Is "network analysis" a better term for what this article describes? Seriously, if taking a deep, hard look at connections among alleged drug dealers
and gang members is bad, what would be better?
My understanding of the Palantir law enforcement use case is that, for example, a gang unit police cruiser going down the street in a bad neighborhood can pick up data from its license plate readers, and be automatically alerted if any passing vehicles are associated with certain parameters.
The plain-vanilla tech solution for law enforcement would be something along the lines of: throw a notification if any of the passing vehicles is registered to someone with outstanding warrants.
Palantir takes it a step further and throws a notification if, say, the vehicle is registered to a known associate of a gang member who is wanted for questioning. This network understanding has to be built on the backend, both by integrating existing data sources and by doing work directly on the Palantir system.
Eventually the cops might start following the vehicle, and pull the driver over for a nominal traffic infraction. At that point, the officer is going to use their Palantir app within their department-issued mobile phone to assist in the discussion with the driver -- for example, if the driver coughs up any names, the officer can type them in to see what comes up in the system.
I'd think that Palantir's defense of this would be something along the lines of, "everyone in this story previously had the right to see every bit of information the system provided, we just made it more efficient". The counterargument would be something along the lines of, the state having such detailed understanding of its citizens' personal lives is ipso facto tyranny.
1. I know enough to stop answering questions
2. I have a lawyer I can call and ask to get involved
Both 1 and 2 are, however, not choices for the vast majority of people.
Cameras in your vehicle and handing your attorney's business card with your driver's license are good deterrents that I highly recommend. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
They may even, as you say above, move to detain you and bring you in. Again, actually having a lawyer here is what's important, and again, usually not something most people can afford.
Limiting police power is a tough political goal. Right now police can literally shoot you dozens of times with their personal assault rifle that has "fuck you" engraved on it while you are lying on the ground with your hands on your head begging for your life, then get caught planting a gun on your body and face zero repercussions. And in discussions about this a huge number of people support the cops - "you never know, he could have been armed, we can't ever suggest a cop behaved badly because that would make other cops less willing to kill at a moment's notice" are real arguments people put forward. If you want to stop them from being able to pull people over for no reason so easily that sounds great but that is a HUGE undertaking.
Connecting dots between convicted criminals is one thing, predicting crime based on associations with people who are not criminals is a whole other ballgame.
In this case, that’s to say: if an unnamed gang member committed a crime, but all the known members of said gang have alibis... maybe you should be looking for an unknown member of said gang. And who’s likely to be secretly in a gang? Well, someone whose friends are all in said gang would be a good first guess.
What about outreach workers? How many of them are going to have connections to junkies, homeless people and gang members?
Sincere good Christians often believe in trying to help the unfortunate. Some good Christians spend all their time surrounded by clean living church goers. Others spend a whole lot of time surrounded by folks who are from the wrong side of town and the wrong side of the law.
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Downvoters, care to explain?
There is 0 reason to expect them to not abuse this
Now, there are step that you can take to reduce these assumptions, but those are steps outside of the program, and would have to be introduced in tandem with the introduction of the program. Unfortunately, policy-makers often assume that any single idea that is funded (i.e. buying a predictive model from Palantir) is a comprehensive solution to the problem (often encouraged by the sales reps peddling whatever the 'solution' is) and fail to recognize that other programs will have to be funded alongside in order to deploy the program effectively.
Methinks fine upstanding citizens are not as readily distinguished from bad guys as you seem to imagine.
Add on top of that it's being done by a company named after a mass surveillance device used for evil in a fantasy story.
And on top of that it's being done by a Thiel company. Thiel, who is nearly a perfect personification of evil: he has made very explicit candid public statements on how he opposes the idea of democracy itself, he does not think women should have the right to vote.
And on top of that it was being done without the knowledge or consent of nearly anyone in the city.
And finally, the justice system presumes innocence. The Palantir system does the opposite -- it makes wild, arbitrary untrackable inferences that suggest guilt for people without any real evidence. It is quite literally nothing more than a very thin shield police can use to justify harassing and intimidating the "kind of people who tend to be criminals", which in this case is not that at all -- it is "the kind of people who tend to get caught and prosecuted for crimes" i.e. only violent or drug crimes (except drugs white people use), only poor criminals, only minority criminals.
Where's the massive computer analysis system that looks for wage theft committed by employers? This is after all how the vast majority of wealth is stolen in the US, citizens could recover billions of their own money if it were stopped. Where's the computer system working with law enforcement to automatically detect any insider trading? Why don't we monitor the behavior of people in finance to detect cocaine use and then send in the SWAT teams? What about a computer system that detects bad prosecutors?
" It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us."
"I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other."
His essay here is pretty blunt about how he is opposed to democracy. He outlines how to escape democracy (he calls it politics sometimes in the essay and uses the two words essentially interchangeably, because they are the same). He outlines ways to escape from democratic governments, seasteading, techno-libertarian cyberspace, etc, where capital can rule uninfringed by the desires, needs, interests, votes of its subjects.
I was incorrect about his views on women, though, thank you for the correction I retract that completely. He simply sees women voting as a problem because they don't vote the way he wants (they are not by and large wealthy and powerful so do not vote exclusively for the interests of these constituencies, like Thiel) -- and uses this as an excuse to throw out voting altogether. I'm not sure that that's better but my characterization was inaccurate.
"“We’re kind of a prototype,” said Matalin. “Unless you’re the cousin of some drug dealer that went bad, you’re going to be okay.”"
Sorry, cousin! Took your house and car too, I see...
The government basically had a naive likelihood analysis program that attempted to group terrorists. If someone went to the same places as terrorists, in about the same schedule, then the system came to the conclusion they were a terrorist. In programming we use the duck metaphor - "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck."
What occurred was that a journalist who was interviewing these terrorists ended up on the kill list. In theory the human element was supposed to filter out such things - and I'm sure that's what the developers of the system intentioned. It's also clear the human operators were simply rubber stamping everything the system produced, and allowed a kill order on a journalist to go out.
And if you're discussing evaluating types, then our duck solution is just fine. If you're discussing firing hellfire missiles at unarmed people, then we probably need to take a step back. Predictive algorithms and network analysis are naive - they're fine for recognizing pictures of dogs and cats, or pinging a friend when you upload a photo with their face. They're not sufficient to apply to policing or resourcing, especially since algorithms display the exact same bias as their input data.
System designers, including myself, often expect human elements to act as reliably as algorithmic components. The truth is that humans are lazy, biased and easily prone to pavlovian conditioning (The system showed me a dialog, when I click OK the thing I want to happen happens.)
The other truth is that frequently these systems, even if they are honest - they show likelihood percents, their flaws have been explained to their operators, they were made with the best available data - are too complicated for most people to grasp. Most folks can't schedule a meeting across five calendars without assistance or get email marketing correct. Do we really expect them to grasp the nuances of a statistical network analysis model and correctly interpret the results on a repeated basis?
The solution is that we need to stop pretending an algorithm is a replacement for human decision making in these life or death cases.
Is that really the standard you want to rely on - that you're a suspect because of what your cousin may have done?