The Art of Monitoring New York City's Telephone Conversations

You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up. More »