9-11 Urban Legacy: Cities of Bollards

“It used to be that D.C. architecture consisted of graceful Georgetown mansions, neoclassical federal buildings — and, of course, the monuments. When the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts was founded in 1910 to guide Washington’s architectural development, it reviewed designs such as those of the Lincoln Memorial and the Federal Triangle. Over the seven years I’ve served on the commission, however, an increasing amount of time is spent discussing security-improvement projects: screening facilities, hardened gatehouses, Delta barriers, perimeter fences, and seemingly endless rows of bollards. We used to mock an earlier generation that peppered the U.S. capital with Civil War generals on horseback; now I wonder what future generations will make of our architectural legacy of crash-resistant walls and blast-proof glass.”

— Wittold Rybczynski, Meyerson professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read more:

“The Blast-Proof City,” Wittold Rybczynski, Foreign Policy

“We Built DC Into an Urban Fortress After 9/11. And January 6 Proved It Was Penetrable.” Jane Recker, Washingtonian

“I Came, Eyesore, I Conquered,” Witold Rybczynski, Slate

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Greetings From Fortress Washington

The National Mall will be empty of well-wishers on Inauguration Day, but, thanks to the threats of domestic terrorists incited by Donald Trump, 25,000 National Guardsmen will join thousands of federal, local, and regional police to observe the transfer of power. More Capitol Hill photos here.

Bearing silent witness to the Inauguration: the souls of 400,000 dead Americans needlessly sacrified due to Trump’s criminal reglect.

More:

“‘I never imagined this’: Washington prepares for an inauguration under siege,” Lois Beckett and Julian Borger, The Guardian

“‘Wartime footing’: Capital draped in steel and concrete in unprecedented inauguration security operation,” Kevin Johnson, USA Today

— “Inside look at how 25,000 National Guardsmen are arriving in Washington, DC,” Luis Martinez, ABC News

“What It’s Like To Live Inside D.C.’s Militarized Security Zone,” Jenny Gathright, Carmel Delshad, Jacob Fenston, Natalie Delgadillo, and Tyrone Turner, DCist

“Sorry, Your Homeowners Insurance Might Not Cover Insurrection,” Rob Brunner, Washingtonian

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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com. More Capitol Hill photos here.

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Trump Golf: Hole-in-One for Hackers

“We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and pointed a 2-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.

A few days later, we drove through the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with the same antenna and aimed it at the clubhouse. We identified two open Wi-Fi networks that anyone could join without a password. We resisted the temptation.

We have also visited two of President Donald Trump’s other family-run retreats, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a golf club in Sterling, Virginia. Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.

The risks posed by the lax security, experts say, go well beyond simple digital snooping. Sophisticated attackers could take advantage of vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi networks to take over devices like computers or smart phones and use them to record conversations involving anyone on the premises.

“Those networks all have to be crawling with foreign intruders, not just ProPublica,” said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity, Inc., a digital security company, when we told him what we found.”

— “Any Half-Decent Hacker Could Break Into Mar-a-Lago,”  Jeff Larson and Julia Angwin, with Surya Mattu of Gizmodo, ProPublica.com

While the president travels with secure communication equipment, he tweets on an older model Android phone. And members and their guests could have their phones hacked to record conversations at the clubs.

Related:

“Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is heaven — for spies,” Darren Samuelsohn, Politico

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Trump White House: ‘Get Off the Sidewalk!’

The sidewalk in front of America’s Executive Mansion, site of centuries of political dissent, has been permanently closed by the Trump Administration. That section of Pennsylvania Avenue was closed to traffic by a reluctant Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

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Pentagon Won’t Punish ‘Pillow-Talk’ Petraeus

David Petraeus, who resigned as CIA director after revelations he’d shared classified information with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, won’t be punished any further by the Pentagon, reported the Washington Post. General Petraeus pleaded guilty to a single count of unauthorized use of classified material last year in a …, um, “sweetheart deal.” Now he won’t even be demoted and will continue to receive a four-star general’s retirement benefits, including a pension of nearly $220,000 a year.

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Drones Over Paris

Mysterious drones have flown over Paris for two nights, hovering over the Bois de Boulogne, Elysee Palace, Place de la Concorde, Les Invalides, U.S. Embassy, the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks. Reporters are having a field day speculating about the little unmanned aerial vehicles. Reporters from AJ made things even worse with their coverage, flying a camera drone over the City of Light for some POV footage before they were nabbed by panicky gendarmes.

The remote-controlled mini aircraft have been whizzing around France since October, over major roads and nuclear power plants, but these earlier drone flights were by hobbyists. It’s likely these Parisian ones were, too. Flying drones in French cities without a permit is forbidden, even in daylight, and there’s a steep fine. You can see why people would want to do it, though:

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

An employee of a Federal intelligence agency got drunk at a party and crashed his friend’s DJI Phantom aerial drone on the White House grounds. The Chinese drone manufacturer says it’s updating the quad copter‘s software to keep it out of no-fly security zones in future. Maybe what the thing really needs is a breathalyzer interlock.

Who Watches the Watchers? Thieves.

“The high-security building housing Interpol’s South Africa office has been burgled for the fifth time in three weeks.”

— “South Africa: Interpol building raided five times,” BBC News

The International Criminal Police Organization, (INTERPOL) is an intergovernmental organization with 190 member countries facilitating international police cooperation.

 “Our high-tech infrastructure of technical and operational support helps meet the growing challenges of fighting crime in the 21st century.”

— INTERPOL website

 The Pretoria office certainly inspires confidence in that.

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Your City is Watching You

“From the first known use of closed-circuit television cameras to monitor crowds in London’s Trafalgar Square during a state visit by the king and queen of Thailand in 1960, urban video surveillance has come a long way. The Brookings Institution calculates that today it would cost $300 million in storage capacity to capture a year’s worth of footage from Chongqinq’s vast camera network. But by 2020, thanks to the steady decline of cost for digital storage devices, that figure could be just $3 million per year. ‘For the first time ever,’ they warn, ‘it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.’ What’s worse is the active involvement of American firms like Cisco, which is supplying the city with network technology optimized for video transmission for an undisclosed sum.”

— “Your city is spying on you: From iPhones to cameras, you are being watched right now,” Anthony M. Townsend, Salon [links added]

More:

“Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments,” John Villasenor, Center for Technology Innovation, Brookings Institution

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Internet Surveillance

“The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.”

— “The Internet is a surveillance state,” Bruce Schneier, CNN Opinion

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