The horizons of technological control: automated surveillance in the New York subway

ABSTRACT

Surveillance technologies may be capable of monitoring a domain, but they need a sufficiently orderly domain to monitor. This article examines the secretive effort to institute artificial-intelligence-based ‘smart surveillance’ in the New York subway, using object- and pattern-recognition algorithms to identify dangerous activities in video feeds, such as a person abandoning a package. By considering the necessary preconditions for computer vision systems to recognize patterns and objects, I show how smart surveillance was challenged by the lack of visual and social uniformities necessary for smart surveillance systems to make its fine-toothed distinctions. In spite of vast resources and involvement of a major military contractor, the project was eventually deemed a failure. Although problems in computer vision are being incrementally solved, those improvements do not yet add up to a holistic technology capable of parsing the real-world ambiguity of open-ended settings which do not meet the assumptions of the detection algorithms. In the absence of technologies that can handle the actual mess, the world itself must cooperate, but it often does not. The article demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the claims of technical efficacy in the study of security and surveillance to discover how technologies of inspection and control actually work, as a means to cut through the heavy rhetorical packaging in which they are sold to their publics.

KEYWORDS:

• Surveillance/privacy
• urban studies
• security
• artificial intelligence
• subway
• sociology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the feedback, comments, and encouragement from Bill Staples and other participants in States of Surveillance Conference, Surveillance Studies Research Center, University of Kansas, October 2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Noah McClain is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago [email: [email protected]].

Legal case and related documents

Lockheed Martin Transportation Security Solutions, An Operating Unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation v. MTA Capital Construction Company and Metropolitan Transportation Authority. United States District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 09 cv 4077 (PGG) (GWG).

Testimony or transcripts of trial proceedings:

• Davies, Frank. President, Aella Consulting Group. October 23, 2014.

• Gaughan, James. Program Director, IESS/C3 Project, Lockheed Martin Transportation Security Solutions. October 14, 2014.

• Hakim, Veronique, Acting President, MTA Capital Construction. November 3, 2014.

• Williamson, James. Director of Engineering, Secure Enterprise Solutions, Lockheed Martin Transportation Security Solutions. October 20, 2014.

– MTA 2014. ‘Defendant’s Post-Trial Memorandum of Law.’ Filed 11/25/14 as Document 174.

Joint Exhibits (JX):

• JX 9.2. Lockheed Martin. 2005. ‘Design, Development, Furnishing, and Installation of an Integrated Electronic Security System and Security Operations (C3) Centers at Various MTA Locations, Volume II: Technical Proposal.’

• JX 10. MTA. 2005. ‘Request for Proposal for Design, Development, Furnishing, and Installation of an Integrated Electronic Security System (IESS) and Security Operations (C3) Centers at Various Locations’, Vol. 1.

• JX 13.4. MTA. 2005. ‘Request for Proposal for Design, Development, Furnishing, and Installation of an Integrated Electronic Security System (IESS) and Security Operations (C3) Centers at Various Locations, Specification Section 1AB4 – Command and Control (C2) System.’

Lockheed Martin Exhibits (LMX):

• LMX 25. Document # 140–34. Susan Kupferman, Senior Advisor to MTA Chair. ‘IESS Board Briefing.’ June, 2008.

• LMX 62. Email correspondence, August 25, 2010. David Horn, MTA Senior Project Manager, writing to William Morange, MTA Executive Director of Security.

• LMX 89. Aella Consulting Group and Louis T. DeStefano, Inc. 2011. ‘Initial Expert Report Concerning Physical Security Technology Integration and Testing.’

• LMX 146. Aella Consulting Group and Louis T. DeStefano, Inc. 2012. ‘Expert Rebuttal to the Report of Howard Safir.’

MTA Exhibit (MTAX):

• MTAX 42, Part 1. Intergraph Security. 2006. ‘Lockheed Martin MTA-Capital Construction IESS and C3 MTA Project’ System Specification Document v. 1.1.

Notes

1. The MTA declared Lockheed in default of the IESS/C3 contract in mid-2009, citing high failure rates of system software and components. Lockheed sued, claiming that the MTA had failed to facilitate progress; the MTA countersued to recover payments for a security system it called ‘essentially nonexistent’ (2014).

2. See http://www.captcha.net/. Accessed 31 August 2016.

3. Statement of Veronique Hakim to New York City Council Committee on Transportation, 2 February 2006.

4. Statement of Veronique Hakim to New York City Council Committee on Transportation, 24 June 2009.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number SES-0542777] and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.