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Do You Have Terrorist Data Patterns?
If they can do this with voice & other biometrics, they can certainly do it with online data patterns, which you currently do not own, but which you ought to legally claim data sovereignty over before its too late to suggest that.
Computer and behavioral scientists at the University of Buffalo are developing a system that will allow authorities to track faces, voices, bodies and various other biometrical data to create a score for how likely an individual is to commit a terrorist act. Sound like the scariest Big Brother plot since China’s ID card scheme? Well, rest assured, Winston Smith, the researchers only have your best interests in mind. “The goal is to identify the perpetrator in a security setting before he or she has the chance to carry out the attack,” says Venu Govindaraju, professor of computer science and engineering at the university, who was recently awarded $800,000 by the National Science Foundation to create such a system. “We are developing a prototype that examines a video in a number of different security settings, automatically producing a single, integrated score of malfeasance likelihood,” adding that the system will incorporate machine “learning” capabilities, which will allow it to adapt over time. “Human screeners have fatigue and bias, but the machine does not blink,” the researcher said, just before remarking that he was late for an appointment at the Ministry of Truth.
Be careful what words you put together in your search queries.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
This has actually been around for awhile now. Both this system, and its ideological forefather:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropological_criminology
In the past, trying to figure out who a criminal will be by the bumps on a person’s head wasn’t very effective, and this probably won’t be either. The only physiological indicators of criminality probably conform to syndromes which create mental disability, so they probably only deduced that if a person has Down’s syndrome, they are more likely to commit certain petty crimes. The problems with this system will be the same in spirit: It will only reveal incidental information that is mildly correlated, not root causes.
And it will be annoying. Having the police go around measuring everybody’s head because they are grasping at straws about the causes of criminality was probably annoying, and having the police monitor the facial expressions of every living soul (and tagging arbitrary people who have anxiety or whatever) will be annoying as well. Most people don’t want to live in that kind of a setting, terrorists or no.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
And you know what the other thing about all this is? I don’t want to trust my security in ANY way to AI probability games. Secure the fucking plane, and leave it at that. Don’t secure the plane with fuzzy probablities in part so the TSA people can slack off, secure the plane by making 100% sure that no bombs get on the plane. Its that simple.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
And you know what the third thing is? (sorry to rant here) I don’t want my security resting on the assinine idea that a computer can be trained to recognize human intent by behavior. Humans have a hard enough time figuring out their OWN intent, let alone other people, let a lone a computer. What is the difference between a human terrorist and a bomb? A bomb can’t star in a play as somebody else because a bomb can’t act. They should spend the time to develop the right technology for the taks, which is technology to recognize bombs and guns instead of sniffing everybody’s asses.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Computers predicted that Hurricane Katrina would just miss New Orleans.
October 9th, 2007 at 6:11 am
> a bomb can’t act
Except in that movie Dark Star. Must work out who I’ve lent that to…
October 9th, 2007 at 10:36 am
in a world where all the “good” people are medicated, an anxious person would be the criminal.
October 9th, 2007 at 11:37 am
This also ignores one of the deeper roots of crime. And it is not biology, but the fact that people are placed wittingly or no into impossible situations such that crime seems more logical and easier. Crime is a choice, like everything else. Saying that you have patterns and behaviors which are crime-like and therefore make you more probable to commit crimes eliminates Free Will as a causal factor.