Can a kiosk be punished for protesting after curfew? Starting two days ago—the day after the New York City government started imposing a curfew—LinkNYC internet kiosks all over the city started showing the names of black Americans killed by police and others, as spotted by Inverse editor Jacob Kleinman and a slew of other users on Twitter.
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"LinkNYC was not hacked," the company said on Twitter. "We posted the names on all 1,780 Link kiosks beginning on June 2 and will continue to do so."
The current names being displayed in rotation with other LinkNYC content are Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, according to Spectrum News.
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At least one kiosk also displayed a message that said "United States of America: Season Finale," but that one is a sticker and not affiliated with LinkNYC.
LinkNYC machines have become a fixture on NYC streets since their initial launch in 2016. They offer fast Wi-Fi, phone calls, USB charging, and a huge screen that displays a rotating set of paid advertising and inspirational civic content, like fun quotes about New York from famous authors and such.
LinkNYC kiosks are run by the city and CityBridge, a consortium that includes Qualcomm, a company called CIVIQ Smartscapes, and Intersection. Intersection has close ties to Google; its chairman, Dan Doctoroff, is also the CEO of Sidewalk Labs, an urban-development startup funded by Google's parent Alphabet.
The kiosks, which also contain cameras, have come under criticism from various advocates for relatively cloudy policies on privacy and data sharing, although the company says "LinkNYC does not use Wi-Fi sniffers or other sensors to track people."
Tech companies have been spinning out a string of anti-racism messages in the past few days, the most recent from Apple, in which CEO Tim Cook writes "While our laws have changed, the reality is that their protections are still not universally applied. We’ve seen progress since the America I grew up in, but it is similarly true that communities of color continue to endure discrimination and trauma."
In New York, meanwhile, riot police attacked a peaceful crowd in Brooklyn and broke up other marches citywide as they enforced the new 8 p.m. curfew at around 9 p.m., according to the New York Times. By late evening, that may have left the silent kiosks as the loudest voices on the streets continuing the protests.
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