I was happy to read Cory Doctorow's article on tech or the public interest because lately it's all too easy to see technology as inherently evil. AI dominates the headlines and new initiatives and infrastructure are almost always military in nature.

Knowing that tech people aren't necessariy evil, so maybe tech isn't necessarily evil is a nice idea to hold onto, especially when tech has been your entire 30-odd year career.

Still, the article and resources and examples it references are dominated by software and coding. My career and professional interests are in wireless communications.

So how can I help?

Back in the day, I was involved in a project to build WiFi across the City of Philadelphia. Earthlink was driving it, and it died on the vine; according to this article, due to business model problems. My memory is a little fuzzy on the details but I felt like the civic benefits of ubiquitous access were the point, and I was never sure how/why it would make money. I know I'm quick to jump on free WiFi at any municipally owned site (e.g. community centres, libraries) I'm at, but I haven't seen any broad coverage throughout a municipality (I found this organization in Philadelphia, while trying to figure out if the old project somehow survived in a new form, but the coverage is limited and didn't start till the pandemic).

A City providing WiFi coverage across a broad area would be costly, not only to build out, but also to maintain, and providing bandwidth to all those users wouldn't be cheap either. Could a city gain a benefit or synergy by deploying public WiFi? There is the data consideration - in fact, in Doctorow's own work of fiction Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, they touch upon the idea of using a community wireless mesh network's usage statistics to detect traffic patterns.

Sounds good until you realise it's basically mass surveillance. Flock cameras are getting a lot of bad press - people are destroying these units wherever they are seen. The opposition comes from a general opposition to Big Brother surveillance, and the abuses they allow - several cases of police officers using Flock's technology to stalk the comings and goings of ex-girlfriends or other women they have no business surveilling. It's enough to want any reasonable person (which I consider myself to be) consider Flock or any mass-surveillance technology a net evil, and want to ban it altogether.

Then I come across a missing persons poster. These implore me to help provide information as to this person's whereabouts - me, with a limited field of vision, imperfect recall, and limited hours on the streets am supposed to help track down what happened to the missing person? I'm especially sensitive about these matters when the missing person is a minor with special needs. Cameras don't have my limitations. In fact, Flock claims to have found/reunited over 1000 missing people with their technology.

I'm going to posit that the technology itself doesn't have to be bad, but serious controls as to accesses the (big) data provided have to be implemented; e.g. no access or broad searches without a warrant.

So now I'm imagining a city- or community-wide network, providing broadband access, with broadband applications (including video security) running over the top of it. Accessing the data that it provides is strictly governed, and needs that would justify it include:

  • Immediate emergency safety

  • Anonymized data trends that inform city planning

Flock cameras use cellular networks as backhaul, according to my research. Right now Canada is looking at implementing a Public Safety Broadband Network (similar to the US' FirstNet), to give public safety agencies a reliable broadband network for data-intensive applications (like video and voice). While a WiFi Network wouldn't meet the reliability and mission-critical criteria that public safety agencies demand, if they were able to access it and preempt other traffic, I'll claim that an imperfect solution today is better than a perfect one at an indeterminate point in the future.