Strange Way To Vandalize a LinkNYC Kiosk

I’ve become accustomed to seeing stickers and strips of tape covering any or all of the three cameras present on every LinkNYC kiosk. The gesture could be interpreted as fear of or simply commentary on the surveillance capabilities of these machines, which seem as if they will never shake their reputation as data-harvesting vacuum cleaners of surveillance video and identifiable information about pedestrians passing by.

It’s been my understanding, from sources who would know better than most, that the cameras are very rarely activated. The famous brick-throwing incident from last year, in which the perp was apprehended thanks in large part to being caught on LinkNYC’s surveillance video, is described as instance in which CityBridge, the owners of the kiosks, activated them only after detecting a pattern of repeated attacks on their machines.

If the cameras ran constantly they probably would have captured video of whoever threw bricks at a handful of kiosks in 2018.

I don’t worry about such things. The surveillance ship has sailed and the bulk of us make a lot of money for a small group of people simply by being alive. That’s just the world we live in.

Any given LinkNYC kiosk likely has at least one privately-owned surveillance camera pointing at it, with access to its video footage available to unknown individuals who could do with it whatever they wish. Some of this surveillance video goes up for grabs to the general public, streaming live, via non-password-protected URLs.

It is fair to say that CityBridge and, indeed, the whole “Smart City” campaign, has done itself no favors by offering virtually zero verifiable concrete evidence of its security precautions and practices, delivering for the most part defensive and even condescending rhetoric.

No independent security audit of LinkNYC’s surveillance capabilities and data-siphoning is known to have been performed.

With that rambling introduction out of the way I share how, strangely, someone chose to cover the tablet screen of this LinkNYC kiosk with some kind of opaque black material. I don’t know the material and did not attempt to peel it off, but assumed it to be adhesive.

The tablet underneath actually still worked, at least I think it did. I made phone calls using the tactile keypad below. But with the tablet screen itself possessed of no real surveillance capability all I could ask was why? Sizing this material to perfectly and completely cover the tablet screen took some amount of determined, focused work. The question, simply: What message is someone trying to communicate here?