Tag: ‘technology

UK Police Pilot AI System to Track “Suspicious” Driver Journeys

Police forces across Britain are experimenting with artificial intelligence that can automatically monitor and categorize drivers’ movements using the country’s extensive number plate recognition network.

Internal records obtained by Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph reveal that three of England and Wales’s nine regional organized crime units are piloting a Faculty AI-built program designed to learn from vehicle movement data and detect journeys that algorithms label “suspicious.”

For years, the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system has logged more than 100 million vehicle sightings each day, mostly for confirming whether a specific registration has appeared in a certain area.

The new initiative changes that logic entirely. Instead of checking isolated plates, it teaches software to trace entire routes, looking for patterns of behavior that resemble the travel of criminal networks known for “county lines” drug trafficking.

The project, called Operation Ignition, represents a change in scale and ambition.

Unlike traditional alerts that depend on officers manually flagging “vehicles of interest,” the machine learning model learns from past data to generate its own list of potential targets.

Official papers admit that the process could involve “millions of [vehicle registrations],” and that the information gathered may guide future decisions about the ethical and operational use of such technologies.

What began as a Home Office-funded trial in the North West covering Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, and North Wales has now expanded into three regional crime units.

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Europol Pinpoints When Skynet-Like Human Resistance To AI Could Emerge

If Goldman’s estimates of a partial or full displacement of up to 300 million jobs across the Western world due to the proliferation of artificial intelligence and automation are even remotely correct, a new report suggests that by 2035, society could face widespread public resentment, protests, and even acts of sabotage directed at robotic systems.

A new report by Europol, the EU’s central intelligence and coordination hub for serious crime and terrorism, identifies around 2035 as a potential inflection point at which a human resistance movement against AI could begin to take shape, in a scenario that echoes the resistance to Skynet in the Terminator film franchise.

Europol warned of “bot-bashing” incidents and acts of sabotage against robotic systems in the middle of the next decade, as the spread of AI and robotics could fuel a populist backlash against technologies that have hollowed out parts of the Western economy and left millions unemployed.

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How Palantir Is Expanding the Surveillance State

When people complain about Big Tech, they tend to mean companies like Meta, Google, and X—entities providing free tools and platforms that we can choose whether to use. Much less attention is directed at the tech companies helping the federal government consolidate and analyze data on all of us. Companies like the data analytics firm Palantir, created by Paypal co-founder and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

Palantir has long been connected to government surveillance. It was founded in part with CIA money, it has served as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor since 2011, and it’s been used for everything from local law enforcement to COVID-19 efforts. But the prominence of Palantir tools in federal agencies seems to be growing under President Trump. “The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon,” reports The New York Times, noting that this figure “does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.”

Palantir technology has largely been used by the military, the intelligence agencies, the immigration enforcers, and the police. But its uses could be expanding.

“Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service—about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions,” reports the Times.

Along with the Trump administration’s efforts to share more data across federal agencies, this signals that Palantir’s huge data analysis capabilities could wind up being wielded against all Americans.

This won’t allow the authorities watch us more so much as it helps them make use of all the data it’s already got on us. But that’s unsettling too.

“The ultimate concern is a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country,” Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Wired in April. “What we are seeing is likely the first step in creating that centralized dossier on everyone in this country.”

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