By Julie Mardin
“What we’re talking about here is not people that are scared of technology. What we’re talking about is not people that don’t want change. What we’re talking about here is having absolutely zero trust in both our City and the partnerships that the City goes into…So what are you all doing to combat and to restore trust?”
— Jennifer Gutiérrez, Chair, Committee on Technology, and Oversight Committee on LinkNYC
June 7, 2023 — The Technology Oversight Committee on LinkNYC held a six hour hearing to review updates from the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), and CityBridge, the franchisee, on the LinkNY kiosks, and the contentious 32’ foot tall communication towers, called Link5G. In addition to offering free public wifi, the towers have housing for four different commercial telecom carriers’ radios and antennas, and could end up totaling 7500 on our city sidewalks, according to the latest contract amendment.
Twenty members of the public signed up to testify in person and twenty-five online, the vast majority in opposition, or in some kind of dismay. Privacy, health, design, and process were all discussed. There was also hundreds of pages of written testimony.
Former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney was the first witness in opposition, speaking of the wrong-headedness of having to have children rely on hotspots on the street in order to do their homework. Her long time Chief of Staff Minna Elias noted that the problem seemed to be more about affordability, and there were programs that already existed that could be better advertised, such as the federal Affordable Connectivity Program. Even tech guru Clayton Banks, co-founder of Silicon Harlem, labeled 5G as the new digital divide, as 5G devices are too expensive right now. The important thing was broadband. And this was the question that seemed most on the mind of Chair Gutiérrez. Would these poles provide the access that they were promising?
A handful of community groups were there in support of the project, such as the Electrical Workers Union, a few non-profits who did see great benefits from the free advertising, as well as the Gigabit centers. These are computer access sites where the high speed fiber is actually brought into the premises.
Reverend Conrad Tillard of Black Clergy for Economic Empowerment chided those parts of the city that were taking for granted a service they already had.
Carnegie Hill Neighbors, a landmark preservation group in the upper east side, had staged a rally earlier that morning calling for an improved plan. The siting of these towers in affluent areas begged the question of wither this was about crossing the digital divide, or about reaching the best advertising revenue streams.
Many of those in opposition believe that the type of internet access that is being proposed does not represent true equity. As even with the installation of these poles, it is still not guaranteed that the outer boroughs will get what the more centralized neighborhoods have, and that is proper wired connections.
One of the most important written testimonies submitted was from the Irregulators, a group of former telecom industry insiders, who document how it is because of Verizon’s three card Monte tricks that we are trapped in this digital divide. It is important for New Yorkers to review this history, otherwise it is possible that all the public funded fiber that has been invested in throughout the years will disappear into private hands.
Today we are told that CityBridge itself will build out neutral fiber, yet we were promised that, in a sense, with Verizon too. The institutional amnesia, and the way that Broadband is tending to be defined purely as WiFi these days, indicates that we are gong through yet another bait and switch, and ushered into an all wireless, all the time world. This is far more lucrative for industry, but has deep and unresolved problems in terms of health, surveillance, and equity, some of which were starting to be aired at the hearing.
HEALTH
“The EPA, CDC, FDA, National Cancer Institute, and World Health Organization have not scientifically reviewed the totality of the up-to-date research, and certainly not on 5G, 4G, or bioeffects related to long term cell tower level radiation. There’s no risk assessment, and no reports… There’s no federal agency with any funded activities regarding cell tower radiation, no federal measurement or oversight program. It’s a regulatory gap.”
— Theodora Scarato, Environmental Health Trust
In answer to Chair Gutiérrez’ question on how CityBridge was working on restoring trust, CityBridge attorney Margaux Knee reassured the panel that they had done their homework and would improve their messaging. She then went on to claim that there are thousands of studies overwhelmingly showing the safety of 5G and previous iterations of wireless technologies. Even the experts they have brought on to community board meetings have not spoken in such all encompassing terms. The usual position is that there is no definitive proof of harm, and that the studies that do show harm have not been able to be duplicated. These statements have been supported by our federal agencies as well.
And yet none of these agencies have any funded programs regarding cell tower radiation, no federal measurement or oversight program, Theodora Scarato of Environmental Health Trust informed us during her testimony.
To put these assurances of safety in some historical context one can go back to the 1980s and 90s when there was a federal agency charged with overseeing the effects of electromagnetic fields. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had a robust department working on the issue, and was putting together a report that was leaning towards concluding that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) were “a probable cause of cancer.” In 1990 the draft was published and they were poised to make recommendations for more stringent guidelines. By the mid 1990s their department was defunded, and the final report never made the light of day.
Also in the 1990s Drs. Henry Lai and Narendra Singh were discovering single strand DNA breaks in the brain cells of rats after a 2 hour session of microwave radiation, at levels far below heating and safety guidelines. Damage to DNA can cause cell malfunction, mutations or cell death, and has implications for cancer or neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimers, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or multiple sclerosis (MS).
It was precisely because these and other inconvenient results were starting to be replicated that all funding for this type of research dried up.
The industry did fund counter studies in an attempt to “wargame the science,” and flooded the literature with industry friendly results. One of these researchers who refused to go along, Dr. Jerry Phillips, spoke of how easy it is to design studies that find no effect. The military also engaged in these tactics. These are huge industrial forces that had a lot at stake in these technologies.
In 1993 the cell phone industry was also facing a potentially ground breaking law suit from Florida business man David Reynard, alleging a cell phone related brain tumor killed his young wife. All this made the manufacturing of a consensus of safety even more urgent.
PRIVACY
“The City chose to have the private sector respond to a structural inequity, a problem that market-based solutions are not equipped to fix. Rather than equitably addressing the digital divide, the LinkNYC business model created another problem: infrastructure that relies on surveilling our communities to survive.”
— Ed Vogel, Senior Policy Researcher, Surveillance Resistance Lab
Alli Finn, a Senior Researcher at Surveillance Resistance Lab, maintained that the cost of “free WiFi” was the implementation of a data mining and surveillance infrastructure through New York City, which caused a bit of head-shaking on the CityBridge side of the room. They often brag that all they collect is an email and a name.
But privacy experts say that we just don’t know what CityBridge does with all the technical information that it collects. Even if anonymized, it could be sold to data broker companies, third parties that make their profits by extracting, and repackaging, and selling our data. And that we need to know more about the anonymization methods.
Similar questions remain around the use of environmental sensors which CityBridge CEO Nick Colvin did not seem fully aware of at the 2022 hearing, when he said he believed they were only there to sense the health of the structure.
As well as the use of bluetooth beacons, which we are assured only go one way. At last year’s hearing Civil Rights Attorney Albert Fox Cahn thought that that was preposterous, pointing out that bluebooth beacons may go only one direction, but once they reach your phone, your phone application might share the data with any number of third parties.
CityBridge also shares anonymized information with advertisers and advertising networks, despite reassurances to community boards throughout the past months that the company does not in any way monetize the data. Nick Colvin has said that they do so only in order to understand the user better. However the privacy policy itself states that it is ‘to select and serve relevant advertisements.’
This is the kind of shiftiness that has characterized the program over the last months and years, and led community leaders such as Chair Frank Taylor of Queens Community Board 3 and Chair Reverend Carlene Thorbs of Queens Community Board 12, who both have law enforcement backgrounds, to declare that they could not trust anything CityBridge said, and that they believed the company was a shell.
Who is CityBridge And what are these poles for?
CityBridge is making the future siting of installations much easier for the wireless industry.
CityBridge itself is not one company, but an evolving consortium of technology companies, currently consisting of ZenFi Networks, who is building out the new fiber, and Intersection, their advertising partner.
At one time Intersection was partly owned by Sidewalk Labs, a firm developing smart city technologies, which was owned by Alphabet (Google’s new parent company.) The Google connection definitely made people more attuned to the possibility of tracking and data mining via the physical landscape. And in fact it was openly discussed that this was the new business model, and that was how the program would be able to pay for itself and offer the free services.
LinkNY fell short of revenue and stopped building kiosks in 2018. One cannot help speculating that it was not purely financial troubles that collapsed the program, but the spotlight on privacy concerns, and the sense that the public was not ready for these grand visions of a “digital revolution of cities,” as Dan Doctoroff, the head of Sidewalk Labs, former Deputy Mayor and CEO of Bloomberg LP, called it.
At the time Sidewalk Lab’s other grand project, Quayside, in Toronto, which was setting out to build a smart city from the ground up, also became mired in controversies over the potential for all out surveillance, and the company abandoned the project in 2020.
In December of 2021 Dan Doctoroff announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Sidewalk Labs because of a possible ALS diagnosis. The company was folded back into Google, and it is not clear whether its involvement with LinkNY has ended, or simply faded into the background.
Link5G in any case has carried on without any visionary talk about smart cities. CityBridge’s new CEO tries to distance the company from any of these earlier iterations. We are told these gargantuan poles are all about digital equity, and simply to remedy gaps in service, and anticipated gaps in service. We are told that industry has been consulted with in order to make this infrastructure ‘future ready.’ It would be good to know what their visions of the future are. But since these consultations are not shared with the public, the best we have to go by is what is being discussed at the tech conferences.
The last 6G Conference in Brooklyn was abuzz with talk of the Metaverse and Digital Twinning. This is where physical objects are tagged with a multitude of sensors which then relay back information to the digital twin in real time, so that predictions can be made about their health and future. While there might be some beneficial uses for this technology, there is a an expectation that every possible thing that makes sense to be sensored will be sensored by 2030. In order to handle all these new data streams we would require networks to deliver some 100 GBytes per second, according to Nokia’s President and CEO, Pekka Lundmark, who gave the keynote speech. These can only be delivered by much higher frequencies and a much denser infrastructure.
The Metaverse is forecast to be a $13 TR economy by 2030. There is no doubt there will be great economic opportunities, but at what cost to public health, privacy, and even autonomy.
It is not a far stretch to assume that these poles will play a part in such visions. At the very least they are about more than phone or internet capacity, but about future technologies that there should be more of a conversation about.
Julie Mardin is a New Yorker and independent researcher. She volunteers for New Yorkers 4 Wired Tech and other organizations working to open up the conversation on the Link5G project in New York.
