04 ISSUE III
FEBRUARY 2025
FEBRUARY 2025
Ride or Die
Paying for your subway ride isn’t so innocent anymore. It also involuntarily ties you to the military-industrial complex.
By Mara Levi
If you are one of New York’s over four million daily subway riders, you sure will have observed the roll-out and implementation of a new payment system: One Metro New York (OMNY). It replaces the old MetroCard, which is made of plastic with a magnetic strip. The contactless payment system is usable with bank cards and any smart device and connects the physical infrastructure of the subway turnstile with the digital sphere. While the MTA claims that data collection through OMNY will allow for better platform and vehicle management, it really opens our ridership data to ruthless profit-making and surveillance. But this isn’t just about gross capitalism. It also involuntarily ties you to the military-industrial complex.
While the MetroCard was connected to an old and clunkily synchronizing system of turnstile computers, OMNY offers a wide scope and distribution of real-time data collection. Movement data – who enters the subway in what location and at what time – is already highly sensitive, allowing for identifying someone’s personal profile, especially their religious, sexual and political orientation. However, by incentivizing the use of smart devices such as credit cards, digital wallets, or wearables to buy an OMNY trip, the parties and data sharing points involved in the transaction are exacerbated. A wide array of data (i.e., device identifiers) is collected, all linked to your real name associated with you through your payment device.
While transport agencies typically practice anonymizing and aggregating individual data points, it has been proven that anonymized data is either easy to retrace or, if properly anonymized, it undermines the dataset’s usability for planning purposes, incentivizing “lighter” anonymization. Given the sensitivity of the collected data and the difficulties in obscuring it, one would hope for it to be tightly governed and protected through OMNY’s privacy policy – which we all automatically accept through using the system. However, the contrary is the case, and the policy is permeated with problematic regulations and loopholes. For example, it allows the MTA and the transportation company behind OMNY, Cubic Transportation Systems, to share the data with their affiliates and subsidiaries.
Cubic is a major player in the market of contactless fare collection, holding a 70 percent share of the global market. It is the company’s stated intention to provide for more than a seamless tap into the subway system. As early as 2017, promotional videos speak of Cubic’s “NextCity” vision to open new revenue streams. The idea is to provide one integrated system that monitors mobility and encourages users to choose specific routes over others, i.e., by giving incentives through discount deals, advertisements, and loyalty rewards.
Cubic aims to extract what Shoshanna Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus,” the data that reveals and extracts more than is required for functionally operating a technology and that extends from the digital into the physical world and ultimately instrumentalizes human behavior for modification, prediction, monetization and control. Even more worrying, Cubic works on transportation systems and military and defense technologies through its second division, Cubic Mission and Performance Solutions.
This other branch of Cubic is heavily involved in US and foreign military contracts. It supplies military and surveillance technologies, such as drone training software and video enhancement software, which has, for example, been bought by the New York Police Department (NYPD).
As if this weren’t enough, Cubic’s major shareholder, Veritas Capital, also develops the much-criticized Department of Homeland Security’s biometrics database and owns business units of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other defense contractors. All of these “affiliates” of Cubic could theoretically receive OMNY and other transportation data, thus building out their databases. More tangibly, however, surveillance plays out when looking at data sharing with government agencies such as the NYPD and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which both have a track record of massive racial profiling. It is a long-standing practice in New York City to use judicial subpoenas to request transit data from MetroCards to track criminals. Accessing mobility data and additional data gathered by OMNY, could, for example, allow these government agencies to track down undocumented immigrants, potentially conflicting with New York’s status as a sanctuary city or compromising people’s right to anonymous public association.
Many of these concerns would have seemed exaggerated or far-fetched only months ago. But the aggressive orders and actions by new US president Donald Trump and his big tech bedfellows, now in government, should let us know better. OMNY embeds our daily commute into digital surveillance with an omnipresence of tracking and data collection for both profit and control.
On a more optimistic note, rest assured that such control measures are always porous and prone to breakdown, especially in cities. They often overwhelm technology through the chaos of urban life. This is not only epitomized in the many fare evaders and turnstile jumpers in New York City, but also direct resistance by citizens. Actions include demolishing and sabotaging OMNY readers and vending machines. Ironically, these activists use the same social media that surveils them: “Bring a friend to watch your back and go to town. Smash an OMNY, cover a camera, break one of their stupid video ads. Join the Transit Liberation Front today!”
Unfortunately, technology like OMNY is all around us - just think about your daily interactions with digital-physical technology, from paying for your coffee to using Siri or Alexa and scanning your university ID. Every piece of technology really affects our world; design is policy. OMNY’s impact as a mobility observation policy tied to the military-industrial complex is far-reaching but lacks democratic legitimacy or accountability. It is granted the assumption of neutrality due to its technical and non-invasive nature. The best advice is to not buy into this narrative, or, better, to turn it upside down: “Stay aware of your surroundings, and if you see something suspicious, tell a friend and start to organize!”
Mara Levi is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.