by Michael Dean Thompson

AI is having its moment. And though 
 much of what has been slapped with the AI label is generally a far cry from the large language models you may have experienced at Bing and Google, it can still be terrifying. These new generations of tools are enabling a surveillance state far beyond an Orwellian fever dream. And, it is not just the government watching you. Rather, the voyeurs are also corporations like Moderna and the NFL.

Maybe the most terrifying is something called correlation analysis. It turns out, your friends have a lot to say about you, even without opening their mouths. Using biometrics like facial recognition to identify you and your friends (who “co-appear” with you in images and videos), they analyze the amount of time you spend together and how often you meet. The system can then cross-reference other data and create a surprisingly accurate picture of you. The same type of technology has been put to use in China to track dissidents and protestors. Now, a company called Vintra has brought the concept to the U.S. and counts the Lee County Sheriff’s office among its clients. The Los Angeles Times queried several police ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Most of us would feel violated to learn that our spouse or partner had been digging through our phone. Imagine if they were to use that access to determine where we have been and who we have been near and then to gain access to our cloud services to examine long forgotten backups, images, and documents. Insatiably, they move on to access our social media accounts and peek into every post we and our friends have made. Most people would shudder in horror at such an intrusive sifting of our lives by people we love and hold most intimate, even if we believed we had nothing to hide.

Emma Well, a policy analyst at the technology research and advocacy organization Upturn asserts, “At no point in human history have we collected and stored so much information about our lives in one place.”

The New York State Police, along with thousands of other law enforcement agencies in the U.S., wants to dig through your digital devices in such a manner. New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul has announced a $20 million expansion on top of tens of millions already quietly eased into the state’s budget. Five-point-three million dollars ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

The reduction of biases in criminal justice is an ongoing problem that does not lend itself to easy solutions. Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) may one day be that solution, though Boston University associate professor of law and assistant professor of computing and data sciences Ngozi Okidegbi points out that day is not here yet. The problem, as it is in all of criminal justice, is how pervasive and pernicious the issue of race can be. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for every 100,000 adults within the U.S., there were 1,186 Black incarcerated adults in 2021. Similarly, there were 1,004 American Indians and Alaskan Natives per 100,000 that same year. In contrast, only 221 incarcerated per 100,000 that same year identified as white. Those extraordinary numbers highlight the severity of the problem but say little about underlying causations.

There has long been a call to increase the use of algorithms in all aspects of criminal justice, from policing to parole and everything in between, with the hope that a purely data-driven solution would eliminate human prejudice. Unfortunately, the systems put into place are often “black boxes” that its users have no real understanding of how the ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Within the past several decades, police have acquired a new tool so secretive that prosecutors were told to either plea out cases or repress evidence rather than permit the public to know about them. Much to the chagrin of the courts, that secrecy extended even unto them. “It is time for Stingray to come out of the shadows so that its use can be subject to the same kind of scrutiny as other mechanisms.” Chief Judge Wood wrote those words in his 2016 dissent in United States v. Patrick, 842 F. 3d 540 (7th Cir. 2016) (Wood, J., dissenting), when the issue of cell-site simulators came before the Seventh Circuit. Nevertheless, little more is known about them seven years later, and various court references to their capabilities seem to conflict with each other. Fortunately, thanks to critical courts, the work of groups like the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (“EFF”), and the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”), as well the emergence of competitors to the maker of Stingray who advertise their product capabilities, more information is being revealed about them.

The super-secret system in question is at least conceptually tied to a humble device. Years ago, corporations ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Corporations have turned cellphones into mobile snooping devices that monetize consumer habits and daily activity. A new service, Pretty Good Phone Privacy (“PGPP”), addresses some of the privacy concerns built into the cellular system.

The problem comes down to the architecture of the cellular networks, which were not designed with privacy in mind. Buried within the SIM card is an Internal Mobile Subscriber Identifier (“IMSI”), a globally unique code. The IMSI is used for many things, especially payment status. Essentially, the IMSI ties the device to the person.

Just about every second or so, your phone “pings” the nearby towers to discover which has the strongest signal, as well as which receives its signal best. Those pings carry the phone’s IMSI and generate a record that can be used to provide a rough triangulation of the phone’s location. While not as accurate as a GPS signal, it has found significant use by police who wish to establish the phone owner’s presence. The tower information is used by the carriers to route calls to and from the phone, as well as data requests. The carrier can tie the phone to a location when phone calls and text messages ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Few of us would not feel violated to learn that our spouse or partner has been digging through our phone. Imagine if they were to use that data to analyze where we’ve been and who we’ve been near, and then, they were to gain access to our cloud services to examine long forgotten backups, images, and documents. Insatiably, they move on to access our social media accounts and peek into every post we and our friends have made. Most people would shudder in horror at such an intrusive sifting of our lives, even if we believed we had nothing to hide.

Emma Well, policy analyst at the technology research and advocacy organization Upturn, asserts, “At no point in human history have we collected and stored so much information about our lives in one place.”

The New York State Police, along with thousands of other agencies in the U.S., wants to dig through your digital devices in just such a nightmarish manner described above. New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul has announced a $20 million expansion on top of the tens of millions already quietly eased into 2022’s budget. Five-point-three million dollars of that set aside to modernize ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

The use of facial recognition systems was banned by the New Orleans City Council in 2020, only to be overturned in July of 2022 in response to fears of rising crime despite concerns within the affected communities about civil rights, privacy, and accuracy.

Facial recognition systems are known to have a high error rate. Much of its success depends on the quality of the image, the availability of multiple source images, and the color of the subject’s skin. Black faces are misidentified at higher rates than white faces. Since most facial recognition systems measure relative distances between cheekbones, eyes, etc., they can look over features that a human eye might find prominent.

In an effort to separate themselves, companies that make the systems each have somewhat different methods of attacking the challenges of facial identification. Those differences can lead to biases that are hidden from the user and the public, resulting in some biases that may only become apparent after millions of runs. The requirement for multiple source images creates additional Fourth Amendment issues for forensic systems with regard to both known-person images (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and unknown-person images (e.g., surveillance of protestors, abortion seekers, ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Over 50 years ago, fear of crime was even then associated in the minds of governing bodies with Black and brown communities. An effort to combat crime based on that fear spurred the creation of software that has since grown to become the predictive policing systems ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

The State of Arizona’s Attorney General, together with the Phoenix Field Office of the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations, has collected more than 145 million records of private financial transactions — and that number is likely still growing. The transactions were collected from companies ...

by Michael Dean Thompson

Through a series of public records requests to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, Unicorn Riot (a non-profit, media-based organization of journalists) has obtained rare insight into how the police department responsible for George Floyd’s death uses technology to spy on its citizens. In all, they gathered ...