Seattle’s Rubber Antennas Spark Privacy Concerns; Dark Fiber Obligations in West Virginia?
Seattle, Washington Trong Nguyen / Shutterstock.com
Also: A new California state worker survey and Cedar Rapid’s hazardous materials highway.
Here’s some of what we’ve been reading today ...
SEATTLE, Washington: They may not look like much, but gray boxes that dot utility poles near intersections across the Emerald City have gotten a new feature in the previous year: small rubber antennas. What do they do?
Crosscut explains:
The antennas are a patented design from Skywave Antennas in Huntsville, Alabama. Each is connected to a modem that casts a net of Wi-Fi across the intersection. As you approach, the signal pings not only the sensors in your car, but your phone and tablet as well. A succession of these gizmos can track your progress down the street.It’s another step in Seattle’s march to the future, a world where the street grid adapts to congestion, construction, accidents and football games in real-time. And as the city works to build a framework for vetting new technologies, struggling at times to keep pace with the speed of technology, it is also driving privacy advocate nuts.
The city says the data is anonymous and says the information gathered can’t be used track individuals or individual devices. A third-party auditor is monitoring the city’s contractors. [Crosscut]
CHARLESTON, West Virginia: It’s an interesting question: Is Frontier Communications obligated to allow a competitor to use the company’s unused “dark” fiber to expand high-speed Internet to other customers? Frontier, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail, is asking the West Virginia Public Service Commission to rule that it isn’t obligated to lease its dark fiber to Citynet. [Charleston Gazette-Mail]
SACRAMENTO, California: It’s a common complaint within ranks of public-sector workers: Performance standards might be clear and employees believe that their work matters, but “management doesn’t recognize good work or hold employees accountable for results.” Those are some of the sentiments, according to The Sacramento Bee, that many California state workers hold, as detailed in a first-of-its-kind survey of job satisfaction.
According to The Bee:
The survey is part of Brown’s effort to improve California’s state civil service system, from streamlining the hiring process to cleaning up its tangled job classification system. For example, the survey results will be used to update mandatory training for new state managers, according to Government Operations officials, improve recruiting efforts and train new hires.The push to make state government work more desirable to job-seekers and more friendly to those already employed has taken on renewed urgency, [California Government Operations Secretary Marybel] Batjer has said, because the state workforce is in the midst of generational turnover.
The anonymous survey was sent out to 5,000 California state workers this summer. About 52 percent of that group responded to the survey. [The Sacramento Bee]
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa: Sometimes, it might just surprise you how much hazardous materials travel along your local highways and rail lines. In Linn County, home to Cedar Rapids, more than 1 million gallons of flammable liquids including ammonia, pesticides, propane and chlorine pass through the area on Interstate 380 within a mile of 8,000 residents, The Gazette reports. The county commissioned a $9,000 study of the local impacts of hazardous materials to better prepare first responders for potential hazardous materials situations. [The Gazette]
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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