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Police Agencies Using Software To Generate "Threat Scores" of Suspects (washingtonpost.com)
Koreantoast writes: It's no secret that governments across the globe have been taking advantage of new technologies to create stronger surveillance systems on citizens. While many have focused on the actions of intelligence agencies, local police departments continue to create more sophisticated systems as well. A recent article highlights one new system deployed by the Fresno, California police department, Intrado's Beware. The system scours police data, public records, social media, and public Internet data to provide a "threat level" of a potential suspect or residency. The software is part of a broader trend of military counterinsurgency tools and algorithms being repurposed for civil use. While these tools can help police manage actively dangerous situations, providing valuable intel when responding to calls, the analysis also raises serious civil liberties questions both in privacy (where the data comes from) and accuracy (is the data valid, was the analysis done correctly). Also worrying are the long term ramifications to such technologies: there has already been some speculation about "citizen scores," could a criminal threat score be something similar? At very least, as Matt Cagle of the ACLU noted, "there needs to be a meaningful debate... there needs to be safeguards and oversight."
Please, step into your designated cell. Your imprisonment for things you might do will begin in a second you potentially violent scumbag!
*BANG*BANG*BANG*BANG*
Sorry! We determined you were too much of a risk to our safety. You have been eliminated. Good bye!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If cities can't even ban Pit Bulls due to their known risk, I'm pretty sure this thing doesn't have legs either.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
How much do you love the Computer?
The Computer is your Friend.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Will a Wall Street thug with a suitcase of cash be scored identically as a street thug with a suitcase of crack?
it's over there, out of sight, safely guarded.
Facebook, twitter, here I come. Not having an internet persona is probably going to rank you high on this list. Also do not forget to make sure you are a registered member on a pornsite or something, having no vices at all will also stick out.
And I guess this will be my last AC posting as well. Sorry for that, I know you will miss me.
Being tagged as "socnet non-user" (as opposed to "still indeterminate") is probably not a good flag, but I'll take it.
We desperately love to disregard complex multivariables. We want one-line evaluations of job candidates, one-number GPAs to represent an education. Take a moment to imagine that you could convince everyone a "relationship/marriage compatibility score" was a sound, valid determinate and not wildly meaningless and dynamic - you'd make millions.
Anyway, my point is the headline was basically inevitable, they're as bad as everyone else, it was only waiting for enough tech and bigdata.
....and probably a lot they just don't understand.
That's what this sounds like. They have metric assloads of data, so much they don't really know what to do with it all and maybe some of it they don't know what it means. But that's what correlations are for, isn't it? To manufacture causation?
Why wouldn't you want this? It just sums up public information.
Maybe we could check ours (like getting our FICA score)?
Otherwise filing a FOIA to see your threat score will adversely affect it.
...That this approach, over time, will get them far worse results than using their own analysis.
It is virtually impossible to avoid bias in the data collection process, and a system that confirms an officers' prejudices becomes a justification. The officer may not understand they told the machine to tell them to go in guns blazing, but that's going to be the net result here guys.
but the other 35 don't rate!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
and even I think this stuff is bad ju-ju. The Extra Creditz youtube blog did a good piece on the Chinese version of this called Sesame Credit.
For those of you wondering how I can stay pro central gov't, I don't see how you can have a world without one. We're going to have a big military to protect us from other countries with big militaries. If you're going to have a big military then you better have a big, strong civilian gov't to counter balance it or you're just asking for a coup de eta. Besides, what else besides a strong central gov't can possibly stand up to a large multi-national corporation?
Think of it this way: It's like there's a box of loader firearms out in the open and somebody picked up a bunch of them and starts waving them around demanding things. Are you gonna sit there and do what they say because you might shoot your eye out or are you gonna pick up a gun and defend yourself? Yeah, you might shoot yourself (heck, it's statistically likely) but it's either that or spend the rest of eternity doing what they guy with the gun says. Gov't is that gun. It's a dangerous tool we're all stuck with...
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Their system is called having a hunch and it involves a detective with an encyclopaedic memory sitting in a room reading reports. I'm sure he'll cope just as well as the rest of us with computers taking his job, and doing it better than he ever could.
If the so-called 'authorities' don't have any data to work with, they're less likely to accuse you of 'potentially' committing crimes that you have no intention of committing in the first place.
This one is pretty easy. People who are not cops, judges, lawyers, politicians or otherwise well-connected or moneyed are DANGEROUS SUSPECTS at all times.
If you're a DANGEROUS SUSPECT it is right and proper that the police treat you as an imminent threat whenever they would like to (up to and including arrest without cause, beating you and claiming you were resisting and shooting you and claiming you were reaching for a weapon).
Now that people are waking up to the fact that we need oversight on the police, they are scrambling in every direction trying to find a way to prevent it.
This is trouble. Every algorithm contains embedded opinions. Cathy O'Neil explains it well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdCJYsKlX_Y
Look at how well Facebook, Twitter, Apple Music, and Pandora do at curation to determine which is good and which is bad in the eyes of the beholder, that the devote millions of dollars to these technologies, and note their failure rate is high.
Now imagine someone's entire quality of life being decimated because of some poorly designed algorithm rushed to meet government accountability standards.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
SELECT Name, Address FROM Public WHERE Race = 'Black';
Have gnu, will travel.
Isn't this a euphemism for profiling? We're just automating stereotypes.
Threat Score (sum of all that apply):
Dark Skin +100
Speaks language other than English or Arabic + 500
Speaks Arabic +1000
Wears funny hat or turban +700
Likes big screen TVs +100
etc...
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
That the big one. The gov's are be sold ideas that worked so well in East Germany. Updated to sell to Western nations who have very few skilled clandestine officers but have been mastered signals intelligence.
:)
A lot of nations now use mandatory government ID photo records to look back over everything the gov and private NGO's, other private groups collected on the net.
Facial recognition: Privacy advocates raise concern over 'creepy' system Government says will enhance national security (2015-09-09)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
Add in mil grade cell phone tracking and long term mapping.
The "manage actively dangerous situations" is government terms for taking away your freedom of assembly and freedom of association.
No peace protesting, anti war protesting. No questioning big agriculture, pharma. No walking around in public on public land with out an official chat down.
Journalists need to be really aware that their driving, walks to meet whistleblowers can and will be mapped every day. Slow down and talk for a few mins, sit with another phone owner, then change direction to walk away... all that shows a meeting. Your story just got discovered by a few different gov's and the mil.
With live mic gov ready cell phones that random conversation in a park or cafe is now very easy to collect.
Be aware of public and private CCTV. It all feeds into public private partnerships for realtime facial recognition and movement (gait analysis).
How to have fun with your citizen score? Download different onion routing software from varied websites with every new IP you get. Be seen in public by CCTV with a DSLR a lot. When confronted by an official ID yourself or walk back to your car to ensure your licence plate can be observed by the official.
Buy a drone and ensure the required registration number is requested and you always get a few chat downs. Be seen near or with all different types of protesters.
Walk into their gatherings with your phone on. Park your car near their events for hours.
Buy a few political books gov's and mil's like to watch for online in one order with a credit card.
Grow that gov electronic file for many random reasons. In some areas your might get a chat down request at your front door. Usually two officials with federal ID or a state based task force trying to pass working with federal funding as been a federal investigator. The chat down and card offer makes for a great "first amendment audit" video on social media further adding to your citizen score
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The police can arrest you, take your cash and don't have to give it back.
Actually, they don't even have to do the first step. They just take the money, saying they have 'probable cause' to believe that it's involved in drug trafficking.
Can't prove where the money came from? You just sold a bunch of drugs.
Can prove where the money came from? You're looking to buy drugs.
"What about my right to a trial?" - Oh, we know that would fail, so we're not charging you with anything, just your money, and because money isn't a person, it doesn't get rights!
"What about MY rights to MY property?" - Oh, you're so silly!
I don't read AC A human right
if you are using military counterinsurgency tools and algorithms on the general population, you are just preventing any change that might upset the status quo. the military industrial complex is going to cannibalize the country if shit like this continues.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
social media, and public Internet data...
So I have no - absolutely zero - "social media" presence. I also have a somewhat unusual name, but there are several other individuals in my country with the same name who ARE on social media.
Do I now get painted with the same brush? Do I adopt their reputation by default? "It's not a real common name... hmm, must be the same guy."
Prostitution Precrime just for driveling down a road
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
To the extent that it scores data the police already have, such as arrest history, etc., I think it will be more fair than the traditional subjective "the usual suspects". Cops often know who the bad guys on their beat are. They use that knowledge in a very fuzzy, subjective way.
In some cases, a cop decides that someone "seems shady" based on extremely poor "evidence". A numerical score would be much more objective and therefore more fair, representing the ACTUAL risk based on the information available.
Factoring in social media posts and connections feels pretty creepy, though. If on Facebook you're friends with some bad guys, does that actually mean police should consider you more suspicious? On the other hand, for centuries cops have noticed who hangs out with who. If you hang out with gang-bangers, and you talk like a gang-banger, you might be a gang-banger, they think. Applying actual objective numbers to that may not be as bad as it first sounds.
which is that it's pretty much inevitable. The question isn't are we going to have a big central gov't, the question is: Are you going to take part in it?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
automatic bump-up on the threat score list. Maybe ACs aren't so lame after all?
"Just out of interest, what other scenario can you think of that is reasonable?"
Not being poor?
But civil asset forfeiture is usually used against stuff not money:
The District of Columbia state prosecutor took them to court and recovered 375 cars that had been seized with no charges pressed against their owners. Gold jewelry, pearl necklaces, if its valuable its seized.
And the shakedown aspect is also clear:
"When Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson complained to the county in the hope of retrieving their savings, they got another surprise. Lynda Russell, the district attorney, told them she had warned “repeatedly” that they did not have to sign the waiver, but, if they continued to contest it, they could be indicted on felony charges. “I will contact you and give you an opportunity to turn yourself in without having an officer come to your door,” she wrote in a letter mentioning the prospect of a grand jury. Once again, their custody of the kids was threatened. Boatright and Henderson decided to fight anyway."
So give us your stuff or we try to take your kids from you.
"In August, 2007, Tenaha police pulled Morrow over for “driving too close to the white line,” and took thirty-nine hundred dollars from him. Morrow told Guillory that he was on his way to get dental work done at a Houston mall. (The arresting officers said that his “stories of travel” were inconsistent, as was his account of how much money he had; they also said they detected the “odor of burned marijuana,” although no contraband was found in the car.) Morrow, who is black, was taken to jail, where he pleaded with authorities to call his bank to see proof of his recent cash withdrawal. They declined."
“They impounded my car, and they impounded me, too,” Morrow told me, recalling the night he spent in jail. When he finally agreed to sign away his property, he was released on the side of the road with no money, no vehicle, and no phone. "
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken
There is one aspect of this that's just begging to be misunderstood by authorities that I'd like to preemptively explain to everybody. Once such a scoring system is in place, there will be some value X for which "an innocent person only has 0.1% chance of scoring higher than X" and that X will become a threshold for suspicion, a threshold that authorities think warrants special treatment and going on various lists as a likely terrorist.
This is analogous to a p-value in statistics. In this case the p-value of an innocent person scoring higher than X by chance is 0.1%.
This will instantly be translated into the completely wrong statement that "there's a 99.9% chance that a person is guilty if they score over X". Those two statements sound really really similar, but they're seriously not the same thing, and in statistics it's an error known as the base rate fallacy.
It's most easily seen by example: suppose only 5 people in a million are actual terrorists, and suppose we run one million people through our test. There are only about 5 terrorists then in our group. Using X as our threshold with its p-value of 0.1%, our scoring system identifies 1000 people as a likely terrorist. So what are the odds that one of those 1000 suspicious people is actually a terrorist? In this example 1000 people were flagged, only 5 were actually terrorists, so despite the fact that "there's only a 0.1% chance that an innocent person will score over X" there's only 0.5% that one of our people who scored over X is actually a terrorist.
Fwiw, this is largely info from http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/ which gives a great discussion of the p-value and what it does and doesn't mean.
First is that some people will end up scoring so high that the police will find themselves justified in just going after them then and there. Except that it will be a very slippery slope when they go to the judge and ask for a warrant saying that there is an 89% probability he has guns, 72% probability that he has drugs, 38% probability that there will be evidence of past crimes on his person, 47% that he will have evidence of a crime being planned, and a 24% chance that he will be harbouring a fugitive. The judge will grand the warrant even though not one shred of evidence will be presented.
The other is that if you use this to arrest a few hundred people in a bad neighbourhood it is in all likelihood that a few really nasty crimes will be discovered. They will be dissolving someone in acid or something gruesome. Except that when any news investigators ask for the records of all the innocent people rounded up, those records will be denied over "privacy issues."
But I work with ML and the horribly named big data. Often it can make interesting lists that are mostly good. Except that it will do things like suggest whoppers of terrible conclusions. On a list of major customers most likely to leave it will add a minor customer who used our company once. Why?, who knows. So my prediction is that this software will be ever more tuned to simply letting the police do what they really want to do and then be able to point to the software and say, "I was just following the computer's orders." Things like racial profiling, no knock warrants because the computer now labels everyone as basically a terrorist ready for a waco level shootout. I also suspect the police will all know how to game the system. For instance one data column might be how many times the police look the person up in the records. So they will look the person up 20 times and boom that will be enough to get a warrant.
Take drug dogs. It is part of the dog's training to "signal" when the handler wants them to. Thus any time the police want to search your car they will bring a drug dog and it will "signal" the only way it won't signal is if the handler is busy and wants to get back to his hooker girlfriend who likes dogs. Then the dog will not find anything even if the car is a mobile drug lab actively producing the final product as the dog walks around. The whole time around it is watching its handler for clues as to what to do and where to signal. If the police can create a magic legal system where a dog is used as a judge issuing search warrants, then a computer will be that much easier.
Feel free to run the scoring system against your own employees, often referred to as 'Law Enforcement Officers' without intentional irony.
Requiem for the American Dream
where at
1 lawyers\politicans
3 politician or lawyer
4 police
Do they take safety measures with public privacy (separating identaties from the main computers) so the police computers aren't cracked/hacked from a direct upload? If not, Is the code read and understood before the police upload? Potential for a Windows like scenario where said program says "search for criminal list: delete our friends records."
Could be waiting to happen. Chapo is said to spend lots on tech. Is this his start up?
This is a business opportunity!
Just start another "Service Agency" with a toll-free number website and profligate the airwaves with radio and TV ads with promises to lower your "Threat Score"!
You'll rake in the big bucks!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Should we honour these California pioneers and call it Fresnology?