Omniscient NYC

As one of the "World's Worst", it was no surprise that the U.S. was labeled as an "Endemic Surveillance Society" by Privacy International (an ACLU London-based partner) when its State of Privacy Map was released a couple years ago.

Some of this surveillance is imposed upon us by authority figures and some of it is self-imposed. Some of it is helpful and some of it is potentially harmful. Here are a few tools that can be beneficial in letting you know what's going in your world on a very local level (and in many cases contribute content). There are also a few resources here to arm you with a little more information about surveillance and your rights.




EveryBlock, which aims to answer the question "What's happening in my neighborhood?" is a pretty comprehensive resource. It's "a new experiment in online journalism", and "the most granular approach to local news ever attempted."

EveryBlock currently offer a news feed for every city block in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami-Dade, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, DC — with more cities to come.

Info is provided from public records, news articles and other geographically relevant content.

As an example of what kind of information it can provide, by inputting my address, it gave me relevant information (organized by date) on media, street conditions, geotagged photos (from Flickr, Yelp, and Craigslist), crimes, political news, business reviews, restaurant inspection ratings, newly granted liquor licenses, and places where graffiti was recently cleaned.

See here for a full list of content covered and resources of information for NYC.




Gothamist has a map of "incidents" (crimes, missing persons, accidents, arrests, fires, etc.) to show you "whats going on and where right now".



You can hear what's being said in your neighborhood with the Google Maps mashup of "Overheard in New York", "Overplot". Who knows ... maybe you said something so incredibly asinine that someone felt it warranted repeating.




Find the political districts you live in, who represents you, and what they're up to via NYTimes.com "Represent", still in beta.




The "City that Never Sleeps" does, in fact, switch to power-save mode, so if you want to know what's open 24-hours a day in your neighborhood, hit up "America All Night".

Put in your location to get a map with plotted points and details for the restaurants, delis / markets / grocery stores, convenience / drug stores, and "everything else" that's always open for business.




Freaked out by all the info available on the web? Use iSEE to plot a surveillance-free walk from one point to another. iSEE, from the Institute for Applied Autonomy, is a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments that helps you find "paths of least surveillance".


The NYC Surveillance Camera Project provides a map and breakout lists by community board.


For more information on surveillance in NYC, see news and resources at New York Civil Liberties Union's Surveillance Camera Project.

Hack your sense of hearing

Our sense of hearing is one of our main tools for gathering information about the world around us. And, like all of our senses, it is easy to trick. Listening to binaural recordings demonstrates this. Over at Quiet American, "Binaural Theory" is described as follows:

"The binaural recording concept is elegant: place closely-matched microphones near the ears, and record what the ears actually hear. The details may be fascinating and esoteric, but the results speak for themselves ...Consider how we are able to locate sound sources ... differences between what each ear hears provide the clues our brains need to locate sound sources in space ... Binaural recordings (are) designed to capture ('commit to tape') these differences ... The result is a subjective three-dimensional soundscape that cannot yet be equaled with conventional speaker playback."

So test out some of these 'three-dimensional soundscapes':

Don't even bother listening to any of these if you aren't going to both WEAR HEADPHONES and CLOSE YOUR EYES (no peeking!).

Nothing like a little hacking of the senses to remind us of the plasticity of the brain ...

• Get a hair cut over at the Virtual Barbershop
• Never again will you have to spend countless nights wondering what it would sound like if someone was writing on the inside of your skull
  
• Sometimes it's OK to play with matches
• And take a ride in a boat

Want to go somewhere specific?

• Go on a audio vacation, like maybe to Spain near Seville's Cathedral where you can hear this flamenco dancer's street performance
• Want to go somewhere else? Check out all the geotagged sounds from around the world at the freesound project.