A new three-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 forthcoming) from Dig Boston is looking at how IBM lured the city into trialling a new model of a “smarter city”: One that watched and listened to its citizens, seeking out suspicious activity while tracking faces and clothing, tying together tweets and hundreds of cameras in a system the current administration ultimately found no “practical value” in.

The surveillance programs echoed license plate scanning systems previously reported on by BetaBoston, except that instead of vehicles, the system was designed to “fingerprint” and track people based on their faces, ethnicity, height, and clothing. As previously reported, even well intentioned programs can easily go awry, with data being retained far longer than policy or improperly stored. It appears that this might be the case here: Even after the program was canceled, Dig Boston reports more than 50 hours of footage, and a large amount of data, from the event are still being stored.