Publicly Usable Secure Rooms

[Jason McVetta]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 3:14 AM, Karl Semich <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to index such places, and create motion towards such
> security being accessible for all people.
>

Attempting to compile such a list would be laborious and self-defeating.
It would invite compromise of the enumerated "secure" locations.

It would be more useful to compile characteristics of "secure public
spaces", and heuristics for locating them in one's local environs.  How can
we tell - without special equipment etc - if a given space is monitored?
If we land in an unfamiliar city, how can we correctly "guess" where to
find a secure public space?

On a recent trip I discovered a little 3' x 4' nook in the outside wall of
LA's Bonaventure Hotel.  Tho adjacent to areas of high pedestrian traffic,
the nook was unspied by any cameras.  No microphones or other sensors were
visible nearby.  A blissful respite from the otherwise panoptic
surveillance of urban California.

In this case we might speculatively take the hotel's Brutalist architecture
as the heuristic for finding similar spaces.  Although sometimes described
as an aesthetically "fascist" style, Brutalist architects loved to create
little difficult-to-surveil nooks & crannies in their buildings.  Alas many
of these spaces have been fenced up by the buildings' current Centrist
owners.  For example the contemptible disfigurement
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Service_Center_(Boston)#/media/File:Government_Service_Center_Boston_P1000474.JPG>
of Boston's magnificent Government Service Center building.

What are other heuristics for finding secure less-surveilled spaces?
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