An Algorithm That Grants Freedom, or Takes It Away

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cade Metz and Adam Satariano at The New York Times: “…In Philadelphia, an algorithm created by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has helped dictate the experience of probationers for at least five years.

The algorithm is one of many making decisions about people’s lives in the United States and Europe. Local authorities use so-called predictive algorithms to set police patrols, prison sentences and probation rules. In the Netherlands, an algorithm flagged welfare fraud risks. A British city rates which teenagers are most likely to become criminals.

Nearly every state in America has turned to this new sort of governance algorithm, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit dedicated to digital rights. Algorithm Watch, a watchdog in Berlin, has identified similar programs in at least 16 European countries.

As the practice spreads into new places and new parts of government, United Nations investigators, civil rights lawyers, labor unions and community organizers have been pushing back.

They are angered by a growing dependence on automated systems that are taking humans and transparency out of the process. It is often not clear how the systems are making their decisions. Is gender a factor? Age? ZIP code? It’s hard to say, since many states and countries have few rules requiring that algorithm-makers disclose their formulas.

They also worry that the biases — involving race, class and geography — of the people who create the algorithms are being baked into these systems, as ProPublica has reported. In San Jose, Calif., where an algorithm is used during arraignment hearings, an organization called Silicon Valley De-Bug interviews the family of each defendant, takes this personal information to each hearing and shares it with defenders as a kind of counterbalance to algorithms.

Two community organizers, the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia and MediaJustice in Oakland, Calif., recently compiled a nationwide database of prediction algorithms. And Community Justice Exchange, a national organization that supports community organizers, is distributing a 50-page guide that advises organizers on how to confront the use of algorithms.

The algorithms are supposed to reduce the burden on understaffed agencies, cut government costs and — ideally — remove human bias. Opponents say governments haven’t shown much interest in learning what it means to take humans out of the decision making. A recent United Nations report warned that governments risked “stumbling zombie-like into a digital-welfare dystopia.”…(More)”.

Design Justice Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sasha Costanza-Chock: “What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.

This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival…(More)”.

Digital democracy: Is the future of civic engagement online?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gianluca Sgueo: “Digital innovation is radically transforming democratic decision-making. Public administrations are experimenting with mobile applications(apps) to provide citizens with real-time information, using online platforms to crowdsource ideas, and testing algorithms to engage communities in day today administration. The key question is what technology breakthrough means for governance systems created long before digital disruption. On the one hand, policy-makers are hoping that technology can be used to legitimise the public sector, re-engage citizens in politics and combat civic apathy. Scholars, on the other hand, point out that, if the digitalisation of democracy is left unquestioned, the danger is that the building blocks of democracy itself will be eroded.

This briefing examines three key global trends that are driving the on-going digitalisation of democratic decision-making. First are demographic patterns. These highlight growing global inequalities. Ten years from now, in the West the differentials of power among social groups will be on the rise, whereas in Eastern countries democratic freedoms will be at risk of further decline.

Second, a more urbanised global population will make cities ideal settings for innovative approaches to democratic decision-making. Current instances of digital democracy being used at local level include blockchain technology for voting and online crowdsourcing platforms.

Third, technological advancements will cut the costs of civic mobilisation and pose new challenges for democratic systems. Going forward, democratic decision-makers will be required to bridge digital literacy gaps, secure public structures from hacking, and to protect citizens’ privacy….(More)”.

Community science: A typology and its implications for governance of social-ecological systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anthony Charles, Laura Loucks, Fikret Berkes, and Derek Armitage: “There is an increasing recognition globally of the role to be played by community science –scientific research and monitoring driven and controlled by local communities, and characterized by place-based knowledge, social learning, collective action and empowerment. In particular, community science can support social-ecological system transformation, and help in achieving better ‘fit’ between ecological systems and governance, at local and higher levels of decision making.

This paper draws on three examples of communities as central actors in the process of knowledge co-production to present a typology of community science, and to deduce a set of key principles/conditions for success.

The typology involves three social learning models in which the community acquires scientific knowledge by (1) engaging with external bodies, (2) drawing on internal volunteer scientific expertise, and/or (3) hiring (or contracting) in-house professional scientific expertise. All of these models share the key characteristic that the local community decides with whom they wish to engage, and in each case, social learning is fundamental. Some conditions that facilitate community science include: community-driven and community-control; flexibility across leadership models; connection to place and collective values; empowerment, agency and collective action; credible trust; local knowledge; and links to governance.

Community science is not a panacea for effecting change at the local level, and there is need for critical assessment of how it can help to fill governance gaps. Nevertheless, a considerable body of experience globally illustrates how local communities are drawing effectively on community science for better conservation and livelihood outcomes, in a manner compatible with broader trends toward ecosystem-based management and local stewardship….(More)”.

Reconsidering Policy: Complexity, Governance and the State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Kate Crowley, Jenny Stewart, Adrian Kay and Brian Head: “For nation-states, the contexts for developing and implementing policy have become more complex and demanding. Yet policy studies have not fully responded to the challenges and opportunities represented by these developments. Governance literature has drawn attention to a globalising and network-based policy world, but politics and the role of the state have been de-emphasised.

This book addresses this imbalance by reconsidering traditional policy-analytic concepts, and re-developing and extending new ones, in a melded approach defined as systemic institutionalism. This links policy with governance and the state and suggests how real-world issues might be substantively addressed….(More)”.

When a Nudge Backfires: Combining (Im)Plausible Deniability with Social and Economic Incentives to Promote Behavioral Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by G. Bolton, E. Dimant, and U. Schmidt: “Both theory and recent empirical evidence on nudging suggest that observability of behavior acts as an instrument for promoting (discouraging) pro-social (anti-social) behavior. We connect three streams of literature (nudging, social preferences, and social norms) to investigate the universality of these claims. By employing a series of high-powered laboratory and online studies, we report here on an investigation of the questions of when and in what form backfiring occurs, the mechanism behind the backfiring, and how to mitigate it. We find that inequality aversion moderates the effectiveness of such nudges and that increasing the focus on social norms can counteract the backfiring effects of such behavioral interventions. Our results are informative for those who work on nudging and behavioral change, including scholars, company officials, and policy-makers….(More)”

Transparent Lobbying and Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Šárka Laboutková, Vít Šimral and Petr Vymětal: “This book deals with the current, as yet unsolved, problem of transparency of lobbying. In the current theories and prevalent models that deal with lobbying activities, there is no reflection of the degree of transparency of lobbying, mainly due to the unclear distinction between corruption, lobbying in general, and transparent lobbying. This book provides a perspective on transparency in lobbying in a comprehensive and structured manner. It delivers an interdisciplinary approach to the topic and creates a methodology for assessing the transparency of lobbying, its role in the democratization process and a methodology for evaluating the main consequences of transparency. The new approach is applied to assess lobbying regulations in the countries of Central Eastern Europe and shows a method for how lobbying in other regions of the world may also be assessed….(More)”.

Federal Agencies Use Cellphone Location Data for Immigration Enforcement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Byron Tau and Michelle Hackman at the Wall Street Journal: “The Trump administration has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The location data is drawn from ordinary cellphone apps, including those for games, weather and e-commerce, for which the user has granted permission to log the phone’s location.

The Department of Homeland Security has used the information to detect undocumented immigrants and others who may be entering the U.S. unlawfully, according to these people and documents.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of DHS, has used the data to help identify immigrants who were later arrested, these people said. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, another agency under DHS, uses the information to look for cellphone activity in unusual places, such as remote stretches of desert that straddle the Mexican border, the people said.

The federal government’s use of such data for law enforcement purposes hasn’t previously been reported.

Experts say the information amounts to one of the largest known troves of bulk data being deployed by law enforcement in the U.S.—and that the use appears to be on firm legal footing because the government buys access to it from a commercial vendor, just as a private company could, though its use hasn’t been tested in court.

“This is a classic situation where creeping commercial surveillance in the private sector is now bleeding directly over into government,” said Alan Butler, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a think tank that pushes for stronger privacy laws.

According to federal spending contracts, a division of DHS that creates experimental products began buying location data in 2017 from Venntel Inc. of Herndon, Va., a small company that shares several executives and patents with Gravy Analytics, a major player in the mobile-advertising world.

In 2018, ICE bought $190,000 worth of Venntel licenses. Last September, CBP bought $1.1 million in licenses for three kinds of software, including Venntel subscriptions for location data. 

The Department of Homeland Security and its components acknowledged buying access to the data, but wouldn’t discuss details about how they are using it in law-enforcement operations. People familiar with some of the efforts say it is used to generate investigative leads about possible illegal border crossings and for detecting or tracking migrant groups.

CBP has said it has privacy protections and limits on how it uses the location information. The agency says that it accesses only a small amount of the location data and that the data it does use is anonymized to protect the privacy of Americans….(More)”

If China valued free speech, there would be no coronavirus crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Verna Yu in The Guardian: “…Despite the flourishing of social media, information is more tightly controlled in China than ever. In 2013, an internal Communist party edict known as Document No 9 ordered cadres to tackle seven supposedly subversive influences on society. These included western-inspired notions of press freedom, “universal values” of human rights, civil rights and civic participation. Even within the Communist party, cadres are threatened with disciplinary action for expressing opinions that differ from the leadership.

Compared with 17 years ago, Chinese citizens enjoy even fewer rights of speech and expression. A few days after 34-year-old Li posted a note in his medical school alumni social media group on 30 December, stating that seven workers from a local live-animal market had been diagnosed with an illness similar to Sars and were quarantined in his hospital, he was summoned by police. He was made to sign a humiliating statement saying he understood if he “stayed stubborn and failed to repent and continue illegal activities, (he) will be disciplined by the law”….

Unless Chinese citizens’ freedom of speech and other basic rights are respected, such crises will only happen again. With a more globalised world, the magnitude may become even greater – the death toll from the coronavirus outbreak is already comparable to the total Sars death toll.

Human rights in China may appear to have little to do with the rest of the world but as we have seen in this crisis, disaster could occur when China thwarts the freedoms of its citizens. Surely it is time the international community takes this issue more seriously….(More)”.

Enchanted Determinism: Power without Responsibility in Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alexander Campolo and Kate Crawford: “Deep learning techniques are growing in popularity within the field of artificial intelligence (AI). These approaches identify patterns in large scale datasets, and make classifications and predictions, which have been celebrated as more accurate than those of humans. But for a number of reasons, including nonlinear path from inputs to outputs, there is a dearth of theory that can explain why deep learning techniques work so well at pattern detection and prediction. Claims about “superhuman” accuracy and insight, paired with the inability to fully explain how these results are produced, form a discourse about AI that we call enchanted determinism. To analyze enchanted determinism, we situate it within a broader epistemological diagnosis of modernity: Max Weber’s theory of disenchantment. Deep learning occupies an ambiguous position in this framework. On one hand, it represents a complex form of technological calculation and prediction, phenomena Weber associated with disenchantment.

On the other hand, both deep learning experts and observers deploy enchanted, magical discourses to describe these systems’ uninterpretable mechanisms and counter-intuitive behavior. The combination of predictive accuracy and mysterious or unexplainable properties results in myth-making about deep learning’s transcendent, superhuman capacities, especially when it is applied in social settings. We analyze how discourses of magical deep learning produce techno-optimism, drawing on case studies from game-playing, adversarial examples, and attempts to infer sexual orientation from facial images. Enchantment shields the creators of these systems from accountability while its deterministic, calculative power intensifies social processes of classification and control….(More)”.