Ondrej Vesely, Grade 11
UWCEA (Moshi)
On the third of September 2020, Tampa Bay Times published an article titled Targeted.
This article explored Pasco County Sheriff, who after taking over the office introduced a new measure to combat crime – algorithm that could prevent a crime before it even happened. This program supposedly analyses which people’s names appear the most in the Pasco counties police database and are thus “more likely to commit a crime”.
Together with this, the algorithm analyses a huge variety of data to make the prediction of “who the next criminal will be”. According to the Sheriff’s office, this had led to 74.4% reduction in residential burglaries, 20.7% reduction in auto thefts along with an overall reduction of property crimes of 35.6%. However, Times is quick to point out that crime had declined at a very similar rate in the nearby eight largest law enforcement agencies in the Tampa Bay area, with violent crime only increasing in Pasco County, that implanted this allegedly successful crime prevention by algorithm policy.
Times findings conclude, that the only result of this is the increased harassment of the counties residents, with police visiting them in their homes frequently at any time of the day, and having “little” threatening chitchats, as can be seen here. This example clearly demonstrates how technology and data can be misused even by the ones we are supposed to trust. The ones who are supposed to guide us through times, like the COVID-19 pandemic, where governments, such as the one in Hungary, Turkey, or the Philippines used it as an opportunity to further boost their grip on power and restrict basic democratic principles.
However, even though most truly democratic countries as of 2020 didn’t change their democratic scores, there has been a dangerous increasing trend – rise in internet surveillance by very high-ranking democracies, such as by the USA or UK. USA is well known for their pervasive surveillance –US intelligence agency NSA monitored 60 million phone calls in just one month in Spain, it monitored calls of 35 world leaders, including German chancellery Angela Merkel. Apart from world leaders, the agency is authorized to spy in 193 countries, without needing a individualized warrant gathering 124.8 billion reports in just 30 days in the year 2013 alone.
Not to mention the loose oversight judiciary that allows things such as nude photos being a ‘fringe benefit’ for NSA employees.
But what can we do about all of this? It might seem that as ordinary people, we are no match against an opponent with unlimited resources.
And this is maybe true, and thus an important realization should come out of it – if we don’t remind our governments that they are serving us, not we them, it will be hard to deprive them of all of the power they have gained in our absence. To not be absent, we can simply deprive the government of their main surveillance tool – companies that sell and give our data to the government, as shown by the PRISM program. PRISM is an alleged government program, which consists of companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and others, which supposedly give direct access to varying degrees of data to US intelligence agencies, such as access to their servers. Trying to minimize the use of software from these companies, such as from Google, could lead to a revolution in the technology sector controlled by tech giants with unrestricted power.
If you want to support companies that rather than profit prioritize their customers, rather than create a product out of them, there are a lot of steps you can take. You can start by exploring privacy-respecting solutions – instead of Google, use even faster Brave Browser or Mozilla Firefox with privacy-enhancing add-ons, or better yet, Tor Browser. Instead of Google search engine, switch to DuckDuckGo. And finally, instead of Windows or macOS, move to one of the many Linux distros. Caring about Internet privacy does not mean you desire to be more anonymous because you want to commit a crime - rather, you believe that it should be a norm that you enjoy the same amount of privacy as in real life.
Rather than “if you have nothing to hide, therefore you have nothing to fear” it should be “you have nothing to hide; therefore they have no reason to look”.
This article explored Pasco County Sheriff, who after taking over the office introduced a new measure to combat crime – algorithm that could prevent a crime before it even happened. This program supposedly analyses which people’s names appear the most in the Pasco counties police database and are thus “more likely to commit a crime”.
Together with this, the algorithm analyses a huge variety of data to make the prediction of “who the next criminal will be”. According to the Sheriff’s office, this had led to 74.4% reduction in residential burglaries, 20.7% reduction in auto thefts along with an overall reduction of property crimes of 35.6%. However, Times is quick to point out that crime had declined at a very similar rate in the nearby eight largest law enforcement agencies in the Tampa Bay area, with violent crime only increasing in Pasco County, that implanted this allegedly successful crime prevention by algorithm policy.
Times findings conclude, that the only result of this is the increased harassment of the counties residents, with police visiting them in their homes frequently at any time of the day, and having “little” threatening chitchats, as can be seen here. This example clearly demonstrates how technology and data can be misused even by the ones we are supposed to trust. The ones who are supposed to guide us through times, like the COVID-19 pandemic, where governments, such as the one in Hungary, Turkey, or the Philippines used it as an opportunity to further boost their grip on power and restrict basic democratic principles.
However, even though most truly democratic countries as of 2020 didn’t change their democratic scores, there has been a dangerous increasing trend – rise in internet surveillance by very high-ranking democracies, such as by the USA or UK. USA is well known for their pervasive surveillance –US intelligence agency NSA monitored 60 million phone calls in just one month in Spain, it monitored calls of 35 world leaders, including German chancellery Angela Merkel. Apart from world leaders, the agency is authorized to spy in 193 countries, without needing a individualized warrant gathering 124.8 billion reports in just 30 days in the year 2013 alone.
Not to mention the loose oversight judiciary that allows things such as nude photos being a ‘fringe benefit’ for NSA employees.
But what can we do about all of this? It might seem that as ordinary people, we are no match against an opponent with unlimited resources.
And this is maybe true, and thus an important realization should come out of it – if we don’t remind our governments that they are serving us, not we them, it will be hard to deprive them of all of the power they have gained in our absence. To not be absent, we can simply deprive the government of their main surveillance tool – companies that sell and give our data to the government, as shown by the PRISM program. PRISM is an alleged government program, which consists of companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and others, which supposedly give direct access to varying degrees of data to US intelligence agencies, such as access to their servers. Trying to minimize the use of software from these companies, such as from Google, could lead to a revolution in the technology sector controlled by tech giants with unrestricted power.
If you want to support companies that rather than profit prioritize their customers, rather than create a product out of them, there are a lot of steps you can take. You can start by exploring privacy-respecting solutions – instead of Google, use even faster Brave Browser or Mozilla Firefox with privacy-enhancing add-ons, or better yet, Tor Browser. Instead of Google search engine, switch to DuckDuckGo. And finally, instead of Windows or macOS, move to one of the many Linux distros. Caring about Internet privacy does not mean you desire to be more anonymous because you want to commit a crime - rather, you believe that it should be a norm that you enjoy the same amount of privacy as in real life.
Rather than “if you have nothing to hide, therefore you have nothing to fear” it should be “you have nothing to hide; therefore they have no reason to look”.
www.unitedworldwide.co