Networks of New York

In 2005, the NYPD launched the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI), a project to tighten security specifically around Lower Manhattan similar to London’s “Ring of Steel.”

The New York City Police Department has a few thousand white, labeled surveillance cameras that, according to press reports, are part of a program called Argus. In Greek mythology, Argus was the name of a giant with one hundred eyes. Apparently, coming up with a clever name for a surveillance tool is really hard, so when searching for information about the NYPD’s Argus, one pretty quickly finds other surveillance camera products with the same name and police departments calling their new exciting initiative Argus.

ITT’s colorful history may be too voluminous of a detour within this guide (highlights include: collaboration with the Nazi party and Nazi-sympathetic governments, working with the CIA to covertly finance the 1973 coup of Chilean president Salvador Allende, being bombed by the leftist radical organization the Weather Underground for involvement in the Chilean coup, and being the subject of the Fela Kuti song “International Thief Thief”—seriously, this company was really evil).

The rationale for a sensor network to detect gunshots is essentially that many people don’t report gunfire to 911.

No word as of yet on whether SuperPier tenants Opening Ceremony or Google will incorporate the Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson aesthetic into their interior design.

The building is home to a Level 3 colocation center, ground-level expensive restaurants, 360,000 more square feet of Google offices, Möet Hennessy’s New York offices, and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Unfortunately society does not yet view Internet infrastructure with the same reverence or civic zeal as it does other tourist-worthy infrastructure like the Hoover Dam

New York’s Internet history is deeply intertwined with the history of the telegraph and the telephone, and the two buildings that best represent that history are 60 Hudson Street and 32 Avenue of the Americas, which are both located just below Canal Street in Downtown Manhattan.

While we’ll look a bit at data centers in this section, the buildings we’ll primarily focus on are often called “carrier hotels” because it’s sort of where different ISPs and network companies “check in” with one another.

In between the initial announcement of LinkNYC and the installation of its first test nodes in the East Village in winter 2015, Google (now Alphabet) subsidiary Sidewalk Labs acquired and merged two of the major companies working on LinkNYC: Titan (the franchise holder for most of the city’s existing pay phones) and Control Group (the company largely responsible for the functionality of the kiosks, best known for its work on the MTA subway system’s information touch screens).