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BOSTON TROLLING (THE COMPLETE SERIES)

[TROLL 728]

BY CHRIS FARAONE, KENNETH LIPP & JONATHAN RILEY

PART I: YOU PARTIED HARD AT BOSTON CALLING AND THERE’S FACIAL RECOGNITION DATA TO PROVE IT

(originally published 8.7.14)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nobody at either day of last year’s debut Boston Calling partied with
much expectation of privacy. With an army of media photographers, selfie
takers, and videographers recording every angle of the massive concert
on Government Center, it was inherently clear that music fans were in
the middle of a massive photo opp.

What Boston Calling attendees (and promoters, for that matter) didn’t
know, however, was that they were all unwitting test subjects for a
sophisticated new event monitoring platform. Namely, the city’s software
and equipment gave authorities a live and detailed birdseye view of
concertgoers, pedestrians, and vehicles in the vicinity of City Hall on
May 25 and 26 of 2013 (as well as during the two days of a subsequent
Boston Calling in September). We’re not talking about old school black
and white surveillance cameras. More like technology that analyzes every
passerby for height, clothing, and skin color.

[CALLING HUGE]

Along with a dashboard that displays real-time alert data from social
media and other nodes of input, city agencies captured thousands of
faces using more than 10 cameras capable of intelligent video analysis.
Their objective? To detect traffic congestion and suspicious objects,
screen people for possible forensic identification purposes, and conduct
real-time video analytics. Nevertheless, more than 50 hours of
recordings — samples of which are highlighted herein as examples —
remain intact today.

Dig reporters picked up on a scent leading to correspondence detailing
the Boston Calling campaign while searching the deep web for keywords
related to surveillance in Boston. Shockingly, these sensitive documents
have been left exposed online for more than a year. Among them are memos
written by employees of IBM, the outside contractor involved, presenting
plans to use “Face Capture” on “every person” at the 2013 concert.
Another defines a party of interest “as anyone who walks through the
door.”

The urban laboratory described herein details specifications of a
so-called Intelligent Operations Center designed and licensed by IBM. As
it turns out, this integration of the company’s branded Smart
Surveillance System (SSS) and Intelligent Video Analytics (IVA) software
was preceded by a beta phase piloted at the 2013 Boston Marathon less
than two months before the expanded system was rolled out at Boston
Calling.

It’s no secret that the Hub has contracted with IBM on an initiative
called Smarter Cities, tooled to “gather better data leveraging
cameras,” since at least 2010. The administration of former Mayor Tom
Menino even bragged about a $400,000 grant the Hub received from IBM in
2012 that provided “top experts to work on ways Boston can engage its
citizens and more efficiently deliver municipal services.” Additionally,
a press release noted that “IBM will work with the city … to draft a
plan in two key areas for our residents: “traffic management,” and to
foster a “healthier environment.”

In addition to those quality of life improvements and constituent
service-driven projects, there also seems to be a darker side of the
relationship with IBM. Namely, the tech behemoth assists Boston with
comprehensive resources designed to analyze body and facial patterns, to
gauge panic levels and crowd sentiment, and to scan social media. It’s
not all funded by grants either; in 2013 alone, the city’s Department of
Innovation and Technology spent more than $3.5 million on IBM
“information technology [hardware]” and “IT solutions.”

With even more state-of-the-art surveillance infrastructure in place
than at the 2013 Boston Marathon, the first Boston Calling was intended
as a “proof of concept.” The “city’s expectations and success criteria”
were listed in an April 2013 document generated by IBM on behalf of
municipal stakeholders. They included:

-   “Transportation department [monitoring].”
-   “Use of cameras for monitoring/viewing.”
-   “Seeing [digital video surveillance] capabilities in action.”
-   “[Counting] people entering.”
-   “Analytics and insights on the event.”
-   “Building a more robust platform for the city for future projects.”

Reached for comment about “Face Capture” and intelligent video analysis,
a Boston Police Department spokesperson wrote in an email, “BPD was not
part of this initiative. We do not and have not used or possess this
type of technology.” To the contrary, the documents found by the
Diginclude internal photos of Boston cops observing the IBM dashboard
during Boston Calling.

[TURNSTILE PIC]In response to detailed questions, Kate Norton, the press
secretary for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, wrote in an email to the Dig:
“The City of Boston engaged in a pilot program with IBM, testing
situational awareness software for two events hosted on City Hall Plaza:
Boston Calling in May 2013, and Boston Calling in September 2013. The
purpose of the pilot was to evaluate software that could make it easier
for the City to host large, public events, looking at challenges such as
permitting, basic services, crowd and traffic management, public safety,
and citizen engagement through social media and other channels. These
were technology demonstrations utilizing pre-existing hardware (cameras)
and data storage systems.”

Norton also explained that “The City of Boston did not pursue long-term
use of this software or enter into a contract to utilize this software
on a permanent basis.” The reason? According to Norton: “From the City’s
perspective, we have not seen a clear use case for this software that
held practical value for the City’s public safety needs.”

Moving forward, Norton wrote that Boston officials “are still exploring
options for situational awareness software, but we lack a policy guiding
use of this software because we do not have any in place at this time.
There are a number of challenges presented by using this type of
software, including, but not limited to, infrastructure support as well
as legal and privacy concerns.”

As the city develops its comprehensive policy, technologists may want to
consider the policies of theCommonwealth Fusion Center, a joint
intelligence venture between state, local, and federal authorities that
also works with IBM. That outfit, for example, prohibits its operatives
from seeking or retaining “information about individual(s) … solely on
the basis of their … activities; their participation in a … lawful
event; or their race [or] ethnicity.”

[SLIDE BIG]

Meanwhile, the “People Search” feature used at Boston Calling parses
individuals by “baldness,” “head color,” “skin tone,” and clothing
texture. All of which is of potential concern to privacy advocates like
Alex Marthews, president of the constitutional rights group Digital
Fourth. Briefed on the 2013 Boston Calling plan, he told the Dig, “The
city seems to have it wrong on a basic level here.”

Marthews added: “The kind of surveillance they’re talking about is not
constitutional or appropriate. The government can’t take attendance for
a public meeting like a schoolteacher does for a first grade class. If
they are using facial recognition to identify every person in the crowd,
then they obviously don’t have individualized probable cause that
someone in the crowd is actually about to commit or has committed a
crime.”

Over the coming weeks, the Dig will further explore the history of the
Smart Cities initiative and of IBM’s relationship with Hub authorities.
We’re also seeking answers in regard to where and when comparable
systems will be used in the future, and about how much money Boston
wasted on these questionable operations.

“They’re asserting a general police power to capture anybody’s image and
process it for law enforcement purposes just in case they later turn out
to be guilty of something,” said Marthews. “That’s not OK.”

 [DNC 728]

PART II: SMARTER CITY OR CITY UNDER SURVEILLANCE?

(originally published 8.14.14)

Last week the Dig alerted readers to a secret experiment carried out by
the City of Boston during the Boston Calling concerts that took place in
May and September of last year. Among the revelations therein: Outside
contractors helped municipal authorities deploy resources designed to
analyze body and facial patterns of “every person who approaches the
door” in order to gauge panic levels and crowd sentiment. In this
follow-up, again relying in part on privileged documents that were left
exposed online, we examine the communications leading up to these
surveillance trials in the days, months, and even decade prior to the
first Boston Calling.

DONKEY CON

Big Brother has been ogling the Hub for years. As far back as 2004,
records show the existence of a Massachusetts Interagency Video
Information System (MIVIS) tooled “to enhance coordination of the
various public transportation and safety agencies through sharing of
each agency’s surveillance video.” In preparation for the Democratic
National Convention held in Boston in July of that year, a vast network
of government agencies — MassHighway, Massachusetts State Police, MBTA,
MassPort, Boston Transportation Department, Boston Police Department,
and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency — were plugged into
angles from more than 100 cameras placed everywhere from subway
platforms to a state police helicopter.

Following the Democratic convention, MIVIS architects promised to foster
more “agency coordination for regional events.” They had plenty of
hardware to work with. In spite of the BPD and other camera-happy
agencies refusing to disclose precise numbers, several media outlets
have since unearthed telling pieces of the puzzle that is Boston’s
surveillance state:

-   Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show
    that as of 2007, the nine cities that comprise the Metro Boston
    Homeland Security Region had installed nearly 150 cameras using
    almost $6 million in federal funding.
-   According to a WHDH report from 2011, the MBTA has more than 1,100
    eyes in the sky.
-   It’s unclear how much has been spent on cameras in total, but in
    2012 the Globe reported that the MBTA would spend $6.5 million in
    Department of Homeland Security grants to add “thousands” more
    devices.
-   MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo has confirmed to the press that as of
    2013, “thousands” of cameras were installed and operational.

[hollerith]In their pursuit of new ways to track people, it’s no wonder
officials teamed with the immortal tech giant IBM. They’ve been in the
people-counting business for more than a century. Under its original
name, Hollerith, the company’s machines were used to tally the first
modern US census in 1890, while a German subsidiary of IBM sold systems
during World War II that helped Hitler and the Third Reich identify
their prey.

While the commonwealth is far from Nazi Germany, the use of surveillance
tech in the Bay State has been for the most part done clandestinely, and
seemingly in violation of constitutional protections. Furthermore, in
regard to the sophisticated surveillance used at Boston Calling – a
pilot program the city now claims to have since abandoned — it appears
that IBM wooed Boston and its wallet at a particularly vulnerable
moment, merely days after the 2013 marathon.

STREET SMARTS

Since the early 2000s, IBM’s relationship with Boston and the Bay State
has been increasingly metastatic, with the company leveraging various
“technology partnerships.” Take, for example, its acquisition of the
Canadian business management leader Cognos in 2007, and of their COPLINK
crime data software that is used across the commonwealth and at two
fusion centers intended to serve as conduits between federal and local
crime-stoppers.

As noted in documents found by the Dig, IBM has provided key supporting
hardware and software for Mass mainframes since the cloud was a pipe
dream. That early ingratiation of IBM into the infrastructure powering
the commonwealth and curating its information has made the company a
shoo-in for lucrative contracts statewide. Between 2011 and 2014, the
City of Boston alone spent more than $4 million on everything from IBM
computers to licensing and maintenance contracts.

IBM has been incrementally installing itself here since John Kerry got
the Democratic nomination. In 2004 the company donated $2 million to the
DNC Host Committee in Boston, effectively seeding a private-public
strategy in which they are a critical contracting pivot. It’s a common
corporate practice: Nurture civic initiatives that place IBM delegates
in city halls and capitals across the country, and establish prime
position with municipal buyers.

In March 2012, Boston became one of 33 recipients of a “Smarter Cities
Challenge” grantfrom IBM. Said to be worth $400,000, the incentive,
according to a corporate press release, was “part of IBM’s citizenship
efforts to build a Smarter Planet.” To that end the company dispatched
“a team of six IBM experts” to “deliver recommendations … [to] help
achieve Boston’s climate and traffic improvement goals by unlocking,
sharing and analyzing transportation data.”

During a three-week analysis in which Boston made its vast trove of data
available to contractors, the aforementioned media release claimed the
IBM team developed an “initial prototype.” They then used that model to
persuade the Menino administration to re-purpose surveillance hardware
that was already in place. Namely, IBM warned that information
“currently is not shared, and often is not recorded or analyzed.”
“Therefore,” the experts determined, “camera data is not fully
leveraged.”

THE LEVERAGER

Heading the IBM fan club at City Hall through this courtship was Bill
Oates, who served as Boston’s Chief Information Officer from 2006 until
this past January. During both the corporate consultation period and
both weekends of the smart surveillance exercise at Boston Calling,
Oates generously flanked his contracted collaborators, boasting to
reporters in March 2013 about the Smarter Cities “partnership between
the private sector, academia and cities.”

The promo tour continued. That same month Oates spoke at an IBM
conference in Las Vegas, where he extolled Boston’s deep engagement with
emerging tech. The CIO also gushed in an online ad for Smarter Cities in
which he echoes language from the IBM sales pitch. “Our starting point
was to identify the important data and unlock it,” Oates says in the
video, “How Software is Making Boston Smarter.” “Every project that we
work on, we’re really thinking about the impact it’s going to have on
the constituent.”

At symposiums and in press releases, Oates toasted universally
appreciated innovations like “improving traffic and greening our city.”
But as documents found by the Dig reveal, in the first few months of
2013, Boston was also piloting a new smart surveillance program with
IBM. Though the Menino administration had offered few clues to the
public up to that point about the video forensic aspects of Smarter
Cities, on the morning of the 2013 Boston Marathon Oates told the trade
publication Information Week that the annual foot race would help
officials “get a sense of what the [Smarter Cities] system is going to
show us, so we can look at leveraging how to improve our coordination of
events.” The CIO additionally plugged the program on an IBM blog. In a
post from early Marathon Monday that vanished  after two bombs detonated
near the finish line, Oates wrote, “It’s the city’s job to make sure all
goes according to plan.”

FEVER PITCH

Though surveillance footage was used in part to identify two suspects in
the aftermath of the April 15 bombing, IBM’s smart video analysis bore
no fruit in the investigation. It had only been a beta test, and the
advanced facial recognition resources had not been made available to
first responders by the finish line.

Whereas some may have interpreted it a failure of the real-time video
tech in trial, IBM saw opportunity. Records found by the Dig show that
an employee of the company met with city officials on the day after the
marathon, and at least two additional times over the following two
weeks.

In the months prior, Boston had already been developing what IBM calls
an Intelligent Operations Center (IOC), basically a centralized
surveillance hub for “crowd management,” among other purposes, many of
which are notably less concerning.

[SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC CHECK]Post-bombing correspondence between IBM
employees and municipal officials shows ambitious contractors suggesting
the city incorporate “more data feeds” in an IOC “on steroids.” Docs
also show the tactics they used to “monitor panic” through social media.
The stated objective for the city’s Department of Innovation &
Technology: “show other departments … this is what [they] can do,” and
build “a more robust platform … for future projects.”

In helping Boston smarten up, IBM has bedded-down with several partners,
augmenting significant deals of its own. In the six months following the
2013 marathon, public records show that Oates’s department spent nearly
$500,000 on IBM contracts, plus fattened other collaborators. In one
instance, on June 23 of that year the city cut a $158,400 check to an
Andover, Massachusetts company that teams with IBM and Boston on
intelligent surveillance.

TALE OF THE TAPE

When the Smarter Cities initiative first arrived in Boston, there was
talk of privacy considerations. AJanuary 2013 report generated by IBM
experts noted the importance of ensuring “that reasonable security and
privacy policies, procedures and controls are incorporated in data
sharing, especially for personally identifiable information.”

Good intentions aside, in the media blitz between Boston Calling events,
IBM and Oates seemingly steered clear of any talk about civil liberties.
In a September 2013 press release applauding the success of Smart
Cities, the CIO mentioned functions such as “reducing traffic congestion
or avoiding conflicts such as roadway maintenance near a busy event.” As
for all the data collected, Oates told the Boston Globe, “We have no
intention of turning these things over to a company.”

As the Dig discovered and initially reported last week, IBM contractors
did in fact store surveillance footage and metadata. At the time of this
writing, much of it still remains vulnerable in an obscure corner of the
internet. Like security around the secret project, the implementation
itself also appears to have been lackluster. A spokesperson for the
current mayoral administration of Marty Walsh wrote in an email to the
Dig: “The City of Boston did not pursue long-term use of this software
or enter into a contract to utilize this software on a permanent basis”
due to a lack of “practical value for the City’s public safety needs.”

Meanwhile, with Oates spreading the Smart Cities gospel at conferences
from Philadelphia to Vegas — and now, presumably, as the CIO of the
entire commonwealth, where he took charge in January — IBM is using
Boston as a model in its pitch to other cities. At an August 2013 talk
to municipal leaders in Florida, Cate Richards, IBM’s North America
Smarter Cities Leader, explained how “the decision to expand deployment
[and] testing continued immediately” after the marathon bombing. In a
presentation that could have passed for the plan outlined for Boston in
2012, the strategist proposed to enhance “the success and safety of
public events,” to “leverage cross-agency data,” and to “anticipate
problems and provide actionable intelligence.”

In their response to the Dig’s questions, as well as to WBUR in
follow-up coverage, the city confirmed that Boston is still exploring
options to develop “situational awareness software.” That and all of the
above considered, in the coming weeks we will be working to identify
what technological direction the commonwealth and its metropolitan
regions are heading in, and to ascertain if civil liberties are being
violated in the process. Like Oates said at an IBM-sponsored forum at
Boston University the month before the bombing, “We’ve only scratched
the surface here in Boston.”

 

[TROLL 3 728]

PART III: THE FUTURE OF PRE-CRIME IN THE COMMONWEALTH

(originally published 9.9.14)

For this third installment of our Boston Trolling series on information
and surveillance, we’ve done some of our own data collection—of every
available bellwether and indicator, positive and negative, that points
forward. Some questions we considered: As the police state expands, are
there adequate safeguards in place? Or for the sake of innovation and
presumed security is our whole state, from every overzealous board of
selectmen to the spineless bureaucrats on Beacon Hill, doomed to embrace
elaborate tripwire systems that prowl for so-called “pre-crime?”

HACK TIME

This past August should forever be recognized as a milestone moment in
Hub history. Not only because the relatively new administration of Mayor
Marty Walsh hosted an event touted as “Boston’s First Civic Minded
Hackathon,” but because the brave creatives who attended the inaugural
HubHacks pooled their talents toward tackling debilitating issues that
should probably have been addressed when Kevin White was in office.

[HUB HACKS]

With more than 50 volunteer coders foregoing a spectacularly sunny
weekend to work inside District Hall across from the enticing South
Boston waterfront, the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology
(DoIT) didn’t ask participants to fix low priority problems or build
novelty apps. Instead, the DoIT’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Jascha
Franklin-Hodge challenged the group to solve fundamental operations
nightmares that the city actually struggles with. Namely, Boston lacks a
streamlined permitting process for new businesses and, unbelievable as
it sounds, maintains a property database that’s so dysfunctional it
neither correlates to post office addresses nor the designations used by
utility companies.

To their credit, members of the mayor’s crew shared a harsh and
deprecating video they produced with interviews of business owners
hammering the system for its bureaucratic asininity. In his turn, the
mayor praised the “new tone” city tech administrators are taking, while
Franklin-Hodge extolled the real-time progress metrics that help Walsh
steer the ship. The optimistic CIO gave only one caveat before
officially commencing the data orgy: “Technology,” he said, “is never a
solution in and of itself.”

Weeks later, in a statement to the Dig about upcoming developments in
city surveillance, a mayoral spokesperson reiterated that sentiment in
different terms: “We know that innovation isn’t just about putting shiny
toys in our departments, but rather is about identifying a need and
finding the right technology to fill the void responsibly … and to
retain data securely for the people we serve.”

Prior revelations considered, that’s a new mantra for Boston, and it
should come as a relief.

Even with so many positive advancements and public-private partnerships
in stride, critics claim that hyperactive innovation hamlets can harbor
a sinister side. Take Massachusetts. Though the Bay State rides the
cutting edge of life-saving biotech, it’s also home to companies like
the Pittsfield-based Lenco Industries, which manufactures the gargantuan
urban street tanks that attracted so much ire in Missouri last month.
The list of local players in high-tech security is long, from the South
Boston-based BioCatch, a “global leader in behavioral biometric
authentication and threat detection,” to the Google-owned Boston
Dynamics, which spawns humanoid and predatory robots for the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

As the Dig reported last month, in 2013 IBM supplied the Hub with
state-of-the-art “smart surveillance” that targeted “anyone who [walked]
through the door” at the Boston Calling music festivals that May and
September (the company has claimed otherwise, though documents obtained
by the Dig paint a different picture). But on a greater scale,
sophisticated new spy instruments comprise but a piddling note in a
statewide symphony of surveillance orchestrated over decades, and that
looms everywhere from street corners to school yards. As such, in
impugning certain innovations, bright and dark alike, we examined four
years worth of technological expenditures at the state level. We may not
have proprietary prying eyes in the sky, but you don’t need a camera to
see which businesses are likely to partner with Mass and its
municipalities in the near future.

SKYSIGHT

People who attended the end-of-summer Boston Calling this past weekend
may be relieved to know the city didn’t leverage the same “Face Capture”
technology the Dig reported was used at the concert series last year.
According to a mayoral spokesperson, the Hub “did not pursue long-term
use of [the IBM] software or enter into a contract to utilize this
software on a permanent basis” due to a lack of “practical value for the
City’s public safety needs.”

At the same time, though IBM has a footprint stretching from the
Berkshires to Barnstable, the company is only one of many angling for
business as authorities across the state explore software that’s
intended to detect bad behavior. Following the bombing of the 2013
Boston Marathon, the MBTA licensed a new product called AISight
(pronounced: “eyesight”), or Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities. A
flagship of the Texas-based BRS Labs, short for Behavioral Recognition
Systems, AISight provides smart surveillance on the cheap. According to
the tech industry trade site ITProPortal, the system “is extremely easy
to implement even across huge, disparate networks of outdated camera
equipment,” and autonomously culls “an ever-changing knowledge base of
activity seen through every camera on your video network.”
Low price and accessibility have made BRS an economic success, with the
company recentlyannouncing plans to go public. Among the marquee
accomplishments fueling such significant growth: deployment in Brazil
during the last World Cup, and at this year’s Boston Marathon. State
records show that in December 2013, the MBTA security department
purchased $200,000 worth of “signal material and equipment” from BRS.
Similar expenditures over the past two years include:

-   Nearly $300,000 in MBTA security spending to the Quincy-based FTG
    Technologies, which services video surveillance and IP solutions.

-   $22,725 to VidSys, which provides software “used to run operations
    centers for public sector agencies.” With a commonwealth branch in
    Marlborough, the Virginia-born company helps “instantly [correlate]
    vast amounts of data gathered from any number or virtually any type,
    brand or generation of physical security system or sensor.”

-   $1.6 million to Minuteman Security Technologies in Andover for
    police “equipment and supplies.” Their specialty: “providing
    real-time monitoring of a facility’s environment, people, and assets
    as well as by recording events for subsequent investigation, proof
    of compliance, and audit.”

You might be familiar with concepts like these, tooled to root out crime
preemptively, from the short story and movie Minority Report, or the
conspiratorial CBS drama “Person of Interest.” The phenomenon is no
longer a mere science fiction fascination. State officials may be less
than forthcoming about their use of surveillance tech, but BRS President
John Frazzini, a former U.S. Secret Service agent, shares his business
goals openly. “Catching these events before they happen,” he told the
“Today Show” in 2013, “is the name of the game.”

ALPHA BETA TESTING

Three months ago, a national network known as the Privacy Coalition
penned a letter, co-signed by 32 organizations that advocate for civil
liberties, to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. In it they urged the
Department of Justice “to quickly complete an updated Privacy Impact
Assessment for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Next Generation
Identification System (NGI).” In short: They want to know what federal
researchers are doing with the endless stream of data they collect
through innumerable access points.

“There’s no evidence that these technologies will ever stop terrorism
or, frankly, would have stopped the marathon bombing,” says Kade
Crockford, director of the ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty
Project. She adds: “The focus on spending millions of dollars in secret
to install these back-end camera analytics systems is all taking place
not only without public debate, but without demonstrations by the
vendors showing what they actually do. For all we know, these may be
very good for helping the government control dissent, or for targeting
people for things like low-level drug arrests in a crowd.”

With thousands of cameras and countless hours of archival footage, the
ultimate goal for governments is seemingly to tap Big Data for the
purpose of identifying targets through space and time. In Massachusetts,
officials have already live-tested several such analysis products on an
unknowing public. The deployment of surveillance linked to facial
recognition and crowd monitoring is hugely different from, say, scanning
raw footage of the Tsarnaev brothers and cross-referencing similarities
against databases. IBM’s Smart Surveillance Engine (SSE) that was used
at Boston Calling records skin, hair, body, and clothing colors, and
helps compile and analyze that data over prolonged periods.

IBM has conceded that its software isn’t perfect; last year the company
noted that hats, masks, and sunglasses can still cause facial
recognition to fail. Yet despite shortcomings, Massachusetts state
officials have propped these costly measures since before the marathon
bombing. In 2010, then-BPD Deputy Superintendent William Casey lectured
about artificial intelligence at the annualBiometric Consortium
Conference, held that year in Tampa. His message: “Advances in biometric
capabilities in the next decade will bring additional tools to law
enforcement that promise improvements in crime solving and, more
importantly, crime prevention.”

BIG BLUE BROTHER

IBM is a fixture in the commonwealth, if not a constant. In addition to
servicing more than $65 million worth of state contracts since 2010, the
company’s executives are intricately wired into the political
establishment. According to the office of Secretary of State William
Galvin, IBM’s most active lobbyist in Massachusetts was paid $30,000 in
the first half of this year alone to flank “information technology or
any other matter concerning IBM’s business” on Beacon Hill.

From Boston’s schools, to its police force, to the “Intelligent
Operations Center” that kept tabs on oblivious concert-goers, the
fingerprints of IBM are everywhere. None of which should be surprising
since the company has worked tirelessly to nurture and maintain
government relationships. In their efforts to ingratiate proprietary
systems with the civic interest, IBM Corporate Community Relations
Manager Maura Banta has had an especially enduring presence. A company
woman since 1973, she has served on advisory boards for entities
including the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education,
the Mass Taxpayers Foundation, and the Mass Business Alliance for
Education.

[OCPF DEVAL IBM WITH SPACES]

On the electoral side, Banta is a backer of Deval Patrick, having
personally donated $625 to the governor since 2010. Other IBM employees
and executives did similarly, giving Patrick nearly $9,000 in total,
plus thousands more to the Massachusetts Democratic Party State
Committee. On the administrative side, IBM also has apparent inroads to
Tony Parham, the commonwealth’s government innovation officer (GIO)
since 2012. Parham worked as a program director of Software Group (SWG)
at IBM from 2000 to 2005, is a founding co-chair of the company’s
Massachusetts Diversity Council, and still operates a management
consulting firm that lists IBM as a client.

In many cases, IBM’s aggressive sales and government relations efforts
straddle several sectors—security and schools, management and
monitoring, and so on. Tending to their education piece, in a2012 post
on a company blog, Banta boasted about work with Massachusetts school
partners on “quality rating systems,” “infrastructure support,” and the
implementation of a suite of classroom products. A few months later, a
company report produced for the administration of Mayor Tom Menino noted
that “departments, such as police, libraries and schools … have video
cameras,” but that “information is not shared,” while “the data is
intended for human consumption, not digital processing.”

You can never have too much intelligent surveillance. As IBM General
Manager Michael Dixon said in a promotional video for their hallmark
Smarter Cities initiative, it’s not like the old days when “those that
needed to be watched were in a jail.” Makes sense. If you’re identifying
perps before they even commit crimes, let alone get charged, convicted,
and incarcerated, then nothing less than the entire public has profound
penal potential.

INSIDE JOB

It’s not necessarily a doomsday scenario. As showcased at the city’s
aforementioned hackathon last month, Boston’s current tech squad—flanked
by the award-winning Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics—is making a
serious effort to innovate on a tight budget. At the District Hall
event, one DoIT associate noted, “It’s really cheap to fail fast.”

Things move slower at the state level, where countless entrenched
contractors are still feasting. It’s a tradition. In the case of the
Canadian business intelligence company Cognos, the commonwealth extended
annual contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars even after a
lobbyist for their software was found to have violated open bidding
rules. The headline case landed then-Speaker of the Massachusetts House
of Representatives Sal DiMasi in federal prison, but Cognos was spared
after IBM acquired it as a subsidiary in 2007.

While the Big Blue Grey Lady remains dominant, and did nearly twice as
much business with the commonwealth last fiscal year than in 2011, IBM
can count on mounting competition—especially on smart surveillance.
Smaller companies have boots on the ground too. In the case of the
Andover-based Minuteman, last year the self-described “enterprise
security leader” paid a Boston firm $48,000 for representation on Beacon
Hill. The face of their lobbying: a former chief legal counsel to the
state Senate Committee on Ways and Means, and a former state senator.

“The surveillance industry isn’t just burgeoning, it’s vibrant,” says
Crockford of the ACLU. “And once these industries have enough money,
they’re able to pay for lobbying to ensure that they get huge government
contracts. It’s difficult to roll back the surveillance state that they
profit off of when our political system is driven by campaign
contributions and lobbyists who endorse this atmosphere.”

Crockford continues: “The people who really lose out here, time and
again, are taxpayers who want to live and participate in a free
society.”

BONUS: BOSTON TROLLING OLYMPIC EDITION

This entry was posted in FEATURES, News, NEWS+OPINIONS, Non-fiction and
tagged 2004 Democratic National Convention, ACLU, Alex Marthews, Big
Brother, Bill Oates, Bill Owens, Boston, boston calling, Boston Globe,
Boston Marathon Bombing, Boston Police, BPD, Cambridge, Chris Faraone,
City Hall, Cognos, COPLINK, Department of Innovation and Technology,
Department of Transportation, DiMasi, DNC, DoIT, Ed Davis, Face Capture,
FBI, IBM, innovation, Joanthan Riley, Joe Pesatro, JTTF, Kade Crockford,
Kate Norton, Kenneth Lipp, Marty Walsh, Massachusetts, MBTA, Minority
Report, MIT, MIVIS, MONUM, OCPF, Person of Interest, pre-crime, Smart
Cities, South Boston, surveillance, Tom Menino on September 9, 2014 by
DIG STAFF.

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