Saturday, September 29, 2018

Artificial Intelligence and Policing: Hints in the Carpenter Decision



‘A third of TripAdvisor reviews are fake’ as cheats buy five stars The Times

'Nicholas wants it': Macquarie Bank CEO's role in tax deal revealed
The Sydney Morning Herald 



Who's afraid of a starving watchdog?
"The Commonwealth's tiny law-enforcement integrity agency has failed to keep up with the demands put upon it." (Public Sector Informant)



Being Julian Assange Consortiumnews


Joh, Elizabeth E., Artificial Intelligence and Policing: Hints in the Carpenter Decision (August 24, 2018). __ Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law __, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3238212
“In the 2018 Carpenter case, Chief Justice Roberts focuses on the quality of the information sought by the police as a means of deciding the case in Carpenter’s favor. Less obviously, however, the majority opinion also stresses the nature of the policing involved in Carpenter’s case: new technologies that do not just enhance human abilities. The majority makes no explicit clams about this focus. But the Carpenter decision reveals the Supreme Court’s first set of views on how it might evaluate police use of artificial intelligence. That contention, and the questions it raises, form the subject of this essay.”

8 ideas for empowering jurors in complex trials: DLA Piper – “Much time and attention has been spent examining ways to improve how lawyers can more effectively educate jurors in complex product liability trials. Many, if not most, of these efforts focus on “the hammer” – ie, the persuasiveness, credibility and clarity of the lawyers and of the witness presentations. But there is potentially another way to improve lawyers’ persuasion of jurors at trial: focus on informing and honing the thinking of the jury. Even an effective hammer benefits from sharpened nails. We can and should work to develop jurors who are better prepared and better equipped to carry out the difficult tasks we place before them. This article takes a look at eight ways to sharpen jurors’ abilities: to help them become better students in the courtroom and, hopefully, mitigate some of the skepticism voiced by lawyers and clients in an era of dwindling product liability and other complex jury trials


The Intercept: “Google built a prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users’ searches to their personal phone numbers,thus making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor people’s queries, The Intercept can reveal. The search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, was designed for Android devices, and would remove content deemed sensitive by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. Previously undisclosed details about the plan, obtained by The Intercept on Friday, show that Google compiled a censorship blacklist that included terms such as “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin.




UK Serious Fraud Office trialling AI for data-heavy cases naked security – sophos: “The BBC says it looks like a kids’ digital game: a mass of blue and green rubber balls bounce around the screen like they’re on elastic bands in a galaxy of paddle balls. It’s no game, however. It is a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that connects, and then visualizes, the parties and their interactions in a complex fraud inquiry. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) recently gave the BBC a look at the system, called OpenText Axcelerate, which staff have been training on Enron: a massive corporate fraud case from 2001 that’s no longer actively being investigated. The lines between the colored balls represent links between two people involved in the fraud inquiry, including the emails they sent and received, the people they carbon-copied, and the more discrete messages in which nobody was cc’ed. SFO investigator Edgar Pacevicius told the BBC that a major advantage of the AI is that it can spot connections between individuals far more quickly than humans can. It’s designed to help investigators keep track of all the parties involved in a given, wide-scale fraud, with all their communications, along with individuals’ interactions with each other. The tool also groups documents with similar content, and it can pick out phrases and word forms that might be significant to an investigation…”




The frontline feedback that could have spared DHS from robodebt fury
KATHRYN CAMPBELL: “It’s hard work. There’s often nowhere to hide. If something goes wrong, it often becomes apparent very quickly, and sometimes ends up in the public domain.”


Accountability in an age of democratic disquiet
KEN SMITH: “A willingness to listen and deliberate is not something that comes easily. It is easier if it is supported by information rather than simply opinion.”


Right to Know Day: federal FOI officers get schooled
ANGELENE FALK: “FOI is just one avenue for individuals to exercise their right to access government information. The starting point should really be the proactive release and publication of information and documents.”


NSW government's $20m cyber plan, call for cross-agency collaboration
LAUNCH: The NSW government’s chief information security officer Maria Milosavljevic unveiled the state’s first cyber security strategy this morning.

Movers & shakers: chief executives promoted, but a cloud hangs over one
BEYOND CANBERRA: A chief executive going on leave is not normally not a newsworthy event, but for pressure from media and the state Opposition led to statements issued by the Attorney General and ICAC commissioner.