…week of Feb 15, 2021
Welcome to my weekly letter! This week we are diving into the world of crime fighting technologies and how they may be used not only for the intended purpose. Without further ado…
Weekly Read
- Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan (Wired) – a cautionary tale happened in 2012 where a process loophole in a tech-assisted terrorist elimination procedure almost took out the wrong person.
- US Defense Intelligence Agency admits to buying citizens’ location data (The Verge) – this legal loophole allowing law enforcement accessing location data without warrant… also brought up the memory of another very similar article (Vice/Motherboard) where location data was acquired for… counterterrorism measure.
- There Are Spying Eyes Everywhere—and Now They Share a Brain (Wired) – looking through the history of ‘fusion tech’ that aggregates various intelligence data to provide predictive alarm on potential crimes. The scary part? Crime fighting may not be its only use case.
- A New Lens Technology Is Primed to Jump-Start Phone Cameras (Wired) – this new lens tech seems exciting, but in the context of surveillance and privacy, it can get a bit scary. Just imagine all the digital doorbells have these lenses and what can the captured data provide when fallen into the wrong hands. To be clear, this only signifies the importance of regulating/auditing the handling of these surveillance data.
- Can Computer Algorithms Learn to Fight Wars Ethically? (WashingtonPost.com) – This just came in as I finished editing. The article illustrates a fair struggle for the military use of algorithm based technologies: on one hand the technology still requires development as well as a strategy to address all the ethical concerns, albeit it comes with a huge risks (innocent lives, potential escalation/provokation); on the other hand it is something that all the other strong nations also been developing so you don’t want to fall behind…
Thoughts
From these articles we can start to formulate the trend of surveillance technologies in the past decade: first it emerged in the crusade of terrorist-fighting; then there were fear of terrorists on domestic land and local law enforcement leverage the tech/data; to further improve the ‘insight’ capability, additional data source, further refined by improved hardware, gets fusioned, or aggregated, together; COVID-19 and the need to render insight from location data also necessitated a test bed, where the tech providers can leverage as proof of concept to market their solutions domestically.
Fighting crimes using technologies that’s inspired by science fiction is pretty cool. Agents of law enforcement being able to quickly track down the criminal suspects’ locations and their affiliated network of people is very cool. Going further and utilizing the past pattern to predict anyone’s future location, or even [criminal] behavior? It’s super cool, but also super scary at the ‘Minority Report‘ level. Would an authorized human being still have the final say for the kill-switch? What happens when the machine makes a mistake? Or both the human and the machine mistaken? Who would know? What’s the oversight procedure on this? How does transparency work?
What will happen to “Presumption of innocence“?
Not to sound super paranoid, but consider the violence of Jan 6th and the ongoing coup in Myanmar. What if this tech falls into the hands of a military leadership who declares martial laws and uses the tech to efficiently hold control over people’s movement as well as behavior? Now we are getting into the era of ‘Big brother’ in 1984…
We are living in an era of ever-heightened innovations. In one way, the technologies improve our quality and quantity of lives, in other ways, the increased complexity along with the legacy processes also create some scary loopholes. It requires constant gartnering to ensure proper handling of data/information as well as a balanced process designed with clear ethical accountability. E.g. Skynet will need a audited, break-glass button by a designated authority chain.
Stay Tuned…
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