Keys to the City

[Image: The "keys to the city," via the New York Post. One key description reads: "What you could do: Take over the subways"].

A set of "master keys" to the infrastructure of New York City popped up on eBay last month, leaving many public commentators and city officials alike concerned for the safety of the metropolis.

It's "what a terrorist might call a dream come true," the New York Post suggests:

The set consists of five keys that would allow control of virtually any elevator in the city, could knock out power to municipal buildings and skyscrapers, darken city streets, open subway gates and some firehouse doors and provide full access to 1 World Trade Center and other construction sites.

After the keys were sold to a buyer who was actually "an undercover Post reporter," an investigation found that "most of the keys did, in fact, work." And they can do quite a lot:

The keys include the all-purpose “1620,” a master firefighter key that with one turn could trap thousands of people in a skyscraper by sending all the elevators to the lobby and out of service, according to two FDNY sources. And it works for buildings across the city.
That key also allows one to open locked subway entrances, gain entry to many firehouses and get into boxes at construction jobs that house additional keys to all areas of the site.
The ring sold to The Post has two keys used by official city electricians that would allow access to street lamps, along with the basement circuit-breaker boxes of just about any large building.

One thing I mentioned last month during the "Applied Topology" lecture at UC-Berkeley was the potential to produce 3D replicas of keys based simply upon visual documentation of the target key set.

For instance, research by Tamara Denning, Cynthia Matuszek, Karl Koscher, Joshua R. Smith, and Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington—see this PDF—has suggested that "household robots," in their words, could be used someday to commit home burglary.

In a situation as notable for its comedic potential as for its criminal ingenuity, belligerent hackers could thus wirelessly take control of your "household robots"—Denning's group chose the Robosapien, Rovio, and Spykee for testing—and surreptitiously gain access to information about your house. Room layout, location of motion sensors, whether or not a certain door has been locked at night, if anyone is even home, or, more directly, where certain things, like jewels, cash, pharmaceuticals, or a handgun, might be kept.

The most plausible scenario the team came up with involved something like a robot still-life, an American Gothic with keys: the Robosapien would simply grab ahold of your house keys and the Rovio would then sit there filming it.

[Images: From research by Tamara Denning, Cynthia Matuszek, Karl Koscher, Joshua R. Smith, and Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington].

This cinematographic duo would thus pose there looking at each other, under the control of hackers huddling in a van somewhere wearing Stadium Pals, long enough that they could 3D-map the keys from the ensuing image feed and then have accurate copies produced. Thus would your house be robbed by robot.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: surely someone could now produce, given enough dedication and perhaps a metal-based 3D printer, hypothetical copies of these "keys to the city" and shortly find him- or herself clicking open locked subway doors, turning off streetlights, stalling elevators, even redirecting construction site equipment to produce off-kilter towers in midtown? Using nothing more than a few glimpses of the keys found online and some late-night field-testing, the keys are cloned and begin to proliferate.

After all, this is now the era of 3D-printed crime: 3D-printed machine guns, 3D-printed bomb triggers, 3D-printed burglar's tools.

3D-printed lock-picking kits, with near-universal access to the city, from elevators to subway cars to private apartments, can only be, worryingly, a few years away.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the link!)

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Garage Warfare

Going back through dozens and dozens of links saved over the past few months, I rediscovered two quick news items I thought I'd post together, both of which involve automatic garage doors.

1) The U.S. Navy has been using a radio signal that seems to interfere with garage door openers in suburban Connecticut:

U.S. Navy officials have acknowledged on Monday that a radio signal being transmitted out of the Groton Submarine Base is likely the cause behind the residents’ garage-door woes. The signal is part of the Enterprise Land Mobile Radio (ELMR) system, which is used by the military to coordinate responses with civil emergency workers, said Chris Zendan, a spokesman for the submarine base in Groton.

In short, it seems that frequencies used by remote-control garage door openers overlap with signals put back into service after 9/11 for communicating during civil emergencies.

However, putting this into the context of several recent articles about the accelerating pace of "cyber-attacks" on U.S. infrastructure—that is, "the pace at which America’s electricity grids, water supplies, computer and cellphone networks and other infrastructure are coming under attack," in the words of the New York Times—as well as news that New York City's elevators and boilers are now seen as potential targets for cyberwarfare (hackers "could increase the speed of how elevators go up or down," perhaps crashing them to the bottom of the shaft), the idea of garage doors being hacked by radio signals emanating from the ocean by belligerent foreign powers takes on the air of, say, Red Dawn as remade by Bob Vila. Or it could be the plot of a bizarre future heist film: a sleepy coastal town in Oregon, its every house and building, robbed by submarine.

Just two weeks ago, meanwhile, over-heated headlines proclaimed that "Chinese hackers have control of U.S. power grid," but perhaps we can imagine, instead, a far less threatening scenario, in which Chinese hackers manage to take control of every garage door in a small town in southern Georgia. Indescribably ignorant politicians proclaim it the work of Satan—but it's just distant teenage poltergeists, high-fiving each other over cans of Diet Coke and trapping families in their 4-car garages.

2) Former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan had back surgery a while back—and the resulting spinal implant has given him the power to open garage doors from afar. In an otherwise idiotic article that explains how "Hulk Hogan Has Battery Powered Back," one of the wrestler's friends jokes that, "When he's walking down a small neighborhood [sic] he opens every garage door on the street!" Talk about the prosthetic imaginary.

[Image: If Hulk Hogan pushes real hard, his garage door opens].

Next year's headline: Chinese hackers in control of Hulk Hogan's back open every garage door in Connecticut.

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Version Control

As a brief follow-up to the Lost Rivers trailer—and the full film debuts in less than one week's time, on Wednesday, October 10th, at Toronto's "Planet In Focus" Environmental Film Festival—it's worth taking a look at a recent post on the excellent blog L.A. As Subject.

[Image: Older versions of Los Angeles: "1943 view of the Macy Street viaduct over the Arroyo de las Pasas' former route. Today, the bridge carries Cesar Chavez Avenue over the Interstate 10 freeway." Photo and caption via L.A. As Subject].

There, we read that the older, wilder geography of Southern California still breaks through the surface of the city—including lost rivers. Tracking down these older versions of Los Angeles takes research: "Archives have played a key role in rediscovering another forgotten feature of L.A.'s wild geography: the extensive system of creeks, arroyos, and other watercourses that once flowed through present-day Los Angeles."

Fed by springs issuing from vast underground aquifers, storm runoff, or some combination of the two, these streams once crisscrossed the entire city. Today, many of them have suffered a similar fate as the Los Angeles River: paved over, buried and converted into storm drains, or eliminated altogether. Most Angelenos walk or drive over them every day without realizing it.

The post's author, Nathan Masters, points us toward L.A. Creek Freak, a blog by Jessica Hall. "By studying the maps, photographs, and other documents preserved in the region's archives," Masters writes, "Hall has reconstructed a surprisingly wet L.A. landscape, braided with dozens of streams that now lie buried beneath streets and parking lots."

[Image: A satellite view "overlaid with L.A.'s historical streams and wetlands. Courtesy of Jessica Hall, L.A. Creek Freak," via L.A. As Subject].

Masters also links to a great old profile of Hall's work on L.A. Weekly, first pointed out to me by Nicola Twilley a few years ago, during a conversation about the Tyburn Angling Society, that contains this awesome image:

“Do you know why there’s sometimes fog at the intersection of Beverly and Rossmore?” Hall asks. “It’s because there’s a perennial creek that runs through the country club there,” she says. “It goes underground beneath Beverly, and comes up again on the other side.”

Urban fog banks as tracking markers for underground streams!

As usual, L.A. As Subject includes some great archival photographs with their post, so it is worth clicking through—and scrolling down—to see them.

While you're there, however, don't miss their look at "why L.A. has clashing street grids," the history of Chavez Ravine, or—one of my personal favorites—an incredible look at the "lost hills of Los Angeles" (previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here). The center of the city is a history of terrain deformation, advanced topology in built form, as tunnels turn to streets because the hills they were cut through no longer exist.

(You can follow L.A. As Subject on Twitter).

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Gossamer Systems

[Image: Via A456].

I'm intrigued by the architectural possibilities of "gossamer systems," a term referring to the design of ultra-lightweight—or perhaps ultra-thin is more accurate—systems for spacecraft design.

According to a recent online course description from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, "an evolving trend in spacecraft is to exploit very small (micro- and nano-sats) or very large (solar sails, antenna, etc.) configurations. In either case, success will depend greatly on [the use] of ultra-lightweight technology, i.e., 'gossamer systems technology.' Areal densities of less than 1 kg/m2 (perhaps even down to 1 g/m2!) will need to be achieved."

[Image: Via A456].

That exclamation point, present in the original text, is well-justified: structures that weigh one gram per square-meter! While obvious comparisons can be made here with super-light spaceframes and other widely familiar engineering achievements of the past few decades, pushing terrestrial structures toward this seemingly impossible vanishing point—buildings so thin and ethereal, they are, in a sense, no longer even physically present—would be a fascinating challenge for a structures class somewhere.

In fact, let's just make it an actual design challenge, architecture's equivalent of the X Prize: combining origami, aerodynamism, spacecraft physics, materials science, athletic equipment, and more, design and fabricate a building the size of Manhattan that weighs less than one pound. Go!

(Gossamer Systems link spotted by Alice Gorman).

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Lost Rivers

The trailer for Lost Rivers has been released, a film I've been looking forward to seeing since meeting Katarina Soukup, the film's producer, way back in the summer of 2010.



"Once upon a time, in almost every city," the film states, "many rivers flowed. Why did they disappear? How? And could we see them again? This documentary tries to find answers by meeting visionary urban thinkers, activists and artists from around the world."

I'm not sure what the schedule is for forthcoming screenings of the final feature, but you can follow the film on Twitter to stay updated.

(From the archives: Drains of Canada: An Interview with Michael Cook).

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The city and its citadels

[Images: Covers from old copies of Fort, the Fortress Study Group member publication].

While writing the previous post and looking for a link to FSG, Robin Sloan's publisher, a fortuitous auto-fill in my browser bar led me to the Fortress Study Group, the "international society of artillery fortification and military architecture." Their site includes a helpful series of PDFs on the architectural history of fortification, or "the development of fortifications designed to resist artillery," including this long look back at the group's most recent "study tour" (similar in many ways to the Fortifications Tour we explored on BLDGBLOG long ago).

Of particular note: through their site, we learn that a symposium called Fortifications at Risk 2 will be held in March 2013 at the National Army Museum in London, discussing "how derelict fortifications may be preserved and re-used" for future purposes. You can register here.

Briefly, I'm reminded of historian Steven Jaffe's fascinating book, New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham, in which Jaffe details the construction of coastal forts and artillery batteries throughout New York City, from colonial times to the Civil War (and beyond).

In particular, Jaffe cites the work of inaugural West Point superintendent Jonathan Williams, "mastermind of New York's harbor fortifications," in Jaffe's words, who designed and proposed "a network of new fortifications placed strategically" at the marine entrances to the city during the War of 1812. His designs included "stone and mortar citadels" peppering the shores and "a line of massive stone blocks" that would be dropped into the harbor waters, forming a kind of submerged gate topped with barrier chains and artillery, further closed in places by the hulls of deliberately scuttled ships, seemingly an architecture equal parts wreckage and military geometry.

The majority of Williams's defensive plan was never built; however, Castle Williams on Governors Island, which we boated past last week as part of Dredgefest 2012, is still there in its circular ruin, not far from the massive unmarked ventilation structure for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel which roars beneath the harbor waters.

An unbuilt fortifications tour of New York City is thus quite an interesting prospect.

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24-hour bookstore people

The release of Robin Sloan's first novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, with its glow-in-the-dark book jacket, kicks off with a 24-hour launch party tonight at New York's Center for Fiction, featuring a long series of interviews, conversations, and guests.

Nicola Twilley and I will be some of the many people participating; we'll be talking to Robin about, in his words, "vast storage spaces" for everything from books and national gold reserves to strategic food stockpiles and nuclear waste, riffing off of the coded book-spine library patterns and semi-autonomous warehouse memory systems found in Robin's book. That particular conversation takes place tonight at midnight.

But tune in to the whole 24-hour interview marathon, as it will be livestreamed, or stop by in person to meet Robin and check it all out. Other speakers include Steven Johnson, Jace Clayton, Hilary Mason, Alexis Madrigal, Jenna Wortham, Jason Kottke, and many more. See the Center for Fiction's website for more details.

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