A Volunteer Army Is Deploying Dirt Cheap Broadband In NYC

Wireless

from the do-it-yourself dept

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

Privacy

from the watching-you,-watching-me dept

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

Privacy

from the more-of-the-same dept

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 $156 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 $90 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

No, Social Media Is Not The Same Thing As Lead Paint

Overhype

from the for-fuck’s-sake-stop-it dept

A few months back I attended a workshop regarding keeping children on the internet safe, and at some point a debate broke out over whether social media was “more like” cigarettes or chocolate (i.e., obviously addictive and harmful or just a little unhealthy in large doses), and a long term trust & safety executive who was in the room told me it was driving them crazy, because it’s just not an analogy that works. Chocolate and cigarettes are things you literally consume in your body, and they have a clear, and pretty well understood, impact on your body.

Social media… is speech.

Speech can have an impact on people: it can motivate them, inspire them, scare them, etc. And sometimes those impacts can be negative. But speech alone is not something you metabolize. It does not change your body. It does not poison you.

It is not a toxin.

And that’s why it’s so frustrating that this analogy keeps popping up. The latest is from Ashwin Vasan, the Commission of the New York City Department of Health. He could be dealing with all sorts of actual health problems facing New Yorkers, but instead decided to pen a nonsense opinion piece falsely declaring social media the equivalent of known toxins.

The title gives away the game:

“We must treat social media like the toxin that it is”

He then uses his own children as the example of how social media is bad (which makes me wonder how his kids feel about being props here).

As a parent of three young children, I see every day how young people have been conditioned to reach for their for phones and devices. The fault lines of this tectonic shift are in my home, and homes like it throughout our nation.

Yes, parents having some control over their kids use of devices and online services is a challenge, but that’s way different than calling it a “toxin.” And, having spent plenty of time around adults, many of them seem to feel “conditioned to reach for their phones and devices” as well, and yet that’s somehow considered just fine, but with kids it’s somehow a problem?

Vasan then admits that social media might actually be good for some kids (while tons of studies actually show it’s good for way more kids than it’s bad for), but then immediately insists that social media is “uniquely harmful” to kids (which is not, actually, what any study has shown).

Real communities can form online, and virtual kinship can help young people explore the world and their own identities. It is clear that social media is now a part of our lives, and so all-out bans or prohibition is neither realistic nor advised. But the evidence is clear that unregulated, unfettered access to all kinds of social media and its content is uniquely harmful to children. Much as toys have package safety inserts for children and parents, we need information and protections for social media.

The link there to “uniquely harmful to children” is not any study that actually supports that claim. It’s to an NPR radio program in which some parents driven by a moral panic have pushed senators to pass legislation to “protect the children online.”

Except, again, all of the evidence suggests that this is wrong. The evidence says that social media is not super dangerous for most kids. It says that there are some kids who have trouble dealing with it, and attention should be paid to those kids. As the American Psychological Association just explained, the evidence simply does not support the narrative that social media is inherently or uniquely problematic. Instead, they recommend better media literacy and digital citizenship efforts in schools, to help those who do run into trouble how to avoid getting sucked in.

But Vasan buys into the narrative, and evidence be damned.

I mean, sure he has statistics, but they don’t say what he wants them to say:

Inaction has helped lead us into a youth mental health crisis. In 2021, 38 percent of NYC high schoolers reported feeling so sad or hopeless during the past 12 months that they stopped doing their usual activities — a rate that was significantly higher for Latino/a and Black students than their white peers.

A survey in 2021, you say? Gee… I wonder why might have happened in the preceding 12 months that might have had an impact on their mental health. What might have caused kids to feel sad and hopeless leading them to stop doing their usual activities? Vasan writes this and assumes you’ll all agree with him that it must be social media, when, for fuck’s sake, it was the damn pandemic. In the preceding 12 months, kids watched a global pandemic take over the world, taking them out of schools, getting people sick, killing loved ones, leading many to have parents who may have lost jobs, while mostly keeping them locked up in their homes to avoid contracting a deadly viral infection.

Indeed, social media was kind of a savior for many of those kids, in that it allowed them to actually continue to have something resembling a social life during the lockdown periods of the pandemic when NYC’s schools were shut down or totally remote.

But, no, to Vasan, it’s obvious that the problem was social media all along:

We must lay out strategies for how we’ll protect young people from the harms of social media. We must rework regulations and, where appropriate, hold companies accountable for the damage they continue to inflict.

Again, Pew and the American Psychological Association both released reports in the last year detailing how social media was actually more helpful to most kids, and noted that there was just a very small percentage who seemed to find social media problematic.

And, yes, sure, let’s work towards fixing those situations and helping those students. But to insist, flat out, that social media is harmful to kids, and that companies need to be “held accountable” because some kids use the internet for problematic purposes, is ridiculous.

And then Vasan closes out with the most ridiculous bit of them all, claiming that social media is no different than lead paint. Really.

Social media may be digital, but its effects can be just as damaging as tobacco, lead paint, or air pollution. One of the primary roles of public health has been to reduce exposure to these toxins through education and harm reduction, and sometimes through litigation, regulation and enforcement, thereby preventing disease, staving off suffering, and mitigating societal costs.

There is no reason to treat social media any differently.

No. Social media’s effects literally cannot be “just as damaging” as tobacco, lead paint, or air pollution. All three of those lead to actual poisons breaking down your body.

Words do not do that.

Again, throughout this I’ve been clear that some kids cannot handle social media, and we should look to help them, but anyone who insists that social media is the equivalent of lead paint does not know what the fuck they’re talking about, and should not be anywhere near a health department, let alone running one for the largest city in the US.

If you want to deal with the downsides of social media, you need rational people in charge. Not foolish people driven by evidence-free moral panics. Unfortunately, New York City has the latter.

Filed Under: aswin vasan, kids and social media, lead paint, moral panic, nyc, protect the children, social media, toxins

New York City Business Owners Aren’t Happy About Facial Recognition Ban Prompted By New York City Business Owner

Legal Issues

from the maybe-take-it-up-with-MSG-Entertainment dept

Things are getting heated in the city that never sleeps stops bitching. Private business owners don’t much care for the city telling them how to run their business, even when said business involves perhaps careless use of problematic tech.

Grocery store owners in New York City oppose a bill that would limit use of facial recognition software, saying the algorithms reduce shoplifting. The measure, introduced to the city council early last month, calls for businesses to inform customers and get their written consent before using biometric recognition on them or face a $5,000 fine.

That’s the dry, straight-to-the-point recap provided by Larisa Redins for Biometric Update. Here’s the Fox News version, which uses the phrase “Grocers Furious” in its headline:

New York City grocers are expressing outrage over a push by city council members to ban facial recognition technology stores rely on to deter shoplifting due to concerns of racial discrimination. 

Ferreira Foodtown CEO Jason Ferreira joined “Fox & Friends” Tuesday to call out the suggestion as thefts continue to rock businesses in the Big Apple.

Ferreira, who has been in business for over 45 years, said the shoplifting has never been worse.

“It’s spreading,” he said. “It’s not only people that are doing it professionally. We have people that are doing it just because they can get away with it. And the gamut runs from children to people that are older.”

Given this spin, it would appear it’s just the city placing a boot heel on the smallest of its businesses — businesses that are now being robbed non-stop by people who are children and/or are older than children.

I don’t doubt that shoplifting poses a problem for retailers and is felt far more acutely by small business owners. I also have my own concerns about the government telling businesses what tech they may or may not deploy to protect their bottom lines.

But this anger is displaced. A definitely not-small-at-all New York City business owner is directly responsible for this legislation, thanks to his willingness to discriminate against perceived enemies of his business with the aid of facial recognition tech.

Let’s revisit some earlier articles written by [checks byline] Tim Cushing at this very site:

Even if you have the leeway to ban people from your premises, the question remains whether you should do so, especially when the bans appear to be vindictive. Earlier this month, some New York City lawyers reported they were being blocked from entering venues operated by MSG Entertainment, the company that owns Madison Square Garden and other city entertainment venues. These bans — enforced by MSG’s use of facial recognition tech — prevented a mother from joining her daughter and her Girl Scout troop during a visit to Radio City Music Hall. Another lawyer was booted from a Knicks game at the Garden after being flagged by MSG’s tech.

This entirely new problem could be traced back to MSG’s chief executive, James L. Dolan. Last summer, he instituted a ban affecting lawyers working for firms engaged in litigation against MSG Entertainment. The ban was supposed to prevent adversarial lawyers from engaging in freelance discovery while attending events. The problem was the ban targeted all lawyers at these firms, rather than just those actually engaging in litigation.

These actions, which were exposed by the lawyers targeted by Dolan and MSG Entertainment, led directly to the proposed legislation these presumable mom-and-pop stores are now complaining about to Fox News commentators.

Sure, these proprietors are correct that it’s the city government pursuing this legislation. But the only reason it exists is because a billionaire businessman decided the best use of facial recognition tech was to deny certain ticketholders access to events they paid to attend solely because they worked for law firms currently involved in litigation against his company.

And yet, these “furious grocers” aren’t calling out a billionaire for wielding questionable tech for completely vindictive purposes. Instead, they’re complaining that the city doesn’t care how often they get ripped off by shoplifters.

I do understand the anger. They have every right to protect their profitability. If they believe facial recognition tech will aid in that, then they probably should be able to use it. But if they continue to ignore the fact that someone else in the private sector abused the tech so often and so blatantly it moved the city government to propose a ban, they’re ignoring the very real possibility that one of their “furious” own will do the same thing. It’s inevitable.

This tech can be useful. But this tech is also inevitably abused because it’s able to do what security people can’t: lock people out of goods or services in microseconds. And that’s just the private sector side. In the hands of the government, it can lock people out of life and liberty. Even when it’s wrong, those deploying the tech assume it to be right. People who support this tech believe it is smarter and more accurate than they could ever be. Doubting its determinations — even when there’s tons of evidence showing this tech still underperforms when dealing with minorities — is never a consideration.

If grocers want to be angry, maybe they should direct their focus to the billionaire asshole who made this legislation a presumptive necessity. I want small businesses to succeed. But succeeding means recognizing the source of your problems, rather than seeking out the most convenient target for your anger.

Filed Under: facial recognition, james dolan, nyc, retailers

US-Located Chinese Cop Shops Allegedly Targeted People For Comparing President Xi To Winnie The Pooh

Too Much Free Time

from the Winnie-The-Party-Member dept

Perhaps you may have heard the DOJ recently arrested Chinese nationals and shuttered “Chinese police stations” located in New York following an investigation into the sort of foreign national work our government tends to find repulsive, even as it does the same thing elsewhere in the world.

It made all the papers, including the British ones.

Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, both New York City residents, face charges of conspiring to act as agents for China and obstruction of justice.

They are expected to appear in a federal court in Brooklyn on Monday.

China has previously denied operating the stations, calling them “service centres” for nationals overseas.

Mr Lu of the Bronx and Mr Chen of Manhattan worked together to establish the first overseas police station in the United States on behalf of China’s Ministry of Public Security, the US Department of Justice alleged on Monday.

The outpost was closed in autumn of 2022, the department said, after those involved became aware of an FBI investigation into the station.

That China would seek to control residents who have strayed beyond its borders is unsurprising. The Chinese government has a firm grasp on pretty much fucking everything. However, those who are no longer subject to China’s pervasive surveillance network are more of a concern to a nation that has plenty of power but the thinnest of skin.

The thinnest skin belongs to President Xi Jinping, who has blown plenty of government resources preventing the spread of Winnie the Pooh images. This isn’t a newfound respect for intellectual property rights (tenuously) held by massive US corporations. This is just the state silencing the harmless residents who’ve noted the General Secretary’s resemblance to the pantsless bear a young British boy befriended following their encounter in a specifically sized forest.

Hidden within the indictments is a phrase the New York Post — the Fox News of New York City — has chosen to believe is at least part of the reason the Chinese government deployed nationals to police other nationals far beyond its borders. And that reason is… Winnie the goddamn Pooh:

China’s US police stations target anyone comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh

That’s the headline the so-called journalists at the Post have chosen to run with. The direct quote from the indictment doesn’t suggest this is actually the case. Instead, the quote simply recounts the sorts of things the Chinese government finds objectionable while stating its basis for the arrest of people who decided to handcraft their own episodes of “Law and Order: Special Pooh Bear Meme Victims Unit” on foreign ground.

“The CCP’s ‘unapproved’ topics include discussions about the overthrow of the CCP’s control of the PRC government and the statuses of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the Republic of China—commonly referred to as Taiwan—to remarks on CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s apparent resemblance to the fictional cartoon character Winnie the Pooh,” says one of the indictments, charging ten suspects who allegedly used fake social media accounts to intimidate dissidents.

Well, duh. I mean, everyone has been talking about China and its censorship of Pooh memes for years now. That this was what these suspects were interested in is speculation that is wholly unsupported by the DOJ’s “this is what China does” boilerplate.

That being said, I will never pass up a chance to clutter up President Xi’s vanity searches with Pooh-related mockery. And there is no better example of that in recent news than the patches allegedly created by military surplus store owner to commemorate Taiwan’s extended middle finger to the autocratic interloper who refuses to acknowledge Taiwan is its own country, rather than just a Chinese subsidiary:

Demand has skyrocketed for a shoulder patch that shows Winnie-the-Pooh being punched in the face after a Taiwanese fighter pilot wore the design—an apparent dig at Chinese leader Xi Jinping—during China’s recent military drills around the island.

The uniform accessory caught the eye of Taiwan‘s public and observers abroad after Taipei’s Military News Agency published the photograph on April 9, on day two of the Chinese exercises. The picture showed a pilot performing preflight inspections of his IDF fighter aircraft at an undisclosed air base.

Here’s the photo released by Taiwan military press reps:

Zooming in:

Better quality images exist elsewhere on the net, but you get the gist: it’s a swift punch to Pooh’s (Xi’s) face, accompanied by the phrase “we are open 24/7.” Another variant contains the slogan “fight for freedom.” Either way, the message is clear. Taiwan’s military has no more respect for President Xi than many of his constituents. Not only is Xi the Pooh in this depiction, he’s getting his ass handed to him by a much more physically imposing bear.

Whether or not the stateside policing of foreign nationals by foreign nationals had anything to do with disrespectful memes is still open for debate. But either way, President Xi is not only Pooh, he’s a punchline. And he should never be allowed to forget it.

Filed Under: china, chinese police, chinese police stations, doj, nyc, winnie the pooh, xi jinping, xi jinping looks like winnie the pooh

Adams Administration Finally Gets Around To Admitting They Killed NYC’s Ambitious Broadband Plan

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to New York City residents.

It wasn’t meant to be.

Earlier this year, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would be “pausing” the initiative. In reality, folks who’d been working on the project for years told me repeatedly that the most ambitious portion of the plan — actively challenging the city’s telecom monopolies with an open access fiber network — was killed off without any consultation with the experts who crafted it.

This week the Adams administration finally got around to admitting it had killed NYC’s ambitious broadband plan:

After Gothamist received a tip the project had been canceled, officials from the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) confirmed the decision on Nov. 29 — about a year after the de Blasio administration announced it had chosen a dozen businesses — including a handful owned or led by women or people of color — to spearhead the effort. The cancellation has not been publicly announced, but city officials said those businesses were informed sometime in November.

Several consultants and regional ISPs told me they were very late in the planning and implementation portion of the program, which had greatly upset regional NYC monopolies.

What did the city do instead of spending $156 million on an open access fiber network? Well, for one, it embraced a partnership with Charter (Spectrum, a company that almost got kicked out of New York State for lies and substandard service) that involves paying the monopoly $90 million over three years to temporarily deliver cheaper broadband to around 400,000 low income housing project users.

As opposed to $156 million on an open access fiber network that would have driven numerous, local ISPs to compete in layers, driving down costs for those in range… permanently.

Folks in positions of power from both U.S. parties really love doing this thing where they throw subsidies at the same regional monopolies responsible for crushing competition and driving up prices, then act confused when this convoluted, temporary relief doesn’t fix the actual, full problem.

Our recent Techdirt/Copia report on America’s broadband problem discussed at great length how the solution to the digital divide involves standing up to telecom monopolies and backing the creation of open access fiber networks by a growing coalition of cooperatives, municipalities, utilities, and public/private partnerships.

But doing this requires standing up to telecom monopolies that are not only politically powerful, but bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering and first responder networks. So what captured policymakers from both parties tend to do instead is something best described as… theater. Talk a lot about the importance of bridging the digital divide, but never stand up to the monopolies responsible for it.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, digital divide, eric adams, high speed internet, low income, nyc

NYC’s Once Bold Broadband Plan Now A Jumbled Mess Of Half-Measures

Broadband

from the more-of-the-same dept

Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to New York City residents.

It wasn’t meant to be.

Earlier this year, new incoming Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would be “pausing” the initiative. In reality, folks who’d been working on the project for years told me that the most ambitious portion of the plan — actively challenging the city’s telecom monopolies with an open access fiber network — was killed off without any consultation with the experts who crafted it.

Instead, the city embraced a number of “digital divide” programs partnering with the very companies that have caused competitive problems in the city for decades. Again, without consulting any of the folks who worked for years on the original plan to disrupt the uncompetitive logjam:

While Next City’s reporting underscores that the new administration did not consult with the original Internet Master Plan team, it also points to a larger issue. The community-based providers that the city had tapped to help build “neutral host” infrastructure have been left high and dry — in favor of a partnership with two major companies the master plan would have challenged.

(The full breakdown of what went wrong in New York City is worth a read).

Instead, the city embraced a program dubbed Big Apple Connect. Under Big Apple Connect, the city partnered with regional cable giant Charter Communications to give free broadband temporarily to around 400,000 folks living in public housing around the city. The program will cost about $30 million a year and run for at least three years, after which those users are likely out of luck.

The problem: like so many “digital divide” initiatives, Big Apple Connect doesn’t directly challenge the monopoly power responsible for high prices in the first place. Charter’s service has been so abysmal, the company was almost kicked out of New York State in 2018. The city also sued Verizon in 2017 for failing to live up to citywide fiber deployment promises.

The broadband problem in New York City, as it is in most cities, is a story of unchecked monopolization. Big Apple Connect does help people, temporarily. But it does so by glossing over the real cause of the problem in partnership with the same, select, giant companies that helped create it. It’s political theater designed to look like the city is fixing the problem… without actually fixing the problem.

Some former city leaders also suggest Big Apple Connect is a redundant waste of money. As part of the federal infrastructure bill, the government embraced the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). ACP already doles out a $30 discount to all low-income residents for broadband. Only 500,000 of the estimated 2 million New Yorkers who qualify for the program have actually signed up for it.

So the city could have worked on boosting awareness and access to the ACP program for (mostly) free. That freed $90 million would have gone a long way in building at least part of the original open access network plan, which would have driven prices down for everybody in range… permanently… through physical, real world competition among truly local providers and groups.

We’ve talked a lot about how U.S. telecom policy could easily challenge monopoly power through cooperative, utility, and municipal open access fiber networks (we just published a big report on this very subject). We don’t want to do that with any consistency, because telecom monopolies are not only politically powerful, they’re routinely tied to our intelligence gathering and first responder networks.

Instead, we tend to embrace a lot of half-hearted feel good measures that usually involve throwing even greater subsidies at the regional monopolies responsible for killing off competition in the first place, then standing around with our hands on our hips wondering why things don’t really improve.

The potential was there to create an open access network in New York City that streamlined access to essential city real estate and numerous, discordant agencies, creating an inspirational model for other major cities facing the same problem. Instead, Adams did what many politicians do when it comes to broadband and the digital divide: embraced a bunch of safe, half-cooked, half measures.

Filed Under: Affordable Connectivity Program, big apple connect, broadband, competition, digital divide, eric adams, fcc, fiber, high speed internet, natural monopolies, nyc, open access, telecom
Companies: charter communications

New York Times Lies About City's Murder Rate, NYPD's Clearance Rate To Sell Fear To Its Readers

Journalism

from the don't-be-shitty dept

There’s no reason for the New York Times to be this bad at reporting. It has plenty of resources and a slew of editors, and yet we get headlines like this one, which says something completely false:

If you can’t read/see the screenshot, this is the original headline attached to an article that says nothing of the sort:

After Murders ‘Doubled Overnight,’ the N.Y.P.D. Is Solving Fewer Cases

Murders did not “double overnight.” The murder rate in New York City hasn’t doubled at all. Here’s what the murder rate looks like according to the NYPD’s own stats:

Want another look at the “doubling” the NYT falsely asserts in its headline? This comes via David Menschel, one of dozens challenging the Times’ embrace of “bleeds/leads” rather than the truth:

So, where does this “murders doubled” quote come from? Who knows. The article doesn’t provide a source for this supposed direct quote (remember, there are quotes around “Doubled Overnight”). At best, one can extrapolate the statement in the headline from a very different statement provided by a former Baltimore PD officer who is now the director of, um, something called the “John Jay College’s NYPD Executive Master’s Program.”

Here’s the NYT pull quote:

“The increase in shootings, that’s got to have a negative impact on clearance rates,” said Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Their caseload literally doubled overnight. The odds are never great. That’s the unfortunate truth.”

The first part (“that’s got to have…”) is pure speculation. So is the rest of it. Someone asked a cop to offer a statement on cop stuff and received something exonerative from someone who used to be a cop but now teaches a masters program aimed at NYPD officers.

At best, it’s maybe “caseloads doubled overnight.” But it’s unlikely this has happened either. And, if we’re going to examine year-to-year crime rates, whatever increases officers in the Bronx (the article occasionally focuses on the family of a Bronx murder victim) have seen in caseloads and reported crimes still cruises along at historic lows for the city that never sleeps.

The headline and the article to a disservice to the purported subject: the survivors of an unsolved murder. Cops have never been great at solving murders and the NYPD is no exception. Unfortunately, the article also lies about clearance rates, which have historically been nowhere near what is claimed by the reporter.

In the years before the pandemic, the New York Police Department was solving nearly 90 percent of the murder cases in the city. But in 2020, as shootings and homicides increased, the percentage of homicides the police solved, a statistic known as the clearance rate, plummeted to around 60 percent, according to the department’s records.

This is just inexcusable. Anyone can pull up these records. The article is (deliberately?) vague about how many “years before the pandemic” it’s talking about, but nothing in the NYPD’s own records suggests it has maintained a 90% clearance rate for murders.

People cherry-picking data may find a quarter from the last three years that shows something approaching 90% clearance, but the NYPD as a whole has never consistently approached the number stated in this article. And the published numbers have their own problems. Every so often, precincts report clearance rates above 100%, which suggests these are rolling averages that simply add solved cases to the total, no matter how long it has been since the crime was reported.

I would normally use the phrase “to its credit” before reporting that the NYT altered its headline less than a day later to have at least one less lie in it. Instead of “murders doubled,” it simply says “murders increased.” But “credit where it’s due” applies, and the NYT is so far in arrears in the credibility department that no credit will be issued. The NYT added quotation marks to quote something no one actually said and turned a NYPD-oriented professor’s speculation into an eye-grabbing “fact.”

Its extremely casual relationship with the truth does no favors for the purported subjects of its article: a tortured family hoping for some justice and closure following the senseless murder of their son in a local bodega. Instead of focusing attention on historically low clearance rates, the paper decided to sell fear to its readers. It irresponsibly claimed readers were surrounded by murderers and the police were powerless to stop them.

What the NYT should have asked is why clearance rates were so low, given the NYPD’s considerable resources. And it should have asked why it takes a pretty white woman dying to motivate law enforcement to put those considerable resources to use. In the grand scheme of all things policing, nothing means less than the death of a young black man. And that’s the real story — one that the Times chose to ignore in favor of misrepresentations and law enforcement-friendly extrapolation.

Filed Under: journalism, murder rate, nyc, nypd
Companies: ny times

New York's Mental Health Response Pilot Program More Responsive, Less Likely To End In Hospitalization Than Sending Out Cops

Legal Issues

from the conclusions-that-should-have-been-obvious-from-the-outset dept

Earlier this year, the city of New York announced plans to send mental health professionals out to deal with mental health issues, rather than the standard-issue cops-and-EMS response teams. It’s an idea that’s gained recent popularity, given the difficulty law enforcement officers seem to have when dealing with things they’re not specifically trained to handle. And by “difficulty,” I mean a lot of people who need professional help were instead being “treated” with force deployment, arrests, and the far-more-than-occasional killing.

It’s an idea so simple and intuitive it’s a wonder it’s taken this long to be experimented with in a small number of cities. The success stories seen elsewhere indicate this is something worth trying, if for no other reason than to free up limited law enforcement resources to handle the sort of thing law enforcement officers are trained to handle.

The results [PDF] are back on the trial run of New York City’s “B-HEARD” (Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division) and they’re similarly encouraging. (via Insider)

It was a limited deployment, but a successful one.

Under the pilot, teams operate seven days a week, 16 hours a day in Zone 7, which includes East Harlem and parts of Central and North Harlem in the 25, 28, and 32 police precincts. In 2020, there were approximately 8,400 mental health 911 calls in Zone 7, the highest volume of any dispatch zone in the city. During the 16 hours a day when B-HEARD teams were operational from June 6 – July 7, 2021, there were approximately 16 mental health 911 calls each day in Zone 7.

B-HEARD doesn’t handle calls that involve weapons or “immediate risk of violence,” but the team still handled 25% of all mental health emergency calls. The number would likely have been higher with more coverage, as police were routed to some calls when B-HEARD members were unavailable or in the midst of handling a call.

Despite these limitations, the B-HEARD team provided more help to more people than the traditional police response would have.

In 95% of cases, people received assistance from B-HEARD teams, higher than 82% for traditional (NYPD/EMS) 911 response.

So, greater responsiveness. And rather than simply turf mental health calls to the nearest hospital, B-HEARD teams were able to provide on-site help. The traditional (police-EMS) response resulted in 82% of calls ending with a ride to the hospital. With B-HEARD, the number dropped to 50%. One-quarter of all calls handled by B-HEARD were taken care of on-site, including de-escalation and referrals to counseling or other care options. Another 20% of cases resulted in B-HEARD transporting persons to community-based care locations.

And the police are more apt to call in B-HEARD than the other way around, suggesting officers are happy to utilize mental health care professionals if they’re available.

NYPD has requested onsite assistance from B-HEARD 14 times.

B-HEARD teams have requested onsite assistance from NYPD 7 times.

There’s no reason this shouldn’t continue to work. And it should scale easily. Should. A lot depends on talking entities like the NYPD into diverting some of their (outsized) budgets towards hiring team members and funding their continued existence. If officers on patrol are utilizing the new teams, they obviously see the value of having mental health professionals on call. And if the beat officers can see the benefits, hopefully the brass isn’t so disconnected from day-to-day operations that it would stand in the way of helping both the officers they oversee and the people who are paying the NYPD to keep them safe.

Filed Under: b-heard, mental health, ny, nyc, nypd, police