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Ed Webb

Lack of Transparency over Police Forces' Covert Use of Predictive Policing Software Rai... - 0 views

bylinetimes.com/...erns-about-human-rights-abuses

police surveillance technology US USA UK Britain policing AI

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Apr 23 - Cached
  • Currently, through the use of blanket exemption clauses – and without any clear legislative oversight – public access to information on systems that may be being used to surveil them remains opaque. Companies including Palantir, NSO Group, QuaDream, Dark Matter and Gamma Group are all exempt from disclosure under the precedent set by the police, along with another entity, Dataminr.
  • has helped police in the US monitor and break up Black Lives Matter and Muslim rights activism through social media monitoring. Dataminr software has also been used by the Ministry of Defence, Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and the Cabinet Office,
  • New research shows that, far from being a ‘neutral’ observational tool, Dataminr produces results that reflect its clients’ politics, business goals and ways of operating.
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  • teaching the software to associate certain kinds of images, text and hashtags with a ‘dangerous’ protest results in politically and racially-biased definitions of what dangerous protests look like. This is because, to make these predictions, the system has to decide whether the event resembles other previous events that were labelled ‘dangerous’ – for example, past BLM protests. 
  • When in 2016 the ACLU proved that Dataminr’s interventions were contributing to racist policing, the company was subsequently banned from granting fusion centres in the US direct access to Twitter’s API. Fusion centres are state-owned and operated facilities and serve as focal points to gather, analyse and redistribute intelligence among state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT), federal and private sector partners to detect criminal and terrorist activity.  However, US law enforcement found  a way around these limitations by continuing to receive Dataminr alerts outside of fusion centres.
  • Use of these technologies have, in the past, not been subject to public consultation and, without basic scrutiny at either a public or legislative level, there remains no solid mechanism for independent oversight of their use by law enforcement.
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