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Fighting Street Gangs With Military Counter-Insurgency Software
An anonymous reader writes "After every major war, technology developed for a conflict gets applied to civilian life. The BBC recently reported that Army researchers have adapted advanced social network analysis software used for counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan to help law enforcement analyze the behavior of street gangs. With the growing problem of gang violence in major U.S. cities, this may provide a fresh perspective. 'Orca can figure out the likely affiliations of individuals who will not admit to being members of any specific gang, as well as the sub-structure of gangs – the gang ecosystem – and the identities of those who tend to dictate the behaviour of others. ... Having some knowledge of the links and affiliations between different gangs can highlight dangers that call for more focused policing. If a gang perpetrates some violent action on a rival gang, police will often monitor the rival gang more closely because of the likelihood of retaliation. But gangs know this, and so the rivals might instead ask an allied gang to carry out a reprisal. Understanding such alliances helps the police stay a step ahead.' The question is: will it work?"
when gang members are identified, eliminate them. Simple and fully effective. let their worthless parents cry about how they were turning their life around blah blah blah.
give them jobs, families and a hope for the future instead of absolute poverty and a 'nothing to lose' life style. But turning military tactics against a sizable portion of our populace works too I guess.
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The question is: will it work?
First; No. Technology doesn't fix social problems, it changes them. Take away guns and people use knives. Take away knives and they use big rocks. And so on. It's the same with any technology, for any social behavior. You can't fix relationships with technology, and fundamentally, all social problems can be expressed in relational pairings.
That said, the better question is -- are we willing to allow the government to change its relationship with us, the citizens, and if so, what will be the new boundaries for such a change? There must be things that are in and out of bounds -- and there needs to be more discussion than is happening now. Otherwise, we're going to wakeup one day and find that we're all wearing the Emperor's clothes, not just with the government, but with each other as well!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Just one more piece of evidence showing how our government is at war with its citizens.
Problem solved
holy fuck, this kind of "story" is such an insult to my intelligence, i dont know where to begin.
Just saying.
We all know just what a swimmingly swell job Afghanistan and Iraq turned out to be. In fact, the "Arabian spring" and general instability is a result of the warring that's been going on over a decade now. And it shows no signs of cooling down.
I for me think this analysis software idea is nice as another spendy chunk of fancy tech, that does about the same as all the other fancy chunks of tech: Disappointingly little.
Because, you know, the best-funded military in the world plus umpteen developed-world allies have been at it for how many years exactly now? and still a bunch of basic cheap rifle-waving robe-wearing medieval-minded sand dwellers are keeping them beholden to the situation they themselves created. Until they're buggering off, and then the sand dwellers will saunter in and take over at leisure. Stocking up on burkas is the safe bet here.
In that sense deploying Army software against domestic city ghettos is yet another attempt to solve a people problem with technology. Which does not work. Which never works. But surely, it got deployed in two deserts, hey, it will work even better in an urban setting, right?
It sounds like they're trying to go to war to their own citizens this time. Instead of, you know, going in and fixing the social fabric in the only fashion that works: Brass-backed grassroots fashion. But that would look like actually having to work at it, and with far less fancy, spendy tech-y toys to play with.
So playing with toys it is. How predictable--this is what Americans do. It may seem to work, but ultimately, it cannot. And so it will not. But it sure will look nice on a few someones their resume.
Didn't they already do this on Numbers a few years ago?
"The Ebenezer Scrooge of all holidays"
With the growing problem of gang violence in major U.S. cities...
This is a friendly reminder that violent crime in the U.S. has dropped every year for the past ten years, and in fact we're at the end of a fairly sustained 20-year drop in crime.
This is what the NSA is doing to all of us.
Did this system eliminate the presence of terrorists? If not, then perhaps we should be spending more time and energy on solving the problems rather than the symptoms.
This should be easy.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
. . .using the fear of street gangs to rake in military-grade toys and funds.
I know you're trolling, but hey, the nonsense you spew is in the backs of people's minds for real. It's a 'Narrative'. A falsehood told to workers to make us fight amongst ourselves while the 1% laugh all the way to the bank with our time and money.
Start by googling the phrase 'working poor'. Then try to get on food stamps if you earn any amount over the poverty line. If you're single, try to get free health care. Won't happen.
And the meat packing plants are happy to hire you. Oh wait, you're a citizen? You can sue us if our dull knifes cause you to lose a finger? You want a steady food supply and health care for your kids? $4/hr isn't enough? 60 hours a week is a bit much? You want overtime? Sorry, you're just not what we're looking for.
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The US military will provide a baseline. Successful "affiliations" (Read: Gangs) Will adapt and overcome. Anywhere from 1 to several to many will develop a "base instinct" and a portion of those will wind up serving our country, in one of the several branches, whether or not they are colored as "Military" because its the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, or other Nun-such.
This isn't stating that the Military and the supporting organizations are "good" or "Bad", it's recognizing that this is a viable recruiting method, and it will have results that are looked upon as positive. Folks with talent get recruited.
If you are going to be successful for the long-term, you look for talent, and adapt that talent any way you can. Ironic isn't it, that Google walks away from one thing. http://mashable.com/2013/06/20/google-stopped-asking-brainteasers/
Makes you wonder what they moved on to?
"Work is the curse of the drinking class" Oscar Wilde
I have to wonder why people are so anti-government, that they live with the idea that while they themselves make a net contribution to society, there are plenty of people who simply lack the ability to manage their own chaotic lives and make everyone else's lives hell.
The libertarian conceit of the middle class, is that everyone else is just as clever, motivated, drug-free and mentally healthy as them, and that the useless are somehow "morally inferior" to their betters. Worse, this conceit goes as far as blaming the useless amongst us, saying they deserve to be dead or rot in jail.
One day, we'll have something between jails (for rehabilitation of criminals) and open society, where people who are too stupid and useless to manage their own chaotic lives can live reasonably well under a highly controlled environment where they can be made to do something useful with their lives and have structure imposed upon them until they can prove that they can properly exercise the rights and responsibilites of citizenship. This may include being compelled to train and work (for pay), and also involve drug rehab, and losing their automatic right to have children.
The "trash" (as people who say) who spawn kids who join gangs belong in sheltered facilities, not on the street.
Next step is to send them drones, first for surveillance, then with weapons. Once accepted, target other groups.
One of the lessons learned by the military in Iraq was that investigation and interrogation sometimes trumps raw muscle. So the intelligence teams started studying police procedures and thinking like police investigators to establish who was linked to who (in Iraq its usually cousins/tribesmen or people from the same village). They also studied how the French conducted the Battle of Algiers (which the French won despite losing the overall war in Algeria). The French had discovered that figuring out who specifically was running an operation and kicking down his one door was far more effective than randomly kicking down 100 doors . So the French started extensively interrogating (unfortunately with torture) prisoners to figure out who were members of different cells. The French started keeping books of rap-sheets, family trees, organization charts, and mug shots of all suspected insurgents in the city. Once they had a good grasp on a cell's organization, then they merely had to pick them up. The US military learned some of these lessons. For example, if they found finger prints on IED fragments, and the prints matched a guy from the town of Ramadi, then the first place to look for him would be the local house of his cousin who was also originally from Ramadi.
Social network analysis software used for counter-insurgencies sounds like something from Vietnam 2.0 thinking.
We now really understand the physical and financial drug trail into our country and have the faces for all middle and high ranking professional networks.
Release the vans for massive dawn raids.
As the above is been planned, funded, rolled out every corrupt cop, fed, lawyer, journalist and judge is going to be setting up urgent meetings.
Ideas about voice prints, facial recognition, internet hacking, banking, aircraft been tracked, total ongoing surveillance teams are not new.
Once sub sections of criminal network are taken down the internal questions start.
Was it the bank, the phone, a new deal, a new face, an old face, a map from a new gunshot detection systems induced a clean outside task force?
If digital networks become useless, all meetings are face to face, if the face is new and the slag/recommendation out by weeks or months questions are asked.
The UK tried the GCHQ via court friendly new departments to offer world wide tracking, quality decryption and other innovative services well outside spy cases.
Corrupt cops and corrupt press quickly understood the changes and efforts by the clandestine services would have been exposed or become near useless.
Cross examination in open court gets interesting when the 'expert' has no past or academic standing yet the court seems to 'just' trust them as no other expert would be.
The other option is to close the court but that gets every corrupt cop, fed, lawyer, journalist running to every journalist who ever wrote about 'freedoms' with the story of the decade in near print ready draft form.
The UK used a gigantic grid of blockhouses in the Boer War ~1901 and camps to 'win'.
An old method but to run that on your domestic population is rather final. Your police have to be run as undercover agents or in SWAT convoys.
If advancement is only by number of raids, arrests and frisks the only win is for the people selling the tracking software.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I quoted a completely true fact as example, could have used other groups but only wished to point out that not being lazy has lasting benefits. but this bothers you and you spout off with "positive stereotypes are harmful"........no, a generally true (in the statistical sense) statement is not a stereotype, it is useful information about reality and might be instructional on how to live life.
you then make irrelevant statement about gangs and lowlifes being of every extraction. the point is that some subcultures have an abundance of them, much more than average percent of them in population. we have subcultures that value laziness, sponging off others, having no regard for fellow man or property, and that in fact commit crimes mostly against others in the same subculture.
In any given situation, identify the niggers and spics. Then eliminate them. By the way, props to Zimmerman. He did his part in keeping America beautiful. Trayvon go bye-bye.
whose targets are citizens rather than government personnel or buildings. Frankly, this is one case where I'd say the use of this technology is appropriate and overdue.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This is the most insightful thing I've read on /., well ever...
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I have no idea what the hell you just said. Please restate your argument in English with proper grammar and spelling.
What the hell are you trying to say? This is like the third rant in this thread that has been just so ranty and unorganized that I can't tell what you are trying to claim. Please rewrite this in English with proper grammar and spelling and then we'll talk.
when gang members are identified, eliminate them
But what if the identification was wrong?
Just look at how the profiling is done. From TFA:-
We have no idea what rules are applied, or the weight given to them. The could take into consideration, for example, factors like skin color, race, language spoken, location of birth, marital status, family pedigree etc. I'm certain that the police are already taking some of these factors into consideration in deciding who to pay special attention to. The difference is that this technology is impersonal and can be misused to provide a veneer of legitimacy to otherwise abusive acts , e.g. "I'm shaking him down because the program says he is a gang member".
My point is that people who are born into a gang dominated environment already are severely disadvantaged, and it sits ill that someone who may be innocent may be subjected to undeserved police action/scrutiny simply because he is marked as a criminal by some program.
give them jobs, families and a hope for the future instead of absolute poverty and a 'nothing to lose' life style.
Wow, how exactly do you do this? It's an example of something easy to say, but hard if not impossible to implement.
Ooh... ooh... I know this one! Teacher, pick me!!!
Start by increasing business opportunities in this country. Businesses start from innovation on infrastructure, so start by improving these.
A national internet and phone service that's fast and cheap. This is trivial to accomplish, just fix the maximum price that the telcos/providers can charge for usage and mandate that there can be no other restrictions. If you choose the price right, the telcos would make the same amount of money under the new rule... but now to make more profit they have to compete for coverage and price. (No early termination fees, no access fees, no roaming charges, choose provider at the time of phone call.)
National health care. Healthy people are happier and less likely to revolt, are less likely to turn to crime, are less likely to be bankrupt from health care bills. This is easy to implement - just copy one of the existing better systems, such as Canada or UK.
Repeal drug laws, get rid of the DEA, put 1/10 the money into education and treatment. (Education and treatment are more effective anyway.) Reduce our prison population by pardoning and/or paroling all non-violent drug offenders. Retroactively downgrade their offense to non-felony, so that they can get jobs. Do this in a graduated way, so as not to raise unemployment.
Revamp patent and copyright law so that creators can profit from and protect their works by starting businesses.
Free schooling through advanced degree for citizens (like Finland). An educated population is more likely to be innovative and take advantage of opportunities. Get rid of H1B visas altogether.
Revamp the tax code so that all businesses pay the same proportional tax with no exceptions. When big corps such as GE pay no taxes it's harder for people to start new businesses. Remove the personal income tax altogether and get revenue from businesses and economic growth (by printing more money, to keep inflation down). Keep inflation a close to zero as possible, so that people can save for big purchases instead of going into debt.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Government has to stop coddling special interests and start benefiting the general population, or else deal with an angry, armed revolt.
If a gang perpetrates some violent action on a rival gang, police will often monitor the rival gang more closely because of the likelihood of retaliation. But gangs know this, and so the rivals might instead ask an allied gang to carry out a reprisal.
The better solution is, of course, to close monitor everyone, including the rival gang, their allied gangs, unrelated gangs, their mothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, anyone they meet, or call or didn't call, etc. If you monitor everybody, you won't miss a thing.
After all, wholesale monitoring it has already been implemented and running, why not use the data collected, right? RIGHT??
Yeah, gangs are partly about violence, but a lot of that is also about money, specifically the money they make selling black-market drugs. Legalize marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and you've pulled the financial rug out from under them. They'll find better things to do.
Bill Stewart
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Here come the drones, spy satellites, secret surveillance cameras in your house, and a finger in your butt.
So the proposal is to use large scale data mining of "social networks" that actually means the "standard communication methods" of all "gang members".
And how do you identify "gang members" ? you got it, you do large scale data mining of everybody's communications to find out who the gang members are.
And since the "experts" are the military, you obviously use the same to do the analysis, and to enforce the "conclusions of the findings".
So the story goes this way:
a) make some killjoy conservatives happy by criminalizing drugs (once you found out that on the "dry" run based on alcohol prohibition this has the attractive side effect of creating a large structured criminal class)
b) let it simmer
c) do some propaganda, mostly with well made, adrenaline filled movies that "demonstrate" that brute force and disregard of such niceties like human rights "gives results"
d) use the pretext of the presence of the large scary criminal class to justify "more surveillance & intervention"
e) muzzle information in the name of national security forbidding to "aid terrorists"
f) finalize the implementation of bertram gross's "friendly fascism", where the disenfranchise "lower class" do not vote nor have any real economical power, and the middle class does as required out of fear of falling into the "lower class pot", and the (very small) rest enjoy the profit of the operation.
Will it make our cites as safe and peaceful and Afghanistan and Iraq? Will it be as successful here at creating desired outcomes as it was there?
Saying this sort of thing means you're talking without engaging your brain. Populist, forceful, meaningless.
Terrorism is a political vehicle, a tool to try and force others to change to further your political agenda by threatening with a breakdown of society. Gangs do have their own inter- and intra gang politics, but they view, say, the police as just another really big gang. It's much more about belonging and safety in numbers, and as such a sign of breakdown of the social fabric, an attempt at patching over a broken one, if you will. To say that the one is the other is to confuse cause and effect.
Things written on paper trump thinking every time!
The attitude of some to the Constitution is no better than a cult.
Will it work? Of course it will work! It's been tried and proven by completely solving the Taliban problem in Afghanistan!
How about we use such tactics to WIN the war on drugs. The worst of the gangs are part of the drug trade, but as can be seen by fast and furious the US is not trying to stop the drug traffic, it's trying to regulate it. This is not just my opinion, it was recently backed up by a high ranking cartel member that's been captured. Then there was the kid in Ohio arrested for supplying pot to 3 schools - he stood out because he has "really good" home grown stuff instead of the stuff from Mexico. Had he used a proper source, he'd probably still be on the streets today. Then there is the time the fentinol was getting into the heroin supply and killing some users - they marched into Mexico and put a stop - to the tainting of the heroin. The fact that this technology now exists and is NOT being used to stop real problems is telling. The first place it should be used is in the government itself to root out corruption and cronyism. But no, we'll use it to put kids into the corporate prison system instead.
Not to say I'm 100% for this, or that I don't see potential downsides. Why don't we declare the gangs and cartels the terrorist orginizations they are and go after them with the full force of the NG and the police? Obviously the active duty Military can't be involved here, but the problem is getting so bad that something drastic needs to be done. No one should feel like they need to join a gang to stay safe.
get rid of the war on drugs and a substantial amount of revenue for gangs disappears.
But that doesn't buy you swat gear and armored vehicles.
I was struck by this particular bit in the summary:
With the growing problem of gang violence in major U.S. cities...
Wait a sec. Weren't they saying the Crips and Bloods were a growing problem back in the late 80s/early 90s?
Funny how the same record gets played over and over. I'd wager the amount of gang violence has remained about the same, and in relation to a growing population i.e. per capita, has actually shrunk.
businesses responded by buying laws that let them bring in refugees for cheap, disposable labor. That wasn't enough, so a new immigration bill is working it's way through the House right now that brings in 1 million new H1-Bs (technically 300,000, but since we don't send them home when their Visas expire it's really 1 mil) and 10 million unskilled labors.
My point is: you can't win. You can't 'not play the game'. The rich will use the gov't to their benefit and your detriment. The only question is are you going to do the same. If you don't think this is a war... well, the best kind of war is one the other side doesn't know their fighting.
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it's replacing workers at a fast pace. Sure, it slowed down a little because Chinese slave labor was cheaper than machines for a while. But that's not true anymore. Foxconn is replacing it's workforce with robots. When their done you think those people will be fed and taken care of? We barely let them live now when we've got a use for them...
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