Spy Gear, for the Ladies

Gents can appreciate a lot of this stuff too.


Store your secret stash:

• Platform shoes with a hidden compartment pictured below
  
• A water bottle safe that actually has water in it

Scale walls:

• Ninja grappling hook or foot and hand claws

Multi-tool:

• Girly Miss Army Knife Kit
• Or the more useful Victorinox SwissChamp

Surveillance and data capture / storage gadgets:

• World's Smallest Global Positioning (16 Satellite Real-Time) Tracking System
• "Ripple" Bluetooth Headset Earrings
• A reverse peep hole viewer
• Stainless steel / crystal Heartwear necklace that's actually a really fancy USB drive
• An over-the-top patriotic Lighter Spy Cam that records sound and video
• Camcorders hidden in packs of gum and pens
• Pens that are really scanners
• A watch that's really a Digital Recorder/MP3Player

Sneaky weapons:

• Kubatons keychain
• A cell phone stun gun
• Folding knuckle knife
• Lipstick that is really a knife or pepper spray
• A pepper spray ring
• An easily concealable tiny Swiss Mini Gun
• 2.5" long Ruger LCP-380 Pocket Pistol
• A cell phone gun

If you want to MacGyver your own weapons, you could (but probably shouldn't) make one of these 5 Deadly Sci-Fi Gadgets You Can Build At Home.

Bind / detain someone without lugging around hand-cuffs via these thumb cuffs that could probably easily be stashed down a bra.

For counter surveillance, this Auto Detective pen detects wireless and RF signals within a certain range and alerts you via a light that starts blinking - the faster the blinking the closer you are to the device you're detecting. It also supposedly has some sort of feature that helps detect counterfeit bills.

Finally, if captured by the enemy, be sure you know how to:

• Unlock police-issue and plastic handcuffs
• Beat a lie detector

Layers of a City

“Most people experience their life in the city in a two-dimensional way ... You know, they go from Point A to Point B along streets and don’t realize there are these multiple layers to the city. By going 20 feet below or 20 feet above, you can go to a place that is practically unvisited, that maybe 100 people get to see a year.” (NYTimes: "Children of Darkness")

Upper Level
Any time I'm on a rooftop in the city, I'm struck by the feeling that I'm on another plain. There's a whole other world going on up there. There are "rooftop neighbors", not just next door, but across the street, and way down the block ... From my roof, I can see how people create their own little havens on their slice of metropolitan rooftop real estate. My neighbors are so comfortable that they frequently come out on their porch in their underwear. When I peer down to the street below, sometimes it almost seems wrong to be looking down over the pedestrians as they pass by, completely oblivious to my gaze or anything beyond their more immediate surroundings.

Truth is, most of us don't even consider some of the things that are actually going on up on those rooftops: there are amazing views, secret gardens, yoga classes, parties, film screenings .... eh, beekeeping? But we just shuffle by, unaware, on the sidewalk many stories below.



Lower Level
But it's not just what's above our heads that we often fail to notice, it's what's under our feet as well.

"New Yorkers go about unaware of what is happening just beneath their feet: Power pulses, information flies, and steam flows. The city’s infrastructure starts just below street level, but it doesn’t stop there. " (National Geographic: NY Underground)



Go to the National Geographic "NY Underground" site where you can actually interact with the layers in the image above and get more information and (photo, text, and audio) tours.

Also check out NYC24's feature on Exploring NYC's Underground.




See stunning visuals captured by a "Guerrila Historian in Gotham" at Undercity.



Want to see some of this stuff in person?
In a post-9/11 world, much of what was once somewhat accessible is off-limits, so it can be challenging.

• For a more legal route, join in on the annual openhousenewyork weekend: "America's largest architect and design event ... discover new neighborhoods, explore with friends and family, and experience NYC's architecture and design in all five boroughs through special talks, tours, performances and family-friendly workshops – all free of charge...". This next one will be October 10 & 11, 2009.

• For the other route, check out what the LTVsquad us up to.

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.