I’ve been in contact with the reporter again, and this time I get a sense that my microcelebrity precedes me and that he knows who I am. But that’s not certain. It’s just that I sent him links to my contact page and other things and he appears not to have clicked on any of them. If he already knows my name then why would he? Right? I don’t know and I wouldn’t care except that I think he should know who he is dealing with.
I should be used to this by now, waiting for a filler story to post when there are far more important things going on in New York. The CBS piece was in the works for many months.
I should start writing a postmortem for this phase of my street theater project. With crap weather likely a factor for the coming months I don’t think I could expect to get much engagement from my audience. I have no problem being out in the elements to advance my work but why bother when far fewer people will be out and around, and fewer still would have the patience or time for engagement. My work in connecting with New Yorkers does enough combat with headphones, now I’m further intercepted by earmuffs and coat hoods.
But I’ve found new possibilities since LinkNYC changed VOIP provider. Certain tricks and twitches that should not be out there are intriguing. I can block CallerID by dialing *67. That seems like the sort of feature that should not work from a public terminal. I don’t think it works from payphones but I should check up on that.
Dialing 611 connects to RingCentral’s customer service, an automated system which recognizes me as “CityBridge LLC”. Punching around the 611 space reveals that I could be nothing more than a PIN number away from disrupting or even cancelling LinkNYC’s phone service. I have no such intentions but for the love of everything, how hard would it be for a malcontent employee at Intersection to get hold of the PIN and other access codes and cancel the network’s phone service from one of these machines?
*69 is where things get weird. I’m still working on this, and will resume when the snow stops, but when I dialed *69 yesterday I heard a robot voice shout out something like “401-125-095 Nick”. The numbers I could distinguish did not add up to a full phone number, and I am probably off about “Nick”. It seemed strange but a sane explanation likely awaits. Searching for that string of numbers returns nothing useful.
I have reason to think there are turncoats at Intersection and/or its related companies. If that’s true it might mean I have cohorts from within who think my exploits are hilarious. I mean it has to be true that someone there thinks this is interesting or amusing, since no band of humans could be as humorless as Intersection appears to be at the spokesperson level.
My principle reason for thinking there are turncoats within Intersection comes from the NY1 connection, which I only discovered this week.
At about 7am on July 3, the day after this piece posted to Gothamist and the day after NY1 aired this story, NY1 aired a followup segment in which their anchorpeople spent some minutes in a sort of roundtable discussion of the matter, as if the Mr. Softee mystery was a most critical concern facing New York that day. My account of this misses details, because I never saw it myself and it is not posted anywhere on their website (as far as I can tell). But according to Aerosmith (my nickname for the only cohort I have in this project) the news anchors at NY1 took Intersection to task for its statement in response to the situation, a statement which I think attempted to make me look like a fucking asshole:
NY1 reached out to LinkNYC and officals (sic) claimed it wasn’t the work of hackers. They said, people are dialing a number that for some odd reason, plays the jingle, and they leave it on speaker. Since the first crop of these prank calls, LinkNYC has blocked the number, and added an automatic 10-minute hang-up feature.
Officials pointed out that out of the 460,000 free calls made from LinkNYC’s phone app every month, the most dialed number is the customer service line for the New York State Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card.
In a statement, they said, “We hope New Yorkers will allow their neighbors to access Links for these important services and not continue to misuse them for pranks.”
One of the anchors at NY1 took Intersection to task for implying that people were standing in line waiting to use these kiosks, but that I was somehow getting in their way and preventing them from accessing the food stamps hotline. It is one of many comments from Intersection that had me asking if people at the company even know what LinkNYC is.
Returning to the turncoat theory: At 12:50pm that day I spotted about a dozen calls coming from phone numbers that that did not belong to LinkNYC kiosks. It was easy to figure out who these calls were coming from because along with those phone numbers were the full names of individuals working at Intersection and other entities connected to the LinkNYC project, such as their public relations firm and Vonage, the company that provided the kiosks’ VOIP phone service.
I’ve never been able to think about this without shaking my head or doing a palm-to-forehead. As part of their “investigation” they picked up their phones and called the number I’d been using, as if the ice cream man was going to answer and explain everything.
They have to have known that making phone calls like that handed over not only their phone numbers but their names. Right? If I was half the asshole they seem to think I am I could have made their lives a little bit more miserable by calling and blasting Mr. Softee music into their phones. I could have done this using spoofed CallerID to make it look like I was calling from a LinkNYC kiosk.
I did no such thing.
The calls from Intersection and related companies all came in around the same time, indicating these people made their calls during a meeting or conference call to discuss strategies to squelch the Softee crisis.
The turncoat twist comes from two calls that came a few hours later. At 3:19pm a call came from the NY1 newsroom. A minute later, at 3:20pm, a call came from the cell phone of Van Tieu, the NY1 journalist whose report aired the day before.
How the hell did Van Tieu get the number? I certainly didn’t give it to her, nor did Aerosmith.
What I think has to have happened was somebody who participated in or had knowledge of that above-referenced meeting called the NY1 newsroom (212-379-3311) and gave them the number. These calls would have revealed nothing to the callers, this on account of the Magic Minute, which had shielded me from being identified on the streets and now it helped keep the mystery of my street theater alive in an unexpected way. None of the callers stayed connected for more than 30 seconds, so they heard and learned nothing about how it all works.
I know, this isn’t Watergate, but that little bit of intrigue is a curious footnote. I don’t know what it means, if someone at Intersection likes my project or if they had some other motivation for snitching the secret number to NY1.
I’ve been remembering some passing weirdnesses, trying to reconstruct the first time one of my numbers was blocked. I think it was late March or early April, well before much mention of my project had made it to social media, suggesting that someone made direct contact with Intersection or 311 to complain about the noise nuisance blaring from LinkNYC machines.
I don’t know what happened but the first time my number was blocked was the first concrete signal I picked up that the company knew something was going on. It was also the first bit of evidence to prove there was nothing much they could or would do to stop it. Blocking the numbers I used is nothing more than a game of Whack-a-Mole, since the quantity of numbers at my disposal might as well be infinite.
At first I assumed the number was blocked because it connected to a traffic pumping scheme, and that the blockage was a routine move by Vonage to avoid paying FCC-mandated termination fees. I changed my mind about this when I found that other freeconferencecall.com numbers adjacent to the one I’d been using were not blocked. They really had singled out my number.
Upon reaching this conclusion I procured a new number the next day and got back to work.
I imagined the LinkNYC surveillance cameras had been activated to monitor the kiosks scofflaws like I who were (gasp) using these kiosks in the way they were designed, to make phone calls through a loudspeaker so that everybody in the area could hear both sides of the conversation.
For a few days after the blockage I would look up at the surveillance cameras and smile, waving to say hello to anyone who might be monitoring me live from the Smart City bunker.
I did not genuinely believe such live surveillance was taking place but in case it was I wanted to at least get a laugh out of the Smart City.
Another interesting incident occurred the night of March 24, 2018, when I spotted a series of 1-minute calls from a number that traced to someone at Gotham Digital Science. GDS is a company specializing in discovering and remedying software and network vulnerabilities. This was a Saturday night, and I never saw calls from this number again, but it at least suggests that investigations into my activities might have been brewing as early as March.
Assuming GDS did work for Intersection it seems the GDS employee’s investigative acumen was not especially sharp, if calling my number from his personal cell phone is any indication. But maybe the call had nothing to do with any of this. It’s just seems odd that someone in NYC would make repeated calls to a North Dakota number and hang up after 30 or 40 seconds. I engaged this person in a sort of tit for tat, somehow (I have no idea how) causing his CallerID to make it look like he had called himself.
I also suspect that freeconferencecall.com itself was on to me for some reason. On March 2 a short call from (562) 606-3459 appeared on the call report. That number traced to an unknown T-Mobile cell phone customer. I might have written this off as a wrong number if not for the fact that the 562 area code is assigned to Long beach, California, where freeconferencecall.com is based. I called the number from Skype. The first call returned a weird echo chamber kind of sound with a faint trace of old school dial tone. Calling it a second time got me an automated voice saying to leave a voicemail, followed by word that the voicemail for this number was full. I don’t know if FCC (an ironic abbreviation for freeconferencecall.com on so many levels) had reason to flag my account but whatever or whoever made that call remains unknown to me. It seems possible that something in their system was pinged when I suddenly went from making a few calls here or there to making a couple hundred a week. I’ve been using FCC for my LinkNYC project since 2016.
Here or there the reports show calls from “Anonymous”. These were probably me calling from Skype to test if things were working but memory fails so many months later.
I also kept little or no record of the occasional tweets from others between February and the end of May. That’s too bad because my attempts to find them now reveal that more people than I expected delete their tweets. I thought I was the only detweeter out there but it looks like plenty of people use things like tweetdelete to automatically purge their tweets after some length of time. I think I might start doing that, seeing as I’m about as twitter-inept as one could be.
At 7:41 pm on September 15 a call came from “Anonymous”. Less than an hour later, at 8:24pm, a call came from Jen Carlson, Executive Editor at Gothamist.com. I saw neither of these calls until the next day, when a call report showed another unusual number. It belonged to one Jake Offenhartz, the star at Gothamist who wrote the first piece back in May. Less than 24 hours later this story posted. The call from “Anonymous” had to have come from Jason Eppink, the primary source for that story, which unintentionally reveals a security bug that had infested LinkNYC from day 1. The comment that Jason “managed to jot down a phone number from the tablet’s screen” should have raised eyebrows somewhere, since it should be impossible for anyone to tell what number someone else had called from these kiosks. I pointed this bug out to CityBridge over 2 years ago. They ignored me.
Evidently the folks at LinkNYC saw the Gothamist story. I mean, of course they did. This is an entity that is hyper-aware of its social media mentions. But they made no public comment this time. Within hours of the Gothamist posting LinkNYC blocked my number. I procured a new number and was back on the streets blasting noises and music the same day.
Most of my game has been played using FCC, but for most of April and May I used TurboBridge. That was my primary conduit for two months until the first two Gothamist pieces posted and the number was blocked. The advantage to Turbobridge over FCC was that the numbers I could use looked like local NYC numbers, not the relatively weird-looking numbers from Iowa and North Dakota. I thought this would make it less suspicious if the kiosks could be programmed to monitor activity for suspiciously large spurts of phone calls going to tiny towns in places like Ames, Iowa. Algorithmically monitoring for this kind of activity would not be as Orwellian as it might sound, since significant quantities of calls to these numbers can cost the VOIP carrier money.
During the Turbobridge time I fielded a quantity of wrong numbers, curiously enough from the same people. Wrong numbers to an NYC number from within NYC don’t surprise me but wrong numbers to North Dakota and Iowa do. That’s why the string of calls from the dude at GDS seemed suspect to me.
One of the most memorable feelings I had arose after the Vice story posted. That story’s author, in another of many tweets I can no longer find, dubbed me an “absolute genius” or something similar. That was cool but the story’s impact had me feeling the wave of awareness that was taking over the discussion: It’s just a fucking phone call.
But it also revealed that people will believe what they want to believe. Many comments in the months that followed asserted there had been a genuine breach of the LinkNYC network. Intersection’s statement was about as arrogant and holier-than-thou as any other, going so far as to brag that their network could not possibly be hacked. I wouldn’t know if it has been hacked since then, but I met with a group of ethical hackers a couple of years ago who said the network was fundamentally insecure and it had been easily breached. I don’t know if they were telling the truth but one dude in particular seemed like a straight shooter.
So where does it all go now… I don’t know but ideas are forming and research needs to be done. Up to now this is, singularly, the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever done. But it has been genuinely beautiful to me as well, and if that sounds moonbeam or flaky to anybody there then I don’t fucking care. In the future I’m thinking of more interactive possibilities, in which I broadcast sounds that people actually want to hear, not ice cream truck noise pollution that compels people to find the kill switch. If I broadcast music or spoken word that draws people to the machines I think it’s possible to draw them in just enough that they will gladly tap the screen every three minutes to keep things going. Street Radio. That’s the new genre. You’ll see groups of people gathered around the kiosks, tapping the screens, listening to what I don’t yet know.
I will say this, though: If my little shenanigan contributes to a decision to save a quantity of traditional public pay telephones in New York I will have accomplished something to be proud of. There is no reason these unproven, half-assedly designed eyesores should have been granted such broad municipal privilege, and with a long term contract given to a monopoly franchise to boot.
The randomness of it all is kind of mind boggling. The fact that the Softee jingle was playing at slo-mo speed when the bike courier heard it in May was entirely by mistake. I had heard the sound playing at half speed and my first thought was to fix it. I thought it was irritating and weird. But I let that thought settle in and thought: “Yes. Irritating and weird. I like that.” So I didn’t fix it. I remember shrugging my shoulders a bit at the “irritating and weird” conclusion.
I was using VLC media player at the time and the jingle might have been playing at half speed because I accidentally invoked a feature of the software that slows down the speed of playback. But I was also playing this sound off a computer that was as close to dead as any I’ve ever had, and as I heard it I thought the slowness of the playback was a symptom of the computer grinding to a halt. If that’s what it was then the art of it is, accidentally, simply stupendous.
Whatever caused the sound to play back at ½ speed remains something of a mystery to me. But when the first Gothamist piece posted and I saw that I had a hit I stuck with it, and I’ve injected slo-mo Softee into almost every other Machine Piece since. Give the people what they want, right?
(I call them “Machine Piece”s because I’ve overheard a number of people on the streets refer to these kiosks as “machines”.)
To make clear one point: I rarely am around to watch people’s reactions or engagements with my broadcasts. When it happens it is just incidental, meaning I am going back the way I came or else I got stuck in a pedestrian clusterfuck from which I could not escape before the noise started. To me standing around and laughing at people’s engagement with my broadcasts rudely reduces the project to more of a mere prank than I hold it to be.
But there is also a bit of a sanity check. People are not stupid. When many people encounter something like this they look around to see if they are being watched or ridiculed. I don’t do that. I wouldn’t want to deal with any consequences of someone spotting me lurking in the shadows and watching them react to this. It’s a natural for comedians and such but not for me.
So what are the chances that someone is going to encounter this in the first place, but on the first day of the ½-speed playback accident, then have the wherewithal to stop and make a video of it, then have the social media savvy to share it in such a way that Gothamist and LinkNYC are alerted to it? I mean since then I’ve seen numerous people stop and make video of the broadcasts, then they appear to be typing a message and sending the video off somewhere. But where? At first when I saw someone making video of these Machine Pieces I assumed I’d find mention of it somewhere on that Internet thing. But as far as I can tell I’ve never seen a posting from anyone I’ve encountered making these videos.
There is more discussion about this going on out there than there appears. That’s a beautiful thing to be in the discussion, invisibly.
Another chance element is how magically the Magic Minute has kept things going. It not only let me get away from the scene with virtually no chance of being associated with the noise. It also prevented the crack team of investigators at Intersection and NY1 from getting any clue to what the hell was going on here.
Alright, I’m done talking about this today. I will use this as a template for the final postmortem. There is still a lot to record but I have to do other things.
