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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!!!
How much do you love the Computer?
The Computer is your Friend.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I was unaware that carrying a suitcase full of cash was usually illegal... the same cannot be said for a suitcase full of crack.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I was unaware that carrying a suitcase full of cash was usually illegal...
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Welcome to America.
Why wouldn't you want this? It just sums up public information.
Maybe we could check ours (like getting our FICA score)?
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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Only if you're suspected of being a drug dealer under asset forfeiture laws. The police can arrest you, take your cash and don't have to give it back. Some police departments do it as a matter of policy because it easier to shake down the community than ask for a tax raise to pay for new equipment.
http://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/police-seizing-cash-and-property-from-citizens-without-charges/
I remember in the 80s, rottweilers were the "dangerous dog" to avoid. my neighbor had one and it was a big ol teddy bear.
its all about the owner
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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!
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.
I came across two pit bulls tearing a German shepherd apart today... ugly mess. Pit bull owner was a 70 year old woman who was helpless. Shepherd finally got free and headed for the hills.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
We had a Brittany. He pointed all the time. It was a breed trait. Daschunds are ferocious tunnel fighters. They have breed traits of aggression. Pits were bred for generations as fighting dogs, and have breed traits. Anecdotes of individual dogs are just that. Anecdotes.
automatic bump-up on the threat score list. Maybe ACs aren't so lame after all?
I remember in the 80s, rottweilers were the "dangerous dog" to avoid. my neighbor had one and it was a big ol teddy bear. its all about the owner
That's exactly what that guy said about his Pitbull before it ate his kids.
No-one ever got killed by a Chihuahua or Pug, so maybe the breed of dog also plays a part...
"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.
No-one ever got killed by a Chihuahua or Pug, so maybe the breed of dog also plays a part...
Maybe it's the size of the dog that plays a part, regardless of breed? Small dogs bite regularly (I've been bitten many times), but because the damage is so small no one cares enough to put the dog down. Large dogs, OTOH, will get put down if they even once have a bad day.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Hey those dogs are horrible. In college I had to deal with one that was a buddy's that thought it was a fucking lap dog. If it saw someone it knew it would take off in a full bore sprint and leap into your lap. Hopefully you were sitting otherwise it would knock you on your ass and would always attempt to lick your face off. Vicious as hell, I got a number of bruises from that dog.
Seriously just I wish that dog didn't think it was a lap dog. It was one of the friendliest dogs ever but was very protective and I would frequently borrow it when working security at college and had to take someone to the crack stacks. It seems that a lot of a dog's personality has to do with the owner but there is some part genetics play in it too.
Time to offend someone