towers. pic.twitter.com/bTvb8uis7V
— Jordan ...

Brooklyn tenants reject landlord's plan to install facial recognition system

2019-05-09T09:00:00-04:00

Last year, residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment building in Brooklyn, found out that their landlord was planning to replace the key fob entry system with facial recognition technology. [...] But some residents were immediately alarmed by the prospect: They felt the landlord’s promise of added security was murky at best, and didn’t outweigh their concerns about having to surrender sensitive biometric information to enter their own homes.

"Housing complexes of low-income residents may be one early testing ground for residential applications of facial recognition technology," writes Tanvi Misra for CityLab. "But they’re not the only ones. Amazon’s doorbell company, Ring, is coming out with a video doorbell that incorporates facial recognition, which has the ACLU worried about the risk of high-tech profiling of 'suspicious' persons."

New key-less Moscow apartments use facial recognition to open doors and elevators

2018-04-17T15:26:00-04:00

A new Moscow apartment building has unveiled a fully-functioning facial recognition system designed to replace residents’ keys. [...] As well as allowing homeowners to enter the building without a key, the system automatically selects each resident’s floor when they enter the lift, and keeps tabs on cars and pedestrians leaving the complex.

A brief history of designing secure spaces

2018-04-10T15:44:00-04:00

Can design keep you safe from crime? Architects and urbanists have been making that claim since urban crime — or the threat of it — reached crisis proportions in the 1960s. [...] But with scant evidence to support those claims, at what cost do we build “defensible space”? Architectural historian Joy Knoblauch looks back at sixty years of attempts to secure space and asks whether safety lies in the design of the built environment, in our social structures, or in our heads.

Trevor Paglen is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow — #TBT to our encounter with the experimental geographer 12 years ago

2017-10-12T19:19:00-04:00

The mysterious images of the physical manifestations of military power hover between abstraction and information, between the inscrutable and the mundane. They are at once compelling as visual compositions and chilling as photographic documentation of activities that are otherwise based on speculation.

The 2017 MacArthur fellows have been revealed. Artist and geographer, Trevor Paglen, won the award for his work on surveillance infrastructures. Twelve years ago, we followed Paglen on his field work and spoke with him about experimental geography. The full feature by Bryan Finoki is available here.

Image via MacArthur Foundation

Considering the downsides of Smart Home technologies

2017-08-17T14:52:00-04:00

Essey is an engineer at Uber and an early adopter of the Internet of things. He can control his lights with his Amazon Echo or an array of touchpad sensors he has installed throughout the home. Sensors tell him when there's water in the basement or a leak under the sink. While Essey's setup might sound a little like science fiction, it's a prototype of the future. Some critics are worried these devices won't be secure and that companies will use them to spy on us to make money.

As the Internet of things becomes more ingrained in our daily lives, some people are turning ordinary homes into smart homes. One way of doing that is by integrating smart appliances (dishwasher, fridges, microwaves, toasters, etc). That strategy, however, can be expensive and not very efficient, since most of the devices are costly and often are not smart enough to communicate with each other, especially if produced by different manufacturers.

The other way is to get sensors, and put them on everything you want to monitor. "But then those get really unwieldy and you've got all these things sticking around and they look ugly and socially obtrusive," Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University says. Laput and his team, in fact, built such a sensor. When plugged into the wall, the 2-inch-square circuit board senses about a dozen different facets of its environment: vibrations, sounds, light color and so on. The sensor communicates wirelessly with a computer, which inte...

Gregory Ain, once "the most dangerous architect in America," and the mysterious fate of his MoMA exhibition house

2017-08-11T15:36:00-04:00

Gregory Ain, a midcentury champion of modern architecture whose students included Frank Gehry, is virtually unknown outside Los Angeles today. His left-leaning politics made him the object of decades-long F.B.I. surveillance [...] Even the fate of his most important commission — an exhibition house in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art — is a mystery. That house is now the subject of “This Future Has a Past,” an installation at the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village.

This Future Has a Past opened in July at the Center for Architecture in New York and still runs through September 12. The accompanying event Who Was Gregory Ain? on September 7 will feature the installation's producers, Katherine Lambert and Christiane Robbins, as well as other speakers.

Data-collecting benches are making their way into cities

2017-07-17T16:47:00-04:00

A pair of USB ports on a console on the front of the bench provides juice from the solar panel mounted at lap level between the seats. Who wouldn’t want to hang out at a bench like this? It certainly catches the eye of passersby. What these kids might not realize, however, is that this bench is watching them back.

"Smart" benches are spreading—recently a series of them, manufactured by Soofa, was installed in a tiny neighborhood park next to I-77 on the north end of Charlotte, North Carolina with the intent of the neighborhood's analysis and redevelopment.

Soofa, founded in 2014 by three graduates of MIT Media Lab, is one of a handful of companies designing data-collecting street furniture. Their solar-powered benches register Wi-Fi enabled devices within 150 feet of them, sending data back to an office building in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the sensors can't access personal information from your phone, they pick up and remember your devices' MAC address. The technology allows cities and urban planners to count users of various public spaces, identifying when and for how long they're visited, and potentially optimizing their design.

"The line between collecting data for a valid public purpose and the unreasonable surveillance of private citizens can be tough to tease out. Beyond c...

Working in zero privacy: new monitoring technology tracks every motion and word

2017-02-28T17:35:00-05:00

Although it's not shocking that companies like Gensler have automated on/off sensors in their lighting grid to save energy when no one's in the office, it's slightly less comforting to realize that many companies are now using sensors to monitor when employees are at their desks, if they're talking with their fellow co-workers, and how long they're in the bathroom. (Makes one harken for the days when workers were judged by what they actually produced, as opposed to their process of production.) As Marketplace reports, one of the new privacy-free devices is called "Humanyze":

They’re in a badge you wear around [your] neck, kind of like an ID badge. And they measure this thing called “latency” to see how often people are interacting with their co-workers. Which, to me, sounds like a little bit much. But they claim the data is anonymized, and they don’t record exactly what you’re saying, or at least they don’t share that with your employer.... The Boston Consulting Group is using it to...

The NSA spy fortress in the middle of New York City

2016-11-28T13:20:00-05:00

The Intercept has published a fascinating, and eerie, investigation into the iconic Brutalist tower at 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan. Built to withstand a nuclear bomb, the modern fortress has no windows. At night, the building is a dark shadow blocking the illuminated towers around it.

But 33 Thomas Street wasn't built as a fallout shelter—or not for humans at least. Rather, the building was intended to house a massive array of servers, switchboards and computers. According to the Intercept, it's also one of the NSA's most important spy hubs, "used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data."

Documents obtained by The Intercept from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden do not explicitly name 33 Thomas Street as a surveillance facility. However — taken together with architectural plans, public records, and interviews with former AT&T employees conducted for this article — they provide compelling evidence that 33 Thomas Street has served as an NSA surveillance site, code-named T...

Revising the city in the aftermath of violence

2016-07-11T18:39:00-04:00

A mass shooting scenario changes the function of every object in the built environment. [...] The buildings themselves, the fabric of the city, ends up not mattering so much. In fact, sometimes it becomes a kind of enemy. [...] Americans aren’t going to rebuild their cities to accommodate the possibility of violence. The people who protect the people in those cities will just have to learn to see them differently.

Related on Archinect:

Private Session: whistleblowing architects and bank robbing bandits on Archinect Sessions #71

2016-07-07T13:53:00-04:00

Wrapping up our special editorial theme for June 2016, Privacy, Archinect writers Julia Ingalls and Nicholas Korody join us on the podcast this week to discuss two of their recent features—Julia's piece on banking security with input from a reformed robber, and Nicholas' interview with the architecture firm that moonlights as a government whistleblower, posting hundreds of secret documents online.

Listen to episode 71 of Archinect Sessions, "Private Session":

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Download: this episode

Shownotes:

Nextdoor, "the private social network for your neighborhood"

Goodbye to public anonymity? This new Russian face-recognition app may spell its end

2016-05-18T17:06:00-04:00

If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability. It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts.

"In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks."

For related content:

A bird's-eye view of LA with Geoff Manaugh and the LAPD

2016-03-23T13:11:00-04:00

The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists.

"Their job is to anticipate things that have yet to occur — not just where criminals are, but where and when they might arrive next. They patrol time as well as space. In this sense, although it has been in continual operation for the past 60 years, the division has much to tell us about policing the cities of the future."

In a fascinating excerpt from his forthcoming book A Burglar's Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh relates his experience with the LAPD on their helicopter patrols of the city. "Cities get the types of crime their design calls for," he writes. And the sprawl of Los Angeles demands, and facilitates, a policial gaze from above.

For more from the author of BLDGBLOG, check out some articles from the archive:

Or more recent content:

NYPD admits to using "Stringrays," military tech that sweeps up cell data

2016-02-11T19:20:00-05:00

The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the [NYCLU]. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices. The NYPD also disclosed that it does not get a warrant before using a Stingray, which sweeps up massive amounts of data. Instead, the police obtain a “pen register order” from a court... [which] do not require the police to establish probable cause...

Stingrays operate by imitating cell phone towers, sweeping up massive amounts of user data without their knowledge or permission. They force cell phones to connect to them and then track the user's location. Originally a military technology, they have been increasingly bought and used by local and state police forces, despite concerns that they violate fundamental rights to privacy.

Broadly speaking, police forces have been reticent to disclose if they possess or employ Stingrays, and have fought efforts to regulate their use.

For more information on surveillance in the modern city, check out these links:

France moves to block Tor, ban free and public Wi-Fi

2015-12-07T15:00:00-05:00

According to leaked documents France's Ministry of Interior is considering two new proposals: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France. The documents were seen by the French newspaper Le Monde. According to the paper, new bills could be presented to parliament as soon as January 2016. These proposals are presumably in response to the attacks in Paris last month where 130 people were murdered.

According to the report published by Le Monde, the French Ministry of Interior has developed two frightening new security proposals that may be presented to parliament early next years.

The first, as reported by Ars Technica, would block free, public WiFi during a state of emergency. On November 20, France extended its state of emergency – implemented in the immediate aftermath of last month's terror attacks – to three months. Blocking signals could be difficult to implement, if still possible, and have potentially massive implications, leaving many without internet access for extended periods of time.

The second proposal is to block and/or forbid use of Tor. Originally developed by the US Government to protect intelligence communication, Tor is a free software that enables anonymous communication and internet access. While often used for illicit purposes, notably access to the darknet in order to purchase black market items, it's also vital for whistleblowers, journalists and politic...

Losing yourself in the smart city

2015-12-03T18:35:00-05:00

Thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city. Why? Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination.

An analysis of donut-shaped buildings in modern work culture

2015-11-20T17:54:00-05:00

That’s not to say that all circular buildings represent some emergent 21st-century order. It is interesting, though, that past precedents have usually been buildings designed for spectatorship: sports stadiums or, more resonantly, panopticon prisons, where inmates’ cells are arranged in a ring so they’re visible to guards in a central observation tower. Take away that tower and you have the Apple campus.

Circles are an emerging form of office buildings (e.g. Apple HQ, Zappos, Government Communications HQ) and organizing people (Holacracy), as they convey positive qualities like transparency and open collaboration. But, as one New Zealand artist warns in his work, what sinister undertones linger within these structural concepts?

London Garden Bridge will track visitors' phone signals, submitted plan says

2015-11-11T04:00:00-05:00

Visitors to the garden bridge in London will be tracked by their mobile phone signals and supervised by staff with powers to take people’s names and addresses and confiscate and destroy banned items, including kites and musical instruments, according to a planning document. [...] Caroline Pidgeon [...] said she feared the bridge was following “a worrying trend of the privatisation of public places, where the rights of private owners trump those of ordinary people”.

Previously on Archinect:

BBC journalists arrested for reporting on Qatar's World Cup laborers

2015-05-19T14:00:00-04:00

We were invited to Qatar by the prime minister's office to see new flagship accommodation for low-paid migrant workers in early May - but while gathering additional material for our report, we ended up being thrown into prison for doing our jobs. Our arrest was dramatic.

Previously:

Ai Weiwei, Jacob Appelbaum and the dissident experience

2015-04-28T20:20:00-04:00

It’s a Thursday morning in Beijing, and the world’s most famous living artist, Ai Weiwei, is sitting with one of the world’s most controversial technologists, Jacob Appelbaum, in the second-floor lobby of the East Hotel. [...] On a whim, Ai suggests that they call Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living for the last two years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. [...] Ai and Assange talk for several minutes about the mundanities of the dissident life.

Anti-Surveillance Camouflage for Your Face

2014-07-24T13:53:00-04:00

The idea behind CV dazzle is simple. Facial recognition algorithms look for certain patterns when they analyze images: patterns of light and dark in the cheekbones, or the way color is distributed on the nose bridge—a baseline amount of symmetry. These hallmarks all betray the uniqueness of a human visage. If you obstruct them, the algorithm can’t separate a face from any other swath of pixels.

On the Outskirts of Crypto City: The Architecture of Surveillance

2014-01-09T13:32:00-05:00

Looking at the diagram of a restricted image reminded me of the ubiquitous stock photograph of the NSA, the one reminiscent of the Kaaba and among the few used by news outlets. The photograph’s ubiquity, along with its subject’s resemblance to another opaque monument, serves as shorthand for an institution that seeks to be perceived as beyond human comprehension or accountability. I made my pilgrimage not to the NSA, however, but to adjacent temples of lesser gods.