Smart Cities have an enormous potential to improve users’ life, but they also involve a security risk, as Bruno Castro highlights in this opinion article.
By Bruno Castro (*)
As individuals, we are tendentiously more connected to our city than to our country. It’s in the city that we find the gardens and squares in our busy life, between honks, high buildings and historical monuments. Either by trotinete or electric bicycle, shared car or public transport, we move daily, in a bustle which replicates a little bit all over European Union.
Even if unconsciously, it is to the municipality that we demand for more, either because we want a better garbage collection system, either because we don’t have any more available parking spots. We ask for the City to be a services provider, and for many generations the City answered to that request. But we also know that many of those services don’t change for centuries because each change usually implies high costs, to be supported by the taxpayers.
It was thinking about this reality that the concept of Smart City started to be in the agenda. The principle is simple. To generate visible changes, with impact in the citizens’ quality of life, at a low cost – creating smart cities. Beyond efficiency, there are at stake the current concerns about the environment and, of course, the municipal political intervention. That’s how the concept of city that we have today is improving globally.
And why does it seem that the Smart City is an EU trend?
Unlike the USA, that we may consider as a community of metropolis, Europe is a community of small/medium cities. Lisbon, for example, isn’t more than an expanded city, with about 2 million inhabitants all along the metropolitan area. This number, slightly under the German 3 million (Berlin), is substantially low, when compared to its American – New York has about 9 million – and South American – São Paulo has about 15 million – or Asian congeners – Chongquing with about 30 million inhabitants. The EU, whose tissue presents population densities highly inferior, ends up working as the ideal and large-scale pilot project to put into practice the, also political, challenge of smart cities.
Naturally that, as a functional European concept, can’t miss to represent the political legacy of EU. We are talking about the environmental concerns, reinforced by the Paris Agreement, that are a very dear subject to European citizens who already understood that it isn’t affordable to continue growing without considering sustainability.
So, thinking in smart mobility is also thinking “green”. Furthermore Europe, on the contrary of USA, Russia or Asia, has much more vulnerabilities and urges much more for Security – let’s see, for example, the higher risk of terrorist attack – and that’s why a Smart Cities must, necessarily, be a city able to defend itself, mitigating insecurity phenomena, but always considering balance and respect for the democratic principles – rights, freedoms and guarantees, in particular, when it comes to privacy.
It’s specially because of this last pillar that VisionWare wanted to be part of the European Projects that, during the last years, have contributed to build Smart Cities in European Union. For VisionWare, security is a fundamental value that must be assure to all cost, except when directly colliding with the citizens rights, namely, privacy, another aspect of our work with our clients. Anyway, it is important to understand that, specially when talking about smart cities, we can’t only imagine security in a strict physical perspective: it interconnects with digital security means, VisionWare’s area of expertise, and that its reflected on the already five European projects in which we participate, three of them in the scope of FP7 and H2020, with an enormous investment from the European Commission.
These projects have been answering, and continue to do so, to the needs and concerns of the European Citizen, strengthening the great project that EU is.
As we said before, a major concern, specially in recent years, in the mind of every European Citizen, is terrorism. The video vigilance systems of the city – that already exist for several years – allow to identify, posteriori, the suspects of a crime. However – as it became evident in London Riots (2011), in a city full of cameras – information become hard to analyze by human means. In that case, 3 days of riots where equivalent to 18.000 hours of video. With a team of 24 analysts, divided in groups of 8, working alternately in shifts of 8 hours without stopping, it would be only possible to analyze 192 hours per day. Even if they worked through the weekend, without days off, it would be necessary about 3 months to analyze those 3 days.
Thinking about this and other situations, the first projects in which we participate emerged, being Smart Cities’ oriented, in a security perspective. Technology may be a great help. And if there’s something in which computers are very good at is at identifying patterns through statistic models and then remove, isolate and recognize deviation. Thus, in LASIE project, through a Big Data analyzes software – pattern analyzes, facial recognition and crime scene reconstruction – it was possible to bridge a gap that, in future scenarios, would have had different outcomes than those in London.
However, that solution was, after all, incomplete. With FORENSOR the pattern detection intelligence was in the sensors, allowing them to send an alert on the moment of an occurrence and to act preventively – presenting the concept of on the edge computing. Its practical relevance is huge. For example, it would have allowed the identification of armed people in real time or of suspicious abandoned volumes in public transports, send an alert and, consequently, gain time to evacuate civilians – in a case like Charlie Hebdo or Brussels subway attack.
The same system that detects bomb-cars, may improve the day-to-day of the city and serve not only the authorities when fighting threats but also the citizens. We are talking about identifying second line parking or roads and bridges at risk, through constant monitoring – avoiding cases like the one in Borba or the one of Morandi Bridge (Genova, Italy). And this is how we get to the project where we are currently participating since theend of 2018 (SCENE).
Looking to the future, we know that low cost Hyper-connectivity technology (5G/6G) will allow to connect a bigger number of more capable smart sensors. Hand in hand with the concept of Internet of things, we will have sensor in dustbins, park benches, public lamp bulbs, watering system, parking lots, close to houses or to areas of high fire risk. It will be possible to optimize services and detect, in time, danger and crimes. However, it’s important to understand that the proliferation of low-cost smart sensors, creating a true sensory network, raises a group of challenges, of other order. The development of these type of surveillance technologies in Europe must be done according to GDPR (and others), which means that, each moment, there must be a cost-benefit analyzes, that’s the same saying, to verify if the risk justifies the privacy restriction typical of surveillance.
That is why, for example, images captured by sensors may only consider anomalous situations.
But the future may, also, be frightening. Smart Cities have, by principle, a huge abuse potential: the same sensor used to detect assaults, may also detect when citizens are off for vacations; the ones monitoring cars, give the information of which of them are parked for longer time and, consequently, are more sensitive to be assaulted; the ones monitoring the public waters distribution system may be controlled in order to generate a break of services; and so on. These are particularly dangerous threats, hard to detect, not necessarily new, but deeply sophisticated, that demand, when thinking about smart cities, an important reflection about security and privacy: a smart reflection about the future.
Find the original article here