Digital Democracies: How Liberal Governments Can Adapt In The Technological Age

from the embrace-the-technology dept

At the turn of the last millennium, there was a wave of optimism surrounding new technologies and the empowerment of the modern digital citizen. A decade later, protestors across North Africa and the Middle East leveraged platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to bring down authoritarian regimes during the revolutions of the Arab Spring and it was believed these technologies would bring about a new flourishing of the worldwide liberal democratic order.

Unfortunately, the emancipatory potential of the open internet has been undermined by the latest in a long line of authoritarian regimes hijacking the technology. Autocracies adapted, with China leading the way. Towards the end of the 20th century, the CCP introduced a new political-economic model revolving around centralized rule and a controlled market economy. With this new model, China has successfully broken common political-economic orthodoxy by limiting domestic desire for democracy while maintaining a sizable middle class. A key driver of this is a “comprehensive system of state repression, bolstered by the latest digital technologies.”

China has turned applications of key technologies such as artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and data analytics to usher in a new age of digital dictatorships which can spy on its citizens, predict dissent, and censure unwanted information, increasing regime resiliency through a virtually manufactured world safe for autocracy. Many leaders of the developing world have taken advantage of this, as China has exported its model to other countries, such as Venezuela, to restrict the freedoms of the modern citizen.

As authoritarian governments increase regime resiliency by leveraging digital technologies, citizens of liberal democracies have trouble trusting these same technologies in no small part due to their exploitation by authoritarians and their agents at home and abroad. This understandable hesitancy may not only lead to a technology gap, but leave democratic institutions vulnerable to threats by these same technologies; one can simply look to Russia’s meddling attempts in recent U.S. elections. The pendulum has swung towards autocracy as digital technologies seem to have had an asymmetrical effect, bolstering authoritarian regimes as the tides turn against the previous post-Cold War wave of liberalism. Pessimists are looking backwards, opening that perhaps digital technologies are in tension with--or even pose a threat to--liberal democratic governments. This does not need to be the case.

As pointed out by Mike Masnick, when charting the future of the digital landscape, one should not automatically assume “progress towards a ‘good’ outcome is inevitable and easy,” but nor is the path towards a technological dystopia. Not all progress is good, but if we can’t move forward and can’t stay still, that leaves only one option. By rethinking how we apply these technologies, democracies around the world can find methods by which to both enhance the liberal democratic ideological values, and protect against weaknesses inherent to the political ideology, creating resilient “digital democracies'' to stand against the rising autocratic tide and reinforce their own struggling institutions.

Transparency through Technology

The main method by which democracies can enhance liberal principles is by creating more transparent governments. Transparency can act to limit the powers of government, promoting freedom and individualism, while making policy and officials more effective and accountable, respectively. An informed, educated citizenry is the cornerstone of any robust liberal democracy, and there’s no reason the technologies of the Third Industrial Revolution shouldn’t be employed in service of this goal. To do this, digital technologies should be leveraged to better illuminate the wants and needs of citizens for more informed policy making, create reliable metrics so constituents can directly measure the effects of politician’s policy decisions, and generally increase the transparency of actions of government officials, law enforcement agencies, and lobbyists.

Though digital technologies make it possible for countless data points to be gathered on individual citizens, the potential for these processes goes beyond delivering targeted ads without the development of a CCP-style social credit score. Data analysis allows for the ability to create policy options that better fit citizen’s needs, for example customizability. If insurance companies allow customers to select policy options based on their needs, why can national governments not do the same based on a person's location, age, family size, economic situation, etc? We already see this in tax policy, but with digital technologies, this can be applied more broadly. For example, the U.S. welfare state is notoriously difficult to navigate and runs on systems almost old enough to qualify for Social Security. An embrace of new developments could not only make programs more accessible to those who qualify, but more tailored to their specific needs. Policymaking can be reimagined to create options that incorporate different citizens' wants and needs, and advances in digital technologies allow for a larger, faster, and more diverse analysis of the data required to design and implement these complex solutions.

One of the main benefits of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and “big data” is the ability to uncover causal directions between different variables. By using these technologies, it will be easier to understand the direct effects of policy decisions across a number of variables. This level of transparency would create for a more informed citizen as they could see how their representatives' voting habits are directly affecting their bank accounts, the job market, their access to healthcare, etc. For example, governments could use the abundance of financial data to publish reports showcasing how specific tax laws actually affect different demographic groups, taking the guesswork out of evaluating policy decisions. The use of granular data to analyze mistakes in the designation of opportunity zones created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is one example. Digital technologies could also allow for simulations of different policy proposals to see how they might affect an individual, city, or state. Digital twin technologies created by companies like Deloitte and Dassault are already being leveraged by governments to understand how certain decisions on energy and logistics will change how cities operate. Another possible use case of these technologies is policy trials that would allow governments to study the effects of lawmaking for a given geographic area and time period, similar to how businesses run trials on different marketing plans. A “low fidelity” version of this could be seen in 2013 when the Obama administration allowed Colorado and Washington to experiment with legalizing recreational marijuana.

While reasonable steps should be taken to anonymize such information, it’s possible to publish it in a manner that’s transparent and easily digestible by the press, policy analysts, and public officials to make it harder for pie-in-the-sky policy proposals to be introduced and adopted without just taking the word of their proponents.

Lastly, digital democracy can shed light on the action of government and adjacent officials. The idea is similar to that of China’s surveillance system, but in reverse. If China can use digital technologies to monitor citizens, thereby dissuading populations from making certain choices, why can citizens not do the same to governments? Indeed the adoption of a social credit system was a deliberate, top-down choice by the CCP--not the natural evolution of “big data.” Who’s to say that a liberal democracy can’t flip the script? By capturing and sharing instances of government corruption, police abuse, and lobbying malpractice, society's officials will be dissuaded from making decisions against the public’s interests. Apart from Facebook, and Twitter, a number of specialized platforms are being deployed for that very purpose. Guatemalans have experimented with a social platform that allows users to share examples of police corruption. German made LobbyControl provides transparency on lobbying at the local and EU level. Working together, liberal democracies can share these platforms to create an international system of government accountability.

Defense through Digitization

Liberal democratic systems are not without their weaknesses. One such vulnerability is the slowness, as can be seen by America’s sedated and haphazard response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As they can be used to enhance tenets of liberal democracies, digital technologies can also protect against inherent weaknesses by accelerating government response in the face of crisis, preventing the spread of propaganda and polarization, and protecting citizen’s rights to freedom and privacy.

AI, ML, and big data can be leveraged in three key ways to help liberal democratic governments with crisis response. First before a crisis strikes, algorithms can analyze data to uncover vulnerabilities in a system before they take hold. This could have been useful in predicting the collapse of the housing market prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Once a crisis has struck, these technologies can ascertain the principal drivers of a crisis so resources can be deployed accordingly. Tools like this could have been useful during the ongoing hunger crisis in Burkina Faso, where the government may have chosen not to close key resources in the food supply chain had they realized that malnutrition has been a larger cause of death than COVID-19. Lastly, these tools can be used in the post-crisis period to understand which policies had the most beneficial impact, helping to prepare for future events, such as the next pandemic.

And again, openness with this information makes it possible for more parties to cry foul when something isn’t right. In the case of the 2008 financial crisis, there was a vocal minority sounding the alarm. Still, the talking heads and smartest guys in the room maintained a rosy view and were able to dismiss those critics as Cassandras. Open access by a larger swath of the public to warning signs from reliable sources makes it less likely that those who should know better can take a “nothing-to-see-here” line to be repeated by pundits, public intellectuals, and policymakers.

Sometimes weaknesses and vulnerabilities are driven by our own applications of technology and require course correction. In democracies across the globe, it seems as though the public is becoming more polarized. One driver of this is the ease of leveraging technology to sharpen divides in societies to subsequently weaponize public opinion. But it is not technology that is inherently at fault, but the applications of these algorithms to maximize views and profits. Studies show that a large percentage of citizens are less polarized than previously believed. Unfortunately, these moderates may choose to stay away from certain social platforms in order to avoid inflammatory media. But what if the algorithms were rewritten to prop up neutral voices rather than to spread inflammatory content? Moderates may be more willing to use these platforms, and populations would more readily see muted perspectives on an issue. By redesigning the algorithms we use to spread information, digital technologies may be able to turn the tide against tribalization, and subsequently polarization. There’s no neutral design, and the amplification of those who can bring more light than heat and turn down the temperature of online discourse more broadly deserve promotion.

As discussed in the previous section, recommendation systems operate on algorithms that we do not quite understand. These algorithms are not inherently undemocratic, but their applications can lead to unwanted side effects infringing on our freedoms and privacy. By understanding how to game these algorithmic recommendation engines, outside actors are able to create media which can influence perspectives and subsequently our decision-making process, in effect limiting our freedoms by breaking the integrity of our autonomy. What makes this even more dangerous is that we are seldom aware of this occurrence, as we scroll through videos, posts, and tweets on autopilot. A solution to this infringement on our online freedoms can be found by assessing these algorithms and redesigning them to serve the purposes we require.

Looking to privacy, a number of tools have been created that can provide noise to data, making it difficult for digital entities to uncover insights. As an example, a program on your computer could randomly jump to different websites during your downtime to prevent unwanted AI systems from making accurate recommendations based on your browsing history. Likewise, AI software can add similar noise to online pictures by changing a few pixels' colors. One could apply this noise to their Facebook or Instagram posts to prevent facial recognition software from recognizing the images, while allowing friends and family to see the pictures largely unchanged. These sorts of systems could be used in places like China to confuse digital surveillance technology. One key note to remember: if and when “digital democracies” start to appear, it is important to not cross thresholds into the authoritarian regime — the goal is to increase resiliency without further infringing on our rights to freedom and privacy through digital technologies.

Increasing Resiliency through Trust

The examples above serve as a start to the discussion of means through which democracies can become resilient through the usage of digital technologies. But “digital democracies” are not inevitable, as western liberal society has a certain mistrust towards big tech companies who are vital in driving such a transformation. In order to evolve into “digital democracies”, three main societal changes must occur.

The first is an establishing of trust between big, Western tech conglomerates and governments. In the US, mistrust of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have led some to call for a breaking up of these giants, but this is not the solution. Without these companies on our side, liberal democracies may not be able to keep up with the same advancements made by Eastern tech conglomerates such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xaiomi. Instead, governments must partner with tech firms in order to more clearly define rules and regulations, as well as responsibilities between the two groups. Without an open, non-overreaching dialogue, the situation will remain hostile, making it difficult to establish technological resiliency.

Second is the trust between governments and the general public, in regards to the usage of digital technologies. Partnerships between big tech and governments, as discussed above, may lead to greater issues, as can be seen by China’s use of big tech to create a state-controlled market and social economy. This partnership itself would also be antithetical to principles of liberalism by placing too much power in the hands of the government. Just as the media was once seen as a watchdog over governments and politicians, there must be an independent body that serves as a watchdog over governments and their use of tech. There are nonprofits, such as the Center for Humane Technology that serve to advocate for mission-focused tech development. Similar organization will be necessary to serve as a guardian between governments and the abuse of digital technologies. It is with the existence of independent bodies such as this that populations may begin to trust governments to use technologies to only further ideals of liberalism.

The last piece is to establish trust between big tech and the general public. This ties back to transparency. As stakeholders in our own data, people should have a say, or at minimum an understanding of how our information is used. But many of the new AI, ML, and data models utilized by big tech are often seen as “black boxes.” Our data goes in, and a result in the form of a product recommendation, news story, or social media post comes out, without a clear understanding of how the outcome was reached. By opening up algorithms and making them fair, accountable, and transparent, people would feel more comfortable by understanding how their data is truly acquired, assessed, and leveraged. This could be a key step in making digital technologies democratic — it would allow citizens to claim a stake in technology, just as big tech has claimed a stake in our data.

Trust between citizens and governments is a fundamental principle of liberalism and democracy, but in today's ever-polarizing society, this can be hard to come by. The situation becomes even more complex when adding tech titans to the mix. Organizations exist to help establish this trust by guiding governments and big tech in more “humane” directions, but it will take cooperation by all stakeholders, along with NGO partners to increase outreach and communication for a more transparent relationship. This is the first step towards increasing resiliency of democracy, a necessary lever to swing the pendulum back to the people.

Ishpreet Singh is a recent engineering grad currently working as a strategy consultant.

Filed Under: democracy, governance, technology

Private Tech Companies Are Making Law Enforcement's Opacity Problem Even Worse

from the 'for-the-people,'-not-'despite-the-people' dept

The increasing reliance on tech by law enforcement means the increasing reliance on private companies. It's inevitable that tech developments will be adopted by government agencies, but a lot of this adoption has occurred with minimal oversight or public input. That lack of public insight carries forward to criminal trials, where companies have successfully stepped in to prevent defendants from accessing information about evidence, citing concerns about exposed trade secrets or proprietary software. In other cases, prosecutors have dropped cases rather than risk discussing supposedly sensitive tech in open court.

Elizabeth Joh's new article for Science says corporations are making existing transparency and accountability problems in law enforcement even worse.

Private companies are often wary of divulging too much about their products to gain competitive advantage over rivals. As a consequence, companies may decide to protect their intellectual property and market advantages by invoking trade secret privileges, demanding nondisclosure agreements with customers, and imposing other forms of property protections. These forms of commercial secrecy, common enough outside of the criminal justice system, pose challenges to basic police accountability.

This is only one of the problems the adoption of private sector tech creates. There are others. As Joh points out, law enforcement officers often attest to their "training and expertise" when testifying in court or seeking warrants. But actual tech expertise is the exception, not the rule. Private companies market products to law enforcement agencies, but the rollout of purchased tech is rarely accompanied by immersive training. In some cases, any analytic work is offloaded to private contractors, making it even less likely the public will ever be fully apprised of how the tech works or why -- in the case of predictive policing software and facial recognition AI -- it arrives at the conclusions it does.

Saddled by non-disclosure agreements, normal police secrecy, claims of valuable trade secrets, and a lack of technical expertise by law enforcement end users, private company tech can become a black hole where data on citizens goes in, but never comes back out for public scrutiny.

Take, for example, ShotSpotter. Its sensors and microphones pick up percussive noises. These are transferred to ShotSpotter's analysts, who then make a judgment call about the overheard noises. Sometimes the analysts are wrong. Sometimes, more disturbingly, they alter their judgment calls after being contacted by police officers. How accurate is it? More importantly, how can the public access this data without relying on either ShotSpotter's cheery claims about high accuracy or secondhand intuition based on agencies who have dumped the tech after too many false positives?

The real answer may never be known.

[A] community or researcher who wants to know more about ShotSpotter—its accuracy and its flaws—may find a dead end. ShotSpotter’s contractual arrangements with its police customers provide them with results, and results only. The company claims ownership not just of its proprietary software but also of the data its technology generates. This means that conventional tools of disclosure, like state public records requests laws, have no purchase on any acoustic gunfire detection system because such systems remain within private hands.

For better or worse, the solution likely runs through local governments. These entities can forbid law enforcement agencies from purchasing tech from vendors unwilling to allow public scrutiny of their software and hardware. They can demand more transparency on usage and effectiveness from the agencies they oversee. The general public may not be able to take its law enforcement business elsewhere, but their elected reps can help ensure the agencies they're stuck with are more accountable.

The other check against misuse is the nation's courts. Judges can (and should) challenge more broad statements about law enforcement expertise and allow fewer companies whose tech has generated evidence to shirk their proxy obligations to criminal defendants, who have a constitutional right to examine the evidence against them and confront their accusers in court -- even if the accuser is a shot spotting sensor or a proprietary DNA-matching algorithm.

No one's saying cops shouldn't have access to tech advances. But governments need to do more to ensure these business relationships don't supersede law enforcement agencies' obligations to the public. Action needs to be taken now -- both at the local and national level -- to prevent ongoing problems from getting worse and to head off future abuses and injustices before they can occur.

Filed Under: evidence, law enforcement, technology, transparency

A Guy Walks Into A Bra

from the women-in-technology dept

A recent and surprisingly unpleasant professional encounter found me thinking again about an experience I had in the late 90s during my earlier career as a web developer before I went to law school. I'd gotten involved with a group that put on monthly meetings on topics of interest to the local community of Internet professionals. After the meetings a bunch of us would typically go out for dinner to chat and catch up. I did know some women from the organization, but I think most of the time the friends I went out with afterwards were men. It has never really bothered me to be in situations where I am outnumbered by men, so long as I'm treated with the respect of an equal. And I had no quarrel with my male friends on that front. But that evening drove home a reason why it was not good for women not to be better represented in technology in general.

Out at dinner we began "talking shop" almost immediately, discussing, in those early days of the Web, the importance of e-commerce to businesses and what sort of web presences companies needed to have in order to be able to profit from the Internet. We started listing stories of successes and failures, but the conversation ground to a halt once I offered my example:

"I have a bra I really like, and I'd like to buy another, but I can't seem to find a web site for the brand that would allow me to order one."

(Men, I am assuming that you will keep reading the rest of this post, so that I can make my point. But based on my friends' reaction I wouldn't be surprised if you've already slammed down the lid of your laptop, or tossed aside your phone, and run away. In which case, if that's your inclination, it's even more important that you keep reading.)

The example I raised was a perfectly reasonable one. I was sharing an example of a significant e-commerce opportunity being left untapped for no good reason. The essential facts were indisputable: many women wear bras, bras don't last forever, women would probably like to replace their worn-out bras with ones they know they like, and women will pay money to a bra manufacturer to get the bra they want. Therefore, any bra manufacturer not using the Internet to facilitate this purchase was leaving money on the table.

The same would be true for plenty of other goods as well, and I'm sure if I'd swapped the word "women" for "men" and instead listed a product specific to the latter my friends would have readily agreed that it needed to be sold online. After all, at least one of them had an MBA, and they were some of the biggest Internet commerce evangelists I knew. But that the product example was something specific to women's bodies completely shut them down. They practically squirmed out of their seats, desperate for the subject to be changed.

It was an uncomfortable moment for me, too, realizing that an ordinary reality of the female existence could be so unwelcome in a professional conversation. Was it too immodest to discuss undergarments with work colleagues? In an era when Viagra commercials were already running on broadcast television it would hardly seem so. If there was no compunction against discussing the commercialization of such intimate matters for men, why could that same clinical detachment not be afforded to similar topics important to women? After all, this wasn't second grade; no one was going to catch cooties talking about a specific form of underwear common to many women. The bottom line is that women are people and peers and professionals and deserve not to be regarded with the adolescent squeamishness that all too often keeps us apart from the world.

And as far as our discussion was concerned, the subject of selling bras online was a perfectly salient example to cite, just as any male-specific product would have been. In fact, from the larger perspective of e-commerce, it had to get raised by someone. But it seems to take someone with experience with these ideas to bring them to the fore, which means that without having women involved in the decision making they are going to be forever overlooked by the men in charge, who all too easily can regard such topics as icky and esoteric, or outright ignorable, rather than worthwhile business problems to solve.

In the twenty-odd years since that dinner bra manufacturers did eventually discover the web. Yet two decades later, we are still talking about women in technology – including the relative lack thereof. And it's an absence that hasn't stopped mattering.

I've never been one who wanted to believe it might matter. As I said earlier, I've never generally been bothered by being one of the few or only women in a situation, because I didn't think it should matter. To me, true equality means that men and women should essentially be interchangeable, with all of us passing through life based on our merit as people. And I've always worried that if we focused too much on gender issues it might overly dwell on our differences, end up being divisive, and thus keep us from ever getting there.

But the reality is that we aren't there, at least not yet. While there are lots of women in technology, albeit more in some sectors than others, we're not a point where we exist in numbers on par with our male counterparts. And as with any other demographic where inclusion doesn't come easily or equivalently, that lack of representation has consequences.

First, as the bra example illustrates, it leaves out of the technology conversation the insights and additions that women can bring. Although in every way that matters women are equal to men, the reality is that there can be some differences in our physical construction and, moreover, in our lived experiences. These differences shape our perspectives, awareness of issues others might overlook, and perhaps also our acuities. As a result, as with all people from the diverse fabric of humanity, they give us something extra to contribute that is valuable, and that should be valued.

But also, sometimes it is our absence itself that is what makes our lives different, and not in a good way. Because when women are not at the table it teaches everyone that women do not belong at the table. Which makes it really hard to then come along as a woman and try to sit at the table and be treated as the equal that we are.

About a year before the dinner described above I had a different job developing websites at a start-up. It was not a great job for a number of reasons, including that my boss didn't actually know how to make websites. So he tended to give me instructions that were, at best, infeasible. One day I explained that we couldn't do what he asked because we had to use the web-safe color palette or else the page would not render well. Back then, limitations in computer monitor technology meant that web sites were effectively limited to 216 colors in order to render predictably, and I was correct to point out the need to adhere to this common web design practice. But I was a woman dropping this knowledge on a man. He didn't believe it until he looked across at my male colleague who confirmed it.

It was such a stark wake-up call that it didn't necessarily matter how good I was at my job. For some men I would never be good enough simply because I wasn't one of them. And it is among those sorts of attitudes that I am supposed to somehow carve out my career.

On the other hand, ever watch re-runs from earlier decades? In many important ways things are significantly better for women than they used to be. Including that there are plenty of men who welcome us as full equals at the table. But that doesn't mean that things are totally fine – in fact, far from it. Many challenges remain, and one of those challenges is implicit (and sometimes explicit) sex bias, which, even if it only comes up in a minority of situations, still ends up being an issue in quite a few situations. And part of why we need to contend with it is because it can be subtle. While it should hopefully be clear to everyone by now that no one should ever have to deal with the sort of verbal and physical harassment that prompted the #metoo movement, too many men seem to think that simply not outright abusing their female colleagues somehow absolves them of being sexist. But that's hardly the benchmark.

Instead, as that recent unpleasant experience reminded me, there are other questions that need to be asked. Such as: are women as welcome to contribute to the best of our capacity as our male counterparts are? Or is our presence just merely tolerated because at this point it might have to be? When we speak, are we heard like our male colleagues are heard? Or are we tuned out like my friends did to me when I shared a perspective they didn't want to hear or, worse, like my former boss did when I tried to speak with authority and expertise?

Obviously no woman is going to be right on everything, just as no man would be. We're not even going to always agree among ourselves. But if we're not generally regarded as having equivalent ethos as an equally-positioned man, and therefore denied the opportunities to be in an equal position, then that's a problem. It's a problem for women, it's even a problem for men, and it's a problem for any industry that drives our contributions away.

Filed Under: harassment, men, sexism, technology, women

Documents Show NYPD Has A Secret Surveillance Tech Slush Fund

from the pre-approved-dark-funding dept

About a half-decade ago, public records requesters discovered the Chicago Police Department had been spending seized funds on surveillance equipment like Stingray devices. The forfeiture fund was apparently completely discretionary and the PD used this steady supply of cash to make purchases not specifically approved by the city. It also allowed the department to elude direct oversight of surveillance activities and ensure the public was unable to interrupt the procurement process with pesky comments and questions.

It appears the New York Police Department has been doing the same thing for at least as long. But it's not doing it with "discretionary" funds lifted from New York residents using civil forfeiture. Documents obtained by Wired show the infamously secretive agency has even more secrecy up its sleeves -- a fund that is specifically exempt from its own oversight.

New York City police bought a range of surveillance tools—including facial-recognition software, predictive policing software, vans equipped with x-ray machines to detect weapons, and “stingray” cell site simulators—with no public oversight, according to documents released Tuesday.

In all, the documents show that the NYPD spent at least $159 million since 2007 through a little-known “Special Expenses Fund” that did not require approval by the city council or other municipal officials. The documents were made public by two civil rights groups, the Legal Aid Society and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), which say the practice amounted to a “surveillance slush fund.”

Millions of dollars went to Idemia Solutions, a facial recognition tech provider. Hundreds of thousands went to an Israeli defense contractor, which has provided some sort of "devices" to the PD (details on the devices are redacted). Three-quarters of a million went to a mobile x-ray van manufacturer. The list continues, encompassing a cell site simulator provider and other surveillance tech/software contractors whose documents have been redacted into near-uselessness.

Unfortunately, it appears the city gave its explicit blessing to being cut out of the approval process. A memorandum of understanding between the NYPD and the city's Office of Management and Budget allows the NYPD to withhold contracts and other information dealing with tech/tools used in "confidential operations." So, the city is completely complicit here, which differentiates this from the situation in Chicago. In New York, taxpayers are (or rather, aren't) seeing their tax dollars spent on secret tech from a fund no one is allowed to oversee.

Combining secret tech with zero accountability is only the NYPD's idea of a good time. Hopefully this national exposure will prompt the city to shred its memorandum of understanding and start over with some accountability measures in place.

Filed Under: discretionary funds, nypd, police, slush fund, surveillance, technology, transparency

Cities Looking To Dump ShotSpotter Since It's Barely More Useful Than Doing Nothing At All

from the drop-it-like-it's-shot dept

Tech that supposedly detects gunshots has been deployed in multiple cities across the nation with the intent of providing faster response times to possible violence and to give investigators heads up where illegal activity may have occurred. The tech has some pretty serious problems, though.

For one, it cannot reliably detect gunshots.

A 2013 investigation of the effectiveness of ShotSpotter in Newark, New Jersey revealed that from 2010 to 2013, the system’s sensors alerted police 3,632 times, but only led to 17 actual arrests. According to the investigation, 75% of the gunshot alerts were false alarms.

The AI can "hear" the percussive noise and attempt to determine whether or not it's an actual gunshot. It could be a backfire or fireworks or some other noise distinguishably louder than the ambient noise at the detector's location. Far too often (and far more often than ShotSpotter claims), the guesses are wrong.

Out of Fall River’s 51 ShotSpotter activations in 2017, 21 have been false alarms, a 41 percent error rate. The sensors often report loud noises such as car backfires and fireworks as gunshots.

Dupere said there have been another 15 ShotSpotter activations this year that police later determined were unfounded because the responding officers found no evidence of gunfire or any witnesses to corroborate that they had seen or heard gunshots.

More disturbingly, the determinations made by the software can apparently be overridden if investigators truly want a shot to be spotted by tech like that offered by ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter personnel have altered AI judgment calls to fit police narratives. Worse, they've also moved detected shots from one location to another to better fit law enforcement's theory about who was involved in a shooting and where it happened.

ShotSpotter is an investigative tool, but it's a particularly malleable one. Investigators and officers seem pleased ShotSpotter personnel are willing to alter records to better suit their theories and narratives. But that's completely at odds with the ideal of evidence introduced in criminal cases, which is supposed to be free of bias and deliberate manipulation. When (criminal) history can be rewritten on the fly, the facts of the case are no longer factual.

These problems are exaggerated when law enforcement assumes any noise originating from ShotSpotter detectors is a gunshot and sends officers in to harass the locals until something turns up. Like almost every other tech advancement deployed by cops (especially "predictive policing," but there are others), the deployed tech tends to serve pre-existing biases held for decades by the law enforcement community: that minorities are inherently more "dangerous" than the white folks that tend to be overrepresented in law enforcement agencies.

Cities and police departments are loath to disclose the locations of their ShotSpotter sensors, but through public records requests Motherboard also obtained years of data from Kansas City, Missouri; Cleveland, Ohio; and Atlanta, Georgia showing where ShotSpotter sensors generated alerts—a proxy for the general location of the sensors.

In all four cities, the data shows that the sensors are also placed almost exclusively in majority Black and brown neighborhoods, based on population data from the U.S. Census.

So, there's the bigotry angle. This is on top of the evidence-faking issues. And then there are the limitation of the tech, which makes it an unwise investment for cities that actually want to do something about violent crime, rather than just let cops engage in biased policing.

The San Diego City Council was scheduled to vote July 27 on a $1.15 million renewal of its ShotSpotter contract, but city officials withdrew the item from the agenda after dozens of residents submitted public comments opposing the contract.

“ShotSpotter is a perfect example of the patronizing approach to public safety in Black and brown neighborhoods—this idea that we know what’s best for Black and brown community members,” Khalid Alexander, president of Pillars of the Community, told Motherboard. Pillars is an organization that opposes the over-policing of Black and brown residents, and is based in San Diego’s District 4—the only area of the city where ShotSpotter is located.

“I haven’t heard one person in District 4 ... come out and say that the ShotSpotter technology is something needed to keep us safe,” Alexander said.

Unsurprisingly, ShotSpotter says the opposite:

In a statement emailed to Motherboard, ShotSpotter claimed that local communities have told them the opposite, and that it would be "false and misleading" to describe the activists as representing the larger population. "As the communities who suffer most from gun violence, they recognize and appreciate ShotSpotter’s role helping police departments combat gun violence,” the company wrote.

While there's certainly some confirmation bias in play here, it's safe to say it's more than just a land of contrasts out there. But the only party that really has any money at stake is ShotSpotter, and self-preservation is a far stronger motivator than simply feeling underserved by law enforcement agencies that have decided to outsource serving and protecting to passive sensors and artificial intelligence. Taxpayer frustration may touch on fiscal issues, but since it's an aggregate fund, unhappy citizens tend to be less motivated by their bottom lines than companies with multi-million dollar contracts on the line.

And maybe $1.15 million/year seems like a drop in the bucket when it comes to police department budgets. Residents are sick of ShotSpotter and its ability to send officers expecting violence flooding into communities with guns akimbo. In Chicago, the contract now in danger of going unrenewed is $33 million, which is a very tangible hit to the bottom line of a company that early last year recorded record quarterly revenue of a little over $10 million.

Why keep paying for something that isn't doing anything much more than allowing alarmists to claim that violence is on the rise and the only cure is more cop violence? San Diego might not be paying much for its limited rollout of ShotSpotter, but even its small sample set is a complete disappointment.

A San Diego Police Department spokesperson told Voice of San Diego that during the four years ShotSpotter had been in use (as of September 2020) officers had made only two arrests responding to an alert and only one of those was directly linked to the alert.

Meanwhile, 72 of the 584 ShotSpotter alerts during that time period were determined to be unfounded, “a whopping 25 times higher than the 0.5 percent false positive rate put forth by the company,” the Voice of San Diego reported, based on data provided by the city’s police department.

Thirty-six times more false positives than useful investigative leads. $4.60 million (over four years at the going rate) should buy more help than that. It is only two arrests better than having nothing at all, which is so far below rounding error as to be laughable.

Even if the tech improves as time goes on, we still need to ask why we even need it. So far, all it's done is make ShotSpotter more money and justify biased policing efforts by law enforcement agencies willing to make use of any new development that allows them to keep doing the things they've always done. Taxpayers shouldn't be asked to fund programs that set cops up for failure. And they certainly shouldn't be expected to pay for the dubious privilege of being subjected to a system more capable of altering criminal evidence than making neighborhoods safer.

Filed Under: police, predictive policing, shotspotter, technology
Companies: shotspotter

What Landing On Mars Again Can Teach Us, Again

from the humanity-pep-talk dept

It seems I'm always writing about Section 230 or copyright or some sort of regulatory effort driven by antipathy toward technology. But one of my favorite posts I've ever written here is this one, "We Interrupt All The Hating On Technology To Remind Everyone We Just Landed On Mars." Given that we just landed on Mars again it seems a good time to revisit it, because it seems no less important today than it was in 2018 when I originally wrote it. Just as it seems no less important that we just landed on Mars again. In fact, it all may matter even more now.

Today we find ourselves even more mired in a world full of technological nihilism. It has become a well-honed reflex: if it involves technology, it must be bad. And in the wake of this prevailing distrust we've developed a political culture that is, at best, indifferent to innovation if not often downright eager to stamp it out.

It's a poisonous attitude that threatens to trap us in our currently imperfect world, with no way to solve our way out of our problems. But recognizing what an amazing achievement it was to successfully land on Mars can work as an antidote, in at least two important ways:

First, it can remind us of what wonder feels like. To dream the most fantastic dreams, and then to go make those dreams happen. Mankind hasn't gazed at the stars in ambivalence; the heavens have been one of our greatest sources of inspiration throughout the ages. That we have now managed, for the first time in the history of human civilization, to put another planet within our grasp should not extinguish that wonder, with a glib "been there, done that" shrug. Rather, it is a cause for enormous celebration and should do nothing but inspire us to keep dreaming, next time even bigger.

Because if there's one thing this landing teaches us, apart from the tangible fruits of our exploration, it is to believe in ourselves. Our failures and disappointments here on Earth are serious indeed. But what this success demonstrates is that we can overcome what was once thought impossible. It may take diligence, hard work, and faithful adherence to science. And our human imperfections can sometimes make it hard to manage these things.

But landing on Mars reminds us that we can and provides us with an amazing example of how.

Filed Under: innovation, landing, mars, technology

New Year's Message: Make The World A Better Place

from the it-can-always-get-better dept

It's tricky to figure out how to start this post this year, of all years. As long-time readers are aware, ever since 2008, my final post of the year was a reflection on optimism. It started, in 2008, in the midst of a few fights to create a better internet at the time, in which two separate people had expressed to me what they believed to be a contradiction: I am unfailingly optimistic about the potential for innovation to make the world better, and yet I often appeared (to them, at least), to be so angry about the state of the world and the efforts various people were involved in to impede the internet. And thus started the tradition of writing a post about how important it was to stay happy and optimistic, even in the face of so many challenges to that optimism. Whatever anger or frustration people sense from me has never been in opposition to that optimism, but directed at how that optimistic vision may be delayed or limited by short-sighted thinking. If you'd like to look over the history of these posts, here's the full list:

• 2008: On Staying Happy
• 2009: Creativity, Innovation And Happiness
• 2010: From Pessimism To Optimism... And The Power Of Innovation
• 2011: From Optimism And Innovation... To The Power To Make A Difference
• 2012: Innovation, Optimism And Opportunity: All Coming Together To Make Real Change
• 2013: Optimism On The Cusp Of Big Changes
• 2014: Change, Innovation And Optimism, Despite Challenges
• 2015: Keep Moving Forward
• 2016: No One Said It Would Be Easy...
• 2017: Keep On Believing
• 2018: Do Something Different
• 2019: Opportunities Come From Unexpected Places

Of course, 2020 has been a different kind of year by pretty much any measure imaginable. You already know that we're still in the midst of a massive pandemic that has taken the lives of nearly 2 million people worldwide, and 350,000 in the US alone. All of our lives have been changed in the last nine or ten months. At the same time, one of the key issues we talk about and advocate for here on Techdirt — keeping an open internet thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Act — has been under attack (as began in earnest last year) to the point that today, as I write this, it is front page news, with both the outgoing President and the President-elect saying complete and utter nonsense about it, and the Senate Majority Leader basically using the open internet as a key poison pill in his effort to deny Americans the relief they so desperately need.

Needless to say, it's been an exhausting (and frustrating and stressful) year all around.

And that doesn't even mention that over the summer we had to take all ads off our site, after Google's ad moderators found our stories (including about Google, Section 230, and content moderation) "dangerous and derogatory." That has represented a financial hit for us that we are still dealing with. And that doesn't even touch on a few other projects that we had lined up that all were (hopefully temporarily) put on hold due to the pandemic, or how many of us have experienced personal tragedies this year, outside of work, that don't even warrant a mention here. I know that it's been probably the most difficult year of most people's lives.

But, again, the point of this final post of the year is to the good things, the opportunities, and the reasons to remain optimistic, even in the midst of so many challenges. And, there is much to be optimistic about. Obviously, the COVID-19 vaccines were created in truly astounding, record-breaking time, in part due to the combination of new technologies and innovations and open information sharing (we'll have another post on that soon...). While many of us will be waiting months until we can get the vaccine, we can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel, and we're getting there thanks to the promise of innovation.

We've also discovered just how much technology, the internet, and innovation have been able to help so many people make it through the pandemic. The ability of so much of the economy to shift, practically overnight, to a work-from-home setting thanks to the internet and a variety of technologies is quite astounding. Obviously there are many jobs that couldn't make the shift, and many companies -- often small businesses -- that have struggled to make it through, but it is hard to overstate just how important the open internet has been to making the impact of the pandemic significantly less bad for a huge number of people. Even for people who don't work from home, things like online shopping, telemedicine, video conferencing and more have made it possible for people to remain widely in contact with the outside world, without putting themselves and others at risk.

This is incredible. And it should be celebrated. Imagine just how much worse the pandemic would have been without the modern internet.

It has also given us some opportunities to branch out and experiment in new ways. While we had been running various live events and experiments, the pandemic gave us a chance to figure out how to convert our event games to an online format -- allowing us to run our election disinformation simulation game multiple times over the summer and fall, and then to create the Copia Gaming Hour as a place to experiment with more gaming concepts and ideas. It also resulted in us running an amazing online brainstorming game with the World Economic Forum just a few weeks ago (I'll have more on that in a future post as well).

We've also found some other interesting ways to experiment with new technologies, including Coil and the web monetization protocol, which I think is one of the most interesting new innovations online these days. As always, we'd certainly appreciate any support you can give us. Techdirt remains one of the only remaining truly independent media properties out there. Nearly everyone else is owned by some giant company. And having to lose ads for half a year hasn't been great. And while we've been excited to see new media models, such as Substack, show up for independent creators, much of that relies on a paywall, which is something we're not interested in doing ourselves. I know it's been a tough year for everyone, but if you're able to, please consider supporting Techdirt.

And, of course, we're not even close to done experimenting. We've been working on a wide range of interesting things behind the scenes to improve this site and the experience for users -- some of which are pretty close to being rolled out (and which I think many of our long term community members will find very exciting too). We've also got some other, slightly longer-term projects cooking, and I'm excited to be digging in on all of those.

I'm less excited about the fact that heading into the new year we're still going to be spending way too much time fighting back against bad policy ideas. Section 230 is still going to be under attack, even after the new administration takes over (Section 230, like copyright, remains an area where there is bipartisan horribleness). Speaking of copyright, that's back on the docket as well, with Senator Tillis's absolutely insane ideas regarding copyright reform. But it will be important that we fight to move things in the right direction.

I know that lots of people have been looking forward to the end of 2020 because, well, just look around. Of course, I've also seen a few people note that many looked forward to the end of 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019... and the following year was often, in many ways, even worse. It is absolutely true that "things can always get worse." And we should be concerned that even with things looking up in some ways, we're still not out of this mess. Things can get worse. But, the optimism is that they can also get better. And I've dedicated my life to trying to help people understand how it can be better, and to encourage them to help fight to make it better.

So as we move into 2021, I hope that you're all ready to fight to help bring about this better, more optimistic world. We sure could use it.

Finally, my final paragraph of the final post every year is dedicated to again thanking all of you for making this worthwhile. It really is the community of folks here that makes Techdirt what it is. It's the interactions and the discussions and the debates held on Techdirt and across the wider internet that make all this worth doing. It challenges us, makes us think, and always pushes us to continue to be better ourselves. So thank you, once again, for making Techdirt such a special and wonderful place where we can share and discuss all of these ideas. I look forward to what you'll have to say in 2021.

Filed Under: 2020, 2021, covid, innovation, new year's, optimism, technology