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China Tries Its Hand At Pre-Crime (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 writes: China's effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime. The Communist Party has directed one of the country's largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur. "It's very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror," Wu Manqing, the chief engineer for the military contractor, told reporters at a conference in December. "But what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities." The program is unprecedented because there are no safeguards from privacy protection laws and minimal pushback from civil liberty advocates and companies, says Lokman Tsui, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has advised Google on freedom of expression and the Internet.
I think I may try to overthrow....
Hey get away from me!!! I didn't do anything!!!!!!
We're all guilty. Lock us up and throw away the key.
It's called DUI.
>> China Tries Its Hand At Pre-Crime
"Tries its hand"? I thought the use of secret internal police (e.g., the Stasi) charged with stamping out thought crime was covered in communism 101.
"The program is unprecedented because there are no safeguards from privacy protection laws and minimal pushback from civil liberty advocates and companies"
That's because China doesn't have privacy protection, or civil liberties.
This is China we're talking about.
Hydra!
That sounds like a different way of portraying the NSA.
Maybe China's just trying to get people to realize what those guys are doing?
Why not just talk about it and make it public? Surely it's not to hide that you're banging half the city, everyone already knows that, don't they?
No much different than of Predictive Policing, or Predictive Assessments, or Predictive Profiling, or Predictive Markets, or Datamining and Predictive Analysis and so on and so on...
You have to nip crime and terrorism in the bud.
the ideas and techniques will be exported and adopted. Governments love this tripe.
I recall reading a year or so ago about one of the founders of a tracking company. He says the sheer amount of shadow profiles on people are staggering. He said if gathering and collating this data were ever to be taken very seriously by anyone in power, the average person would be screwed. He made the obvious recommendation to buy as much as possible using cash. Why? More and more insurance and other companies are actually taking a very keen interest in what people do. Rates will go up, as an example. The pizza purchase gag online from a while back is funny, but chilling...
Ordering Pizza in the Future
What about people that own guns, like Manga, travel to "odd" (read, less traveled) places?
* For example, I could make a machine that outputs 1 if you input 0 and outputs 0 if you input 1. The inputs and outputs are both finite, and do not require any significant calculations to be done about the future, but if the future were actually knowable, then it would also be possible to provide whatever was predicted as the machine's output (a single bit) as its input (also a single bit). The result is, of course, a paradox of the same type as the halting problem, and since it is known to be possible to build a machine that outputs the opposite of its input (asm NOT instruction anyone?), the only possibility is that it is not generally possible to know the future of even a very simple deterministic system, let alone a hugely complicated system like the universe. (Note that this does not mean the universe is not deterministic, it may very well be... it only suggests that the future is not fully knowable... which interestingly also suggests that any so-called illusion of free will can be indistinguishable from what we might otherwise consider to be genuine free will, and so the illusion may as well be called free will anyways).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I agree. If not, things are headed down a bad slope. Zip up the trouble before it begins. The Chinese government, with the sheer number of people it has to deal with, cannot appear to have a chink in its armor. I know people will at first look at these measures through slanted eyes, but they will come to understand.
one trick phonys
Unless the Chinese are arresting people based on a predictive analysis model, but who haven't carried out a terrorist attack yet, it's not "pre-crime".
captcha:predicts
Not only is this not really news coming out of China, but of course they do far worse than arrest people who have not committed a crime yet - there have been reports that dissident thinkers are on occasion taken into "harmonization vans" and... uh.. "harmonized" permanently. This was over a decade ago that I was hearing such things, not to even speak of the methods they used to enforce such thought policing (methods that many senior US executives purportedly refuse to believe or accept due to religious prejudices).
This was over a decade ago. Back when the US economy was stronger and more independent.
Image a world where the main purpose of justice were rehabilitation and societal protection instead of revenge a.k.a. retribution. Would our prisons continue to be depressing, dangerous places, or would they look more like mental health facilities? Would we require a lower standard of proof to separate dangerous people from society, or would it continue to be difficult to give people the help they need and prevent them from causing harm to others? Would there any longer be a point in blacklisting a person from potential employment opportunities and thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty and crime by labeling them an ex-felon after they've been successfully rehabilitated?
If the idea of "pre-crime" sounds too much like Big Brother, maybe it's because our values are somewhat less than enlightened.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
WTF are you talking about? I could go through the drivel you wrote in your asterisk point for point and show you were it makes no sense, but I'd like to give you a chance to explain yourself first.
There are interesting questions. If a magic machine can predict a future murder with 99.9% accuracy, and has the ability to kill the murderer in advance, but not the ability to communicate it to a third party for any lesser prevention, is it good to use. Using it saves 999 lives, for every one life it costs. That's a good deal.
It gets even more interesting if you're only interested in social order, and you are predicting 1.2 bil. people's actions. Like the gas laws, actions in aggregate are predictable even if the individual ones are not.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
by doing this is the cause of such acts?
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
AC comments get piped to
hmmm.... I think ....
Hey get away from me!!! I didn't do anything!!!!!!
so... YAYYY it works!!
My point is that if you prevent a murder that was predicted to happen, then the prediction is false, one can argue that it may have hypothetically been true if you had not prevented it, but this is irrelevant... it did not happen that way, and so you cannot know with 100% certainty that the so-called prediction would have been accurate without your intervention.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Communism? Are you saying the NSA and FBI are communist organizations?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am talking about the existence of free will, and the inherent problem it presents with trying to impose actions on someone in response to something they have not yet done (since I show that any sufficiently sophisticated illusion of free will can be indistinguishable from any actual free will, and thus may as well be called the latter).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Would our prisons continue to be depressing, dangerous places, or would they look more like mental health facilities?
So, instead of failing to rehabilitate (and producing even worse crimininals), they can merely fail to heal the crazies, probably make 'em even crazier in the process (Paxil, anyone?!). Whats not to like?? Hell, the BATFE can even give 'em some guns to play with, give them the "tools" to make some politically-useful headlines... ;)
i think you've been watching too much star trek. Spock, specifically. Quite seriously.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Q: Do you plan to be a member of the Communist Party?
A: No
Q: Okay, then you're under arrest
If the idea of "pre-crime" sounds too much like Big Brother, maybe it's because our values are somewhat less than enlightened.
Or maybe, Ichijo-san, your crazy ass needs to go back to pre-War Nippon because with ideas as "progressive" as that (/sarc), you sure as hell don't need to be sharing the modern era with the rest of us!
Deterrence matters too.
He means that you can't tell a contrarian with the power to change it what his future will be.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I wonder if being a /. reader will raise your profile for being a troublemaker in such systems?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
in the US:
http://www.predpol.com/
http://www.ibm.com/software/an...
http://www.motorolasolutions.c...
http://computerstories.net/mic...
PDF from RAND:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
and so on and so on.
A pre Sybil System in the making.
I don't have a problem with this as long as it is also used on politicians and goverment members to detect if they will become corrupt and jail them before they commit any possible crime.
It's in all the Fed newsletters.
The fact that we haven't told you about doesn't mean we don't use it, just that we don't tell you you're sheep.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yes, I'm sure the only reason you don't go around raping 3 year olds is because you'd be arrested.
China is not, has not been and probably never will be anything even remotely resembling communism. Yeah, yeah, I can already see you reaching for your true Scottsman. Jeez.
Communism is the economic system where the Means of Production are owned by society at large. That's it. Really. Nothing more to it.
China is a Kleptocracy. A large scale operation that funnels wealth and power to a lucky few through organized theft (with a healthy dose of violence). They stopped pretending the people owned the means of production years ago. It was never real. Just Mao's excuse for killing folks he didn't like.
Communism has a lot of problems. Chief of which is that nobody every actually tried it. I'd argue that it's practically impossible since it involves a large transfer of wealth from the 1% of society at large, and good luck getting that to go off without a hitch.
I propose a different system for solving the same problem. Let the bastages own whatever they want and focus on regulating wealth inequality. Insure a minimum standard of living with the understanding that the 'minimum' improves over time. Oh wait, the Fins, Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists already did that.
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why doesn't China have these things? They're objectively desirable. Their elite certainly have them. If the West has these things why can't China?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The commies learned it from the Tsar's secret police.
Conrad's "Under Western Eyes" is very good fiction about the topic which makes you wonder why Tom Clancy ever bothered to write spy novels with something as good as that around.
The reason we don't do it here is because of the false positives. But if you don't really care about individual liberties, the calculation becomes a lot simpler. Do I get a better crime reduction from the yuan I invest in this than I would spending them elsewhere.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, the tools that works against terrorism are intelligence and infiltration, and I am certain China's leaders know that.
Hence I suspect this is just a posture. In other words, they are just showing the population that they take care of the problem. The advertised method is a nonsense, but the methods that make sense cannot be shown, therefore the need for something else.
Substitute "raping 3 year olds" with "arbitrary crime X", and while getting arrested may not be the only reason for some people to not do it, it can easily be a sufficient reason.
I don't think the BATFE actually gives any of those products away. It might be a more interesting society if they did but they do not currently have that in their mandate. I'm not exactly sure what kind of political changes we'd have to undergo before the BATFE is tasked with provisioning.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I'll be the first to admit it. There are a number of actions I do not take because of the consequences and the fact that they're unlawful acts. No, rape is not among those acts but there are plenty of others.
An example might be, I'd love to evacuate everyone and then blow up a building. That would be awesome! I'd love to drive through downtown Washington, DC and run over the cars parked on the side of the road. That'd be more fun than anything I'd ever done! I'd like to buy a chain-gun and use it at a county-fair shooting gallery. I'd like to blow up a variety of things and with a variety of different explosives.
Oh, I'd not want to hurt anyone by doing so. I'm not keen on putting anyone in the hospital or killing them. That doesn't mean I'd not love to blow some stuff up.
When I was a kid, we'd take empty CO2 cartridges and fill them with gunpowder and put a "Chinese" waterproof fuse in it. Then we'd use them like little grenades and blow reasonably good sized holes in the ground. And it was awesome. I'd love to do that again but I'm prohibited from doing so - it is against the law.
I could probably, given a few hours, come up with hundreds of things that I do not do, quite specifically, because they're against the law.
You're not one of those people who think that all laws are there as moral absolutes, just, or right - are you? Right now it's illegal for someone to fly a remote control helicopter within something like 50 miles of DC. Are people immoral for wanting to do so? Are they not doing so because of some higher calling or are they not doing so because it's a stupid fucking law and they don't want to suffer the consequences?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(blinks)...
Hey get away from me!!! I didn't do anything!!!!!!
"No, that's not real communism! Just because every communist state has been a filed totalitarian hellhole doesn't mean the glorious theory of communism is wrong! Real communism only exists as the perfect idea in my head! It's not communism's fault it keeps failing in real life!"
Why would this be the breaking point, rather than The Great Leap Forward (some 60 million dead), the invasion of Tibet (genocide), or the Cultural Revolution (what's a few million more?) didn't do the trick?
Communist, Terrorist, Perverted, Corrupt...
They're a *lot* of things aren't they?
German research would flag my consumer and social behaviour as indicating large suicide risk. This system could be used to reduce student and other suicide numbers in the Chinese society.
"China's effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime."
Easy. Everyone criticizing the government will be guilty of high treason later on.
China's reported goal here is to "collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur." The goal of the Patriot act was "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". They key word being "intercept", which they were seeking to achieve by large-scale monitoring of communications. I'm sure the US would have tried to collate these data to predict who is a threat.
soylentnews.org
A new fashion is going to be to have strange habits.
Since now, every young boy is going to do strange things on their daily life.
Just for fun!
It'll work this time, just trust us!
The problem with jailing someone before they commit a crime is that is intrinsically unjust. No matter how certain one might be that a crime would have otherwise occurred... by jailing them before the act, the crime would not even have been attempted. It is only right to incarcerate someone for something that *THEY ACTUALLY DID*... or at very least something that they actually attempted to do.
I totally get the idea in trying prevent the damage that crime might do with the concept of precrime, but if you knew that if you did not take any action then crime X would occur at location Y and at time Z, then rather than pre-emptively arresting the person, the just thing to do would be to get additional protections at location Y and at time Z such that any attempt that is made will be thwarted, no damage will have been done, and you can then arrest the person or people who made the attempt, as appropriate. If you prevent the crime from even being attempted by using such protective measures, then that's a win too.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
*awaken*
Hey get away from me!!! I didn't do anything!!!