{"id":12906,"date":"2016-03-09T17:00:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-09T23:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=12906"},"modified":"2016-03-09T17:00:03","modified_gmt":"2016-03-09T23:00:03","slug":"predictive-policing-the-cyber-version-of-stop-and-frisk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/09\/predictive-policing-the-cyber-version-of-stop-and-frisk\/","title":{"rendered":"“Predictive Policing”: The Cyber Version of “Stop and Frisk”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"china\"<\/h1>\n

Thanks America! How China\u2019s Newest Software Could Track, Predict, and Crush\u00a0Dissent<\/h1>\n
\n

Armed with data from spying on its citizens, Beijing could turn ‘predictive policing\u2019 into an AI tool of repression.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

What if the\u00a0Communist Party could have <\/strong>predicted Tiananmen Square? The Chinese government is deploying a new tool to keep the population from uprising.\u00a0Beijing is building software to predict instability before it arises, based on volumes of data mined from Chinese citizens about their jobs, pastimes, and habits. It\u2019s the latest advancement of what goes by the name \u201cpredictive policing,\u201d where data is used to deploy law enforcement or even military units to places where crime (or, say, an anti-government political protest) is likely<\/em> to occur. Don\u2019t cringe:\u00a0Predictive policing was born in the United States. But China is poised to emerge as a leader in the\u00a0field.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what that\u00a0means.<\/p>\n

First, some background. What is predictive policing? Back in 1994, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton led a pioneering and deeply controversial effort to pre-deploy police units to places where crime was expected to occur on the basis of crime statistics.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bratton, working with Jack Maple, deputy police commissioner, showed that the so-called CompStat decreased crime by 37 percent in just three years. But it also fueled an\u00a0unconstitutional<\/a> practice called \u201cstop-and-frisk,\u201d wherein minority youth in the wrong place at the wrong time were frequently targeted and harassed by the police. Lesson: you can deploy police to hotspots before crime occurs but you can cause more problems than you\u00a0solve.<\/em><\/p>\n

That was in New\u00a0York.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wu Manqing, a representative from China Electronics Technology, the company that the Chinese government hired to design the predictive policing software, described the newest version as \u201ca unified information environment,\u201d Bloomberg\u00a0<\/em>reported<\/a>\u00a0last week. Its applications go well beyond simply sending police to a specific corner. Because Chinese authorities face far fewer privacy limits on the sorts of information that they can gather on citizens, they can target police forces much more precisely. They might be able to target an individual who suddenly received and deposited a large payment to their bank account, or who reads pro-democracy news sites, or who is displaying a change in buying habits \u2014\u00a0purchasing more expensive luxury items, for instance. The Chinese government\u2019s control over the Internet in that country puts it in a unique position to extend the reach of surveillance and data collection into the lives of citizens. Chinese authorities plan to deploy the system in places where the relations between ethnic minorities and Chinese party are particularly strained, according to\u00a0Bloomberg.<\/p>\n

\u00a0For all the talk in Washington casting China as a rising regional military threat, the country began spending more on domestic security and stability, sometimes called\u00a0wei-wen,<\/em><\/a> than on building up its military in 2011. More recent numbers are harder to come by, but many China watchers believe<\/a> the trend has\u00a0continued.<\/div>\n

After the Arab Spring in 2011, Chinese leaders increased internal security spending by 13 percent to 624 billion yuan, outpacing spending on the military, which was 601 billion yuan. That year, the Chinese government\u00a0compelled 650 cities to improve their ability to monitor public spaces via surveillance cameras and other technologies. \u201cHundreds of Chinese cities are rushing to construct their safe city platforms by fusing Internet, video surveillance cameras, cell phones, GPS<\/span> location data and biometric technologies into central ICT<\/span> meta-systems,\u201d reads the introduction<\/a> to a 2013 report on Chinese spending on homeland security technologies from the Homeland Security Research Council, a market research firm in\u00a0Washington.<\/p>\n

China soon emerged as the world\u2019s largest market for surveillance equipment. Western companies<\/a> including Bain Capital<\/a>, the equity firm founded by former GOP<\/span> presidential candidate Mitt Romney, all wanted a piece of a pie worth a potential\u00a0$132 billion (in\u00a02022.)<\/p>\n

But collecting massive amounts of data leads inevitably to the question of how to analyze it at scale. China is fast becoming a world leader in the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence for national security. Chinese scientists recently unveiled two papers at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence<\/a> and each points to the future of Chinese research into predictive\u00a0policing.<\/p>\n

One explains<\/a> how to more easily recognize faces by compressing a Deep Neural Network, or DNN<\/span>, down to a smaller size. \u201cThe expensive computation of DNNs make their deployment difficult on mobile and embedded devices,\u201d it says. Read that to mean: here\u2019s a mathematical formula for getting embedded cameras to recognize faces without calling up a distant\u00a0database.<\/p>\n

The second paper<\/a> proposes software to predict the likelihood of a \u201cpublic security event\u201d in different Chinese provinces within the next month. Defense One<\/em> was able to obtain a short demonstration of the system. Some of the \u201cevents\u201d include the legitimately terrifying\u00a0\u201ccampus attack\u201d or \u201cbus explosion\u201d to the more mundane sounding, \u201cstrike event\u201d or \u201cgather event,\u201d (the researchers say this<\/a> was the \u201cgather\u201d incident in question.) all on a scale of severity from 1 to 5. To build it, the researchers relied on a dataset of more than 12,324 disruptive occurrences that took place across different provinces going back to\u00a01998.<\/p>\n

The research by itself is not alarming. What government doesn\u2019t have an interest in stopping shootings or even predicting\u00a0demonstrations?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the Chinese government\u2019s definition of \u201cterrorism\u201d that many in the West find troubling, since the government has used<\/a> the phantom of public unrest to justify the arrests of peaceful dissidents, such as women\u2019s rights worker Rebiya\u00a0Kadeer.<\/p>\n

Those fears increased after the Chinese government passed new anti-terror legislation in December that expanded government surveillance powers and that compels foreign technology companies to assist Chinese authorities in data collection efforts against Chinese citizens. Specifically, the law\u00a0says<\/a> that telecommunication and technology companies \u201cshall provide technical interfaces, decryption and other technical support and assistance to public security and state security agencies when they are following the law to avert and investigate terrorist\u00a0activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S.<\/span> objects, and State Department spokesman Mark Toner said<\/a> the law \u201ccould lead to greater restrictions on the exercise of freedoms of expressions, association, and peaceful assembly.\u201d\u00a0The FBI<\/span>\u2019s push<\/a> to compel Apple to provide a different technical interface into Syed Farook\u2019s iPhone is one reason leaders in China are watching the FBI<\/span> versus Apple debate so closely<\/a>\u00a0(and the epitome of\u00a0irony).<\/p>\n

\u201cEssentially, this law could give the authorities even more tools in censoring unwelcome information and crafting their own narrative in how the \u2018war on terror\u2019 is being waged,\u201d human\u00a0rights worker William Nee told<\/a> the New York\u00a0Times.<\/em><\/p>\n

It could also compel foreign technology companies to assist the Chinese government in the acquisition of more data to train predictive policing software efforts. That\u2019s where China\u2019s predictive policing powers enter the\u00a0picture.<\/p>\n

Predictive policing efforts are rising around the United States with programs in Memphis, Tennessee,\u00a0Chicago, Illinois, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, California, and elsewhere<\/a>. Police departments implement them in a variety of ways, many not particularly controversial<\/a>. Beijing has the resources, will, and the data and inclination to turn predictive policing into something incredibly powerful, and, possibly, quite\u00a0dreadful.<\/p>\n

Read the Original Article at Defense One<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks America! How China\u2019s Newest Software Could Track, Predict, and Crush\u00a0Dissent Armed with data from spying on its citizens, Beijing could turn ‘predictive policing\u2019 into an AI tool of repression. What if the\u00a0Communist Party could have predicted Tiananmen Square? The Chinese government is deploying a new tool to keep the population from uprising.\u00a0Beijing is building…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3449,2805,2122,3140,13,74,4445,1317,4912,4126,883,4379,1814,1928,3553,1132,2098,1189,65],"tags":[5316,5317,5318,5319,5320,4158,2779,5321,5322,4799,5323,5324],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12906"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}