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LizzieOSheaFirstEssay 5 - 09 May 2016 - Main.LizzieOShea
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| | | Indeed, our approach to terrorism is perhaps a future echo of more general trends in policing. The intelligence and law enforcement resources devoted to terrorism are inordinately large and they have been deployed to prevent a social problem that is relative tiny. The outcome has been over-policing of the worse kind; with unnecessary surveillance, increased data collection and invasive investigation techniques. In short, our approach to counter-terrorism takes our current approaches to policing, both in data collection and its analysis, and turbo-charges it. | |
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< | Perhaps what is most troubling of all is the outcome to which all of this leads: large numbers of terrorism convictions arising as a result of entrapment. With all this knowledge and resources directed towards terrorism, the proverbial sledgehammer has ended up creating its own nuts to crack. The lesson we can learn from over policing in an effort to predict human behaviour is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. These high levels of confected terror threats, heroically avoided thanks to the FBI, are perhaps the logical outcome of policing that has a socially constructed our understanding of crime. If we add data science to this heady mix, there is a grave risk that it will provide 'a veneer of technological authority' to these practices. | >
> | Perhaps what is most troubling of all is the outcome to which all of this leads: large numbers of terrorism convictions arising as a result of entrapment. With all this knowledge and resources directed towards terrorism, the proverbial sledgehammer has ended up creating its own nuts to crack. The lesson we can learn from over policing in an effort to predict human behaviour is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. These high levels of confected terror threats, heroically avoided thanks to the FBI, are perhaps the logical outcome of policing that has socially constructed our understanding of crime. If we add data science to this heady mix, there is a grave risk that it will provide 'a veneer of technological authority' to these practices. | | | Arresting these trends | | | Lastly, like so many moments in our post-Snowden world, the take up of these kinds of programs gives us a chance to reflect upon our relationship with technology. Technology companies are now drawing on wider data sets than criminal statistics as data inputs for predicting crime to balance out potential biases in crime statistics. Perhaps it is time to find more robust protections over data, technically and legally, including statutory protection over personal data and the requirement of informed consent from user before data can be used. | |
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< | There may well be positive results that can be achieved by using data and data science to deploy inevitably limited police resources in an effort to reduce crime. But in doing so, we place vast troves of information and power in the hands of political forces that have proven to be both irresponsible and uninterested in informing the general public about the contours of the issue we are grappling with. 'We are developing an official criminology that fits our social and cultural configuration,' Garland argued, twenty years ago, 'one in which amorality, generalized insecurity and enforced exclusion are coming to prevail over the traditions of welfare-ism and social citizenship.' Garland has been proven more right than I think he would care to imagine. | >
> | There may well be positive results that can be achieved by using data and data science to deploy inevitably limited police resources in an effort to reduce crime. But in doing so, we place vast troves of information and power in the hands of political forces that have proven to be both irresponsible and uninterested in informing the general public about the contours of the issue we are grappling with. 'We are developing an official criminology that fits our social and cultural configuration,' Garland argued, twenty years ago, 'one in which amorality, generalized insecurity and enforced exclusion are coming to prevail over the traditions of welfare-ism and social citizenship.' Garland has been proven more right than he would probably care to imagine. | | | -- LizzieOShea - 04 Mar 2016 |
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