Tag: pre crime

TECHNO-HELL: GERMANY ANNOUNCES ‘PRE-CRIME’ POLICE UNIT TO TARGET ‘FAR-RIGHT’

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
-George Orwell, 1984

In a classic case of “life imitating dystopian sci-fi pulp fiction,” the German Fourth Reich has announced big plans for so-called “far-right extremist” (which now means “anyone not blindly obedient to government”) elements of the population it oversees.

This will evoke in many connoisseurs of pop culture remembrance of a little ditty from 2002 titled “Minority Report,” the plot of which is that the state has devised a convoluted method of detecting crime before it happens and therefore eliminated all murders in Washington, D.C. by 2054.

“Germany’s top security official said Tuesday that she aims to make it easier to trace right-wing extremists’ financing and plans to set up an ‘early recognition unit’ to detect far-right and foreign disinformation campaigns as early as possible.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser’s proposals follow large protests against the far right in Germany in recent weeks. They reflect growing concern after a report said extremists met to discuss deporting millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship, and that some members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, whose support has doubled since the country’s 2021 election, were present.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency says the number of far-right extremists has been rising*. In 2022, it reached 38,800, with 14,000 of them considered potentially violent. The agency’s head, Thomas Haldenwang, said the numbers are believed to have risen again last year.”

*Note that the governing authorities never seem to bother to investigate why so-called “far-right extremism” (again, a misnomer designed to smear, not describe) might be attractive to a growing swathe of Western populations — as if, apropos of nothing, the previously well-heeled, domesticated, cosmopolitan, thoroughly liberalized German population suddenly decided to return to its Nazi roots because…

Something, something… probably Russia, definitionally “disinformation,” or maybe the sleazy “malinformation” reared its ugly head. 

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New York Governor Kathy Hochul Announces Plans to Implement Pre-Crime Surveillance, Target Online “Hate”

In a press conference today, New York Governor Kathy Hochul outlined her administration’s aggressive new strategy for combating online “hate” and implementing pre-crime-esque online surveillance.

As part of this approach, New York’s Threat Assessment and Management Teams (TAM teams), which were established in August 2022 in response to the Buffalo mass shooting, will extend their efforts and start targeting speech surrounding the conflict in the Middle East, with a focus on preventing crimes before they occur. TAM teams will be given an additional $3 million investment for their implementation across New York State college campuses.

“We’re creating strategies, first time ever, to help identify hate at the source and prevent crimes before they occur,” Hochul said.

The TAM teams, primarily focused on tracking and stopping violent acts of hate, work in collaboration with mental health professionals. They establish reporting systems for red flags and provide training to identify early warning signs of radicalization. This initiative, while seemingly noble in its intent to protect New Yorkers, raises significant privacy and First Amendment concerns.

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Japan To Deploy Pre-Crime Style “Behavior Detection” Technology

The Japan National Police Agency has decided to adopt AI-enhanced pre-crime surveillance cameras to bolster the security measures surrounding VIPs.

This step comes in response to the commemoration of the shocking assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the rising threats posed by what the government called “lone offenders.”

The use of AI in law enforcement is becoming commonplace globally. A 2019 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace revealed that 52 out of the 176 nations surveyed were incorporating AI tools into their policing strategies, Nikkei Asia reported.

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MIT Makes Probability-Based Computing a Bit Brighter

In a noisy and imprecise world, the definitive 0s and 1s of today’s computers can get in the way of accurate answers to messy real-world problems. So says an emerging field of research pioneering a kind of computing called probabilistic computing. And now a team of researchers at MIT have pioneered a new way of generating probabilistic bits (p-bits) at much higher rates—using photonics to harness random quantum oscillations in empty space.

The deterministic way in which conventional computers operate is not well suited to dealing with the uncertainty and randomness found in many physical processes and complex systems. Probabilistic computing promises to provide a more natural way to solve these kinds of problems by building processors out of components that behave randomly themselves.

The approach is particularly well suited to complicated optimization problems with many possible solutions or to doing machine learning on very large and incomplete datasets where uncertainty is an issue. Probabilistic computing could unlock new insights and findings in meteorology and climate simulations, for instance, or spam detection and counterterrorism software, or next-generation AI.

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LEXISNEXIS IS SELLING YOUR PERSONAL DATA TO ICE SO IT CAN TRY TO PREDICT CRIMES

THE LEGAL RESEARCH and public records data broker LexisNexis is providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with tools to target people who may potentially commit a crime — before any actual crime takes place, according to a contract document obtained by The Intercept. LexisNexis then allows ICE to track the purported pre-criminals’ movements.

The unredacted contract overview provides a rare look at the controversial $16.8 million agreement between LexisNexis and ICE, a federal law enforcement agency whose surveillance of and raids against migrant communities are widely criticized as brutal, unconstitutional, and inhumane.

“The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core,” said Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, which is suing LexisNexis over allegations it illegally buys and sells personal data. Mao told The Intercept the ICE contract document, which she reviewed for The Intercept, is “an admission and indication that ICE aims to surveil individuals where no crime has been committed and no criminal warrant or evidence of probable cause.”

While the company has previously refused to answer any questions about precisely what data it’s selling to ICE or to what end, the contract overview describes LexisNexis software as not simply a giant bucket of personal data, but also a sophisticated analytical machine that purports to detect suspicious activity and scrutinize migrants — including their locations.

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As Chicago Crime Sends Businesses Packing, Scientists Create Algorithm To Detect In Advance

Chicago’s legendary crime has caused businesses to leave town amid the growing threat of violence.

“We would do thousands of jobs a year in the city, but as we got robbed more, my people operating rollers and pavers we got robbed, our equipment would get stolen in broad daylight and there would usually be a gun involved, and it got expensive and it got dangerous,” said Gary Rabine, who pulled his road paving company out of the city after his crews were repeatedly robbed.

Rabine told Fox News that the increased costs of security and insurance for “thousands” of jobs in the city eventually caused expenses to be “twice as much as they should be” per employee.

Billionaire Ken Griffin moved his firm, Citadel, from Chicago to Miami, after saying in October 2021 that “Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem,” adding that he saw “25 bullet shots in the glass window of the retail space” in the building he lives in.

“If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” he told the Wall Street Journal in April. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from.”

AI to the rescue?

Scientists from the University of Chicago have created a new “AI” algorithm that can predict crime a week in advance.

By learning patterns in time and geographic locations from publicly available data on violent and property crimes, the “AI” can predict crimes up to one week in advance with around 90% accuracy.

The tool was tested and validated using historical data from the City of Chicago around two broad categories of reported events: violent crimes (homicides, assaults, and batteries) and property crimes (burglaries, thefts, and motor vehicle thefts). These data were used because they were most likely to be reported to police in urban areas where there is historical distrust and lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Such crimes are also less prone to enforcement bias, as is the case with drug crimes, traffic stops, and other misdemeanor infractions.

Previous efforts at crime prediction often use an epidemic or seismic approach, where crime is depicted as emerging in “hotspots” that spread to surrounding areas. These tools miss out on the complex social environment of cities, however, and don’t consider the relationship between crime and the effects of police enforcement. –PhysOrg

The model isolates crime by analyzing time and spacial coordinates of discrete events and detecting patterns to predict future events. It worked just as well with data from seven other US cities; Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco

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Everybody’s Guilty: To The Police State, We’re All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

The burden of proof has been reversed.

No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

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You’ve Been Flagged as a Threat: Predictive AI Technology Puts a Target on Your Back

“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”—Milton Friedman

You’ve been flagged as a threat.

Before long, every household in America will be similarly flagged and assigned a threat score.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

If you’re not unnerved over the ramifications of how such a program could be used and abused, keep reading.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

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Despotism Is The New Normal: Looming Threats to Freedom in 2022

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.”—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America

Despotism has become our new normal.

Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.

These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.

This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.

The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.

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