Adam Wisnieski at the Crime Report: “In February, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) announced it was moving into a new era of transparency and openness with the launch of a new public crime map.
“Crime analysis and mapping data is now in the hands of the city’s citizens,” reads the first line of the press release.
According to the release, the MPD will feed incident report data to RAIDS (Regional Analysis and Information Data Sharing) Online, a nationwide crime map operated by crime analysis software company BAIR Analytics.
Since the announcement, Minneapolis residents have used RAIDS to look at reports of murder, robbery, burglary, assault, rape and other crimes reported in their neighborhoods on a sleek, easy-to-use map, which includes data as recent as yesterday.
On the surface, it’s a major leap forward for transparency in Minneapolis. But some question why the data feed is given exclusively to a single private company.
Transparency advocates argue in fact that the data is not truly in the hands of the city’s residents until citizens can download the raw data so they can analyze, chart or map it on their own.
“For it to actually be open data, it needs to be available to the public in machine readable format,” said Lauren Reid, senior public affairs manager for Code for America, a national non-profit that promotes participation in government through technology.
“Anybody should be able to go download it and read it if they want. That’s open data.”
The Open Knowledge Foundation, a national non-profit that advocates for more government openness, argues open data is important so citizens can participate and engage government in a way that was not possible before.
“Much of the time, citizens are only able to engage with their own governance sporadically — maybe just at an election every 4 or 5 years,” reads the Open Knowledge website. “By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed and involved in decision-making.
“This is more than transparency: it’s about making a full ‘read/write’ society — not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governance, but being able to contribute to it.”.
Minneapolis is not alone.
As Americans demand more information on criminal activity from the government, police departments are flocking to private companies to help them get the information into the public domain.
For many U.S. cities, hooking up with these third-party mapping vendors is the most public their police department has ever been. But the trend has started a messy debate about how “public” the public data actually is.
Outsourcing Makes It Easy
For police departments, outsourcing the presentation of their crime data to a private firm is an easy decision.
Most of the crime mapping sites are free or cost very little. (The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com charges between $600 and $2,400 per year, depending on the size of the agency.)
The department chooses what information it wants to provide. Once the system is set up, the data flows to the companies and then to the public without a lot of effort on behalf of the department.
For the most part, the move doesn’t need legislative approval, just a memorandum of understanding. A police department can even fulfill a new law requiring a public crime map by releasing report data through one of these vendors.
Commander Scott Gerlicher of the MPD’s Strategic Information and Crime Analysis Division says the software has saved the department time.
“I don’t think we are entertaining quite as many requests from the media or the public,” he told The Crime Report. “Plus the price was right: it was free.”
The companies that run some of the most popular sites — The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com, Public Engines’ CrimeReports and BAIR Analytics’ RAIDS — are in the business of selling crime analysis and mapping software to police departments.
Some departments buy internal software from these companies; though some cities, like Minneapolis, just use RAIDS’ free map and have no contracts with BAIR for internal software.
Susan Smith, director of operations at BAIR Analytics, said the goal of RAIDS is to create one national map that includes all crime reports from across all jurisdictions and departments (state and local police).
For people who live near or at the edge of a city line, finding relevant crime data can be hard.
The MPD’s Gerlicher said that was one reason his department chose RAIDS — because many police agencies in the Minneapolis area had already hooked up with the firm.
The operators of these crime maps say they provide a community service.
“We try to get as many agencies as we possibly can. We truly believe this is a good service for the community,” says Gabriela Coverdale, a marketing director at the Omega Group.
Raw Data ‘Off Limits’
However, the sites do not allow the public to download any of the raw data and prohibit anyone from “scraping,” using a program to automatically pull the data from their maps.
In Minneapolis, the police department continues to post PDFs and excel spreadsheets with data, but only RAIDS gets a feed with the most recent data.
Alan Palazzolo, a Code for America fellow who works as an interactive developer for the online non-profit newspaper MinnPost, used monthly reports from the MPD to build a crime application with a map and geographic-oriented chart of crime in Minneapolis.
Nevertheless, he finds the new tool limiting.
“[The MPD’s] ability to actually put out more data, and more timely data, really opens things up,” he said. “It’s great, but they are not doing that with us.”
According to Palazzolo, the arrangement gives BAIR a market advantage that effectively prevents its data from being used for purposes it cannot control.
“Having granular, complete, and historical data would allow us to do more in-depth analysis,” wrote Palazzolo and Kaeti Hinck in an article in MinnPost last year.
“Granular data would allow us to look at smaller areas,” reads the article. “[N]eighborhoods are a somewhat arbitrary boundary when it comes to crime. Often high crime is isolated to a couple of blocks, but aggregated data does not allow us to explore this.
“More complete data would allow us to look at factors like exact locations, time of day, demographic issues, and detailed categories (like bike theft).”
The question of preference gets even messier when looking at another national crime mapping website called SpotCrime.
Unlike the other third-party mapping sites, SpotCrime is not in the business of selling crime analysis software to police departments. It operates more like a newspaper — a newspaper focused solely on the police blotter pages — and makes money off advertising.
Years ago, SpotCrime requested and received crime report data via e-mail from the Minneapolis Police Department and mapped the data on its website. According to SpotCrime owner Colin Drane, the MPD stopped sending e-mails when terminals were set up in the police department for the public to access the data.
So he instead started going through the painstaking process of transferring data from PDFs the MPD posted online and mapping them.
When the MPD hooked up with RAIDS in February, Drane asked for the same feed and was denied. He says more and more police departments around the country are hooking up with one of his competitors and not giving him the same timely data.
The MPD said it prefers RAIDS over SpotCrime and criticized some of the advertisements on SpotCrime.
“We’re not about supporting ad money,” said Gerlicher.
Drane believes all crime data in every city should be open to everyone, in order to prevent any single firm from monopolizing how the information is presented and used.
“The onus needs to be on the public agencies,” he adds. “They need to be fair with the data and they need to be fair with the public.” he said.
Transparency advocates worry that the trend is going in the opposite direction.
Ohio’s Columbus Police Department, for example, recently discontinued its public crime statistic feed and started giving the data exclusively to RAIDS.
The Columbus Dispatch wrote that the new system had less information than the old…”
United States federal government use of crowdsourcing grows six-fold since 2011
at E Pluribus Unum: “Citizensourcing and open innovation can work in the public sector, just as crowdsourcing can in the private sector. Around the world, the use of prizes to spur innovation has been booming for years. The United States of America has been significantly scaling up its use of prizes and challenges to solving grand national challenges since January 2011, when, President Obama signed an updated version of the America COMPETES Act into law.
According to the third congressionally mandated report released by the Obama administration today (PDF/Text), the number of prizes and challenges conducted under the America COMPETES Act has increased by 50% since 2012, 85% since 2012, and nearly six-fold overall since 2011. 25 different federal agencies offered prizes under COMPETES in fiscal year 2013, with 87 prize competitions in total. The size of the prize purses has also grown as well, with 11 challenges over $100,000 in 2013. Nearly half of the prizes conducted in FY 2013 were focused on software, including applications, data visualization tools, and predictive algorithms. Challenge.gov, the award-winning online platform for crowdsourcing national challenges, now has tens of thousands of users who have participated in more than 300 public-sector prize competitions. Beyond the growth in prize numbers and amounts, Obama administration highlighted 4 trends in public-sector prize competitions:
- New models for public engagement and community building during competitions
- Growth software and information technology challenges, with nearly 50% of the total prizes in this category
- More emphasis on sustainability and “creating a post-competition path to success”
- Increased focus on identifying novel approaches to solving problems
The growth of open innovation in and by the public sector was directly enabled by Congress and the White House, working together for the common good. Congress reauthorized COMPETES in 2010 with an amendment to Section 105 of the act that added a Section 24 on “Prize Competitions,” providing all agencies with the authority to conduct prizes and challenges that only NASA and DARPA has previously enjoyed, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which has been guiding its implementation and providing guidance on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government.
“This progress is due to important steps that the Obama Administration has taken to make prizes a standard tool in every agency’s toolbox,” wrote Cristin Dorgelo, assistant director for grand challenges in OSTP, in a WhiteHouse.gov blog post on engaging citizen solvers with prizes:
In his September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, President Obama called on all Federal agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges. Those efforts have expanded since the signing of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, which provided all agencies with expanded authority to pursue ambitious prizes with robust incentives.
To support these ongoing efforts, OSTP and the General Services Administration have trained over 1,200 agency staff through workshops, online resources, and an active community of practice. And NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI) provides a full suite of prize implementation services, allowing agencies to experiment with these new methods before standing up their own capabilities.
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy famously once said that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This rings true, in and outside of government. The idea of governments using prizes like this to inspire technological innovation, however, is not reliant on Web services and social media, born from the fertile mind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As the introduction to the third White House prize report notes:
“One of the most famous scientific achievements in nautical history was spurred by a grand challenge issued in the 18th Century. The issue of safe, long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail was of such great importance that the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. The Longitude Prize, enacted by the British Parliament in 1714, would be worth some £30 million pounds today, but even by that measure the value of the marine chronometer invented by British clockmaker John Harrison might be a deal.”
Centuries later, the Internet, World Wide Web, mobile devices and social media offer the best platforms in history for this kind of approach to solving grand challenges and catalyzing civic innovation, helping public officials and businesses find new ways to solve old problem. When a new idea, technology or methodology that challenges and improves upon existing processes and systems, it can improve the lives of citizens or the function of the society that they live within….”
The Surprising Accuracy Of Crowdsourced Predictions About The Future
Adele Peters in FastCo-Exist: “If you have a question about what’s going to happen next in Syria or North Korea, you might get more accurate predictions by asking a group of ordinary people than from foreign policy experts or even, possibly, CIA agents with classified information. Over the last few years, the Good Judgment Project has proven that crowdsourcing predictions is a surprisingly accurate way to forecast the future.
The project, sponsored by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence office, is currently working with 3,000 people to test their ability to predict outcomes in everything from world politics to the economy. They aren’t experts, just people who are interested in the news.
“We just needed lots of people; we had very few restrictions,” says Don Moore, an associate professor at University of California-Berkeley, who co-led the project. “We wanted people who were interested, and curious, who were moderately well-educated and at least aware enough of the world around them that they listened to the news.”
The group has tackled 250 questions in the experiment so far. None of them have been simple; current questions include whether Turkey will get a new constitution and whether the U.S. and the E.U. will reach a trade deal. But the group consistently got answers right more often than individual experts, just through some simple online research and, in some cases, discussions with each other.
The crowdsourced predictions are even reportedly more accurate than those from intelligence agents. One report says that when “superpredictors,” the people who are right most often, are grouped together in teams, they can outperform agents with classified information by as much as 30%. (The researchers can’t confirm this fact, since the accuracy of spies is, unsurprisingly, classified).
…Crowdsourcing could be useful for any type of prediction, Moore says, not only what’s happening in world politics. “Every major decision depends on a forecast of the future,” he explains. “A company deciding to launch a new product has to figure out what sales might be like. A candidate trying to decide whether to run for office has to forecast how they’ll do in the election. In trying to decide whom to marry, you have to decide what your future looks like together.”
“The way corporations do forecasting now is an embarrassment,” he adds. “Many of the tools we’re developing would be enormously helpful.”
The project is currently recruiting new citizen predictors here.”
To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World
Book by Vincent Mosco: “In the wake of revelations about National Security Agency activities—many of which occur “in the cloud”—this book offers both enlightenment and a critical view. Cloud computing and big data are arguably the most significant forces in information technology today. In clear prose, To the Cloud explores where the cloud originated, what it means, and how important it is for business, government, and citizens. It describes the intense competition among cloud companies like Amazon and Google, the spread of the cloud to government agencies like the controversial NSA, and the astounding growth of entire cloud cities in China. From advertising to trade shows, the cloud and big data are furiously marketed to the world, even as dark clouds loom over environmental, privacy, and employment issues that arise from the cloud. Is the cloud the long-promised information utility that will solve many of the world’s economic and social problems? Or is it just marketing hype? To the Cloud provides the first thorough analysis of the potential and the problems of a technology that may very well disrupt the world.”
The false promise of the digital humanities
Adam Kirsch in the New Republic: “The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities, which is a growth industry. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants—most recently, $1 million to the University of Rochester to create a graduate fellowship.
Despite all this enthusiasm, the question of what the digital humanities is has yet to be given a satisfactory answer. Indeed, no one asks it more often than the digital humanists themselves. The recent proliferation of books on the subject—from sourcebooks and anthologies to critical manifestos—is a sign of a field suffering an identity crisis, trying to determine what, if anything, unites the disparate activities carried on under its banner. “Nowadays,” writes Stephen Ramsay in Defining Digital Humanities, “the term can mean anything from media studies to electronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas.”
Within this range of approaches, we can distinguish a minimalist and a maximalist understanding of digital humanities. On the one hand, it can be simply the application of computer technology to traditional scholarly functions, such as the editing of texts. An exemplary project of this kind is the Rossetti Archive created by Jerome McGann, an online repository of texts and images related to the career of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: this is essentially an open-ended, universally accessible scholarly edition. To others, however, digital humanities represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about culture itself, spurring a change not just in the medium of humanistic work but also in its very substance. At their most starry-eyed, some digital humanists—such as the authors of the jargon-laden manifesto and handbook Digital_Humanities—want to suggest that the addition of the high-powered adjective to the long-suffering noun signals nothing less than an epoch in human history: “We live in one of those rare moments of opportunity for the humanities, not unlike other great eras of cultural-historical transformation such as the shift from the scroll to the codex, the invention of movable type, the encounter with the New World, and the Industrial Revolution.”
The language here is the language of scholarship, but the spirit is the spirit of salesmanship—the very same kind of hyperbolic, hard-sell approach we are so accustomed to hearing about the Internet, or about Apple’s latest utterly revolutionary product. Fundamental to this kind of persuasion is the undertone of menace, the threat of historical illegitimacy and obsolescence. Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over. The same kind of revolutionary rhetoric appears again and again in the new books on the digital humanities, from writers with very different degrees of scholarly commitment and intellectual sophistication.
In Uncharted, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, the creators of the Google Ngram Viewer—an online tool that allows you to map the frequency of words in all the printed matter digitized by Google—talk up the “big data revolution”: “Its consequences will transform how we look at ourselves…. Big data is going to change the humanities, transform the social sciences, and renegotiate the relationship between the world of commerce and the ivory tower.” These breathless prophecies are just hype. But at the other end of the spectrum, even McGann, one of the pioneers of what used to be called “humanities computing,” uses the high language of inevitability: “Here is surely a truth now universally acknowledged: that the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures.”
If ever there were a chance to see the ideological construction of reality at work, digital humanities is it. Right before our eyes, options are foreclosed and demands enforced; a future is constructed as though it were being discovered. By now we are used to this process, since over the last twenty years the proliferation of new technologies has totally discredited the idea of opting out of “the future.”…
Open Government Data Gains Global Momentum
Wyatt Kash in Information Week: “Governments across the globe are deepening their strategic commitments and working more closely to make government data openly available for public use, according to public and private sector leaders who met this week at the inaugural Open Government Data Forum in Abu Dhabi, hosted by the United Nations and the United Arab Emirates, April 28-29.
Data experts from Europe, the Middle East, the US, Canada, Korea, and the World Bank highlighted how one country after another has set into motion initiatives to expand the release of government data and broaden its use. Those efforts are gaining traction due to multinational organizations, such as the Open Government Partnership, the Open Data Institute, The World Bank, and the UN’s e-government division, that are trying to share practices and standardize open data tools.
In the latest example, the French government announced April 24 that it is joining the Open Government Partnership, a group of 64 countries working jointly to make their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. The announcement caps a string of policy shifts, which began with the formal release of France’s Open Data Strategy in May 2011 and which parallel similar moves by the US.
The strategy committed France to providing “free access and reuse of public data… using machine-readable formats and open standards,” said Romain Lacombe, head of innovation for the French prime minister’s open government task force, Etalab. The French government is taking steps to end the practice of selling datasets, such as civil and case-law data, and is making them freely reusable. France launched a public data portal, Data.gouv.fr, in December 2011 and joined a G8 initiative to engage with open data innovators worldwide.
For South Korea, open data is not just about achieving greater transparency and efficiency, but is seen as digital fuel for a nation that by 2020 expects to achieve “ambient intelligence… when all humans and things are connected together,” said Dr. YoungSun Lee, who heads South Korea’s National Information Society Agency.
He foresees open data leading to a shift in the ways government will function: from an era of e-government, where information is delivered to citizens, to one where predictive analysis will foster a “creative government,” in which “government provides customized services for each individual.”
The open data movement is also propelling innovative programs in the United Arab Emirates. “The role of open data in directing economic and social decisions pertaining to investments… is of paramount importance” to the UAE, said Dr. Ali M. Al Khouri, director general of the Emirates Identity Authority. It also plays a key role in building public trust and fighting corruption, he said….”
Findings of the Big Data and Privacy Working Group Review
John Podesta at the White House Blog: “Over the past several days, severe storms have battered Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and other states. Dozens of people have been killed and entire neighborhoods turned to rubble and debris as tornadoes have touched down across the region. Natural disasters like these present a host of challenges for first responders. How many people are affected, injured, or dead? Where can they find food, shelter, and medical attention? What critical infrastructure might have been damaged?
Drawing on open government data sources, including Census demographics and NOAA weather data, along with their own demographic databases, Esri, a geospatial technology company, has created a real-time map showing where the twisters have been spotted and how the storm systems are moving. They have also used these data to show how many people live in the affected area, and summarize potential impacts from the storms. It’s a powerful tool for emergency services and communities. And it’s driven by big data technology.
In January, President Obama asked me to lead a wide-ranging review of “big data” and privacy—to explore how these technologies are changing our economy, our government, and our society, and to consider their implications for our personal privacy. Together with Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the President’s Science Advisor John Holdren, the President’s Economic Advisor Jeff Zients, and other senior officials, our review sought to understand what is genuinely new and different about big data and to consider how best to encourage the potential of these technologies while minimizing risks to privacy and core American values.
Over the course of 90 days, we met with academic researchers and privacy advocates, with regulators and the technology industry, with advertisers and civil rights groups. The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology conducted a parallel study of the technological trends underpinning big data. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy jointly organized three university conferences at MIT, NYU, and U.C. Berkeley. We issued a formal Request for Information seeking public comment, and hosted a survey to generate even more public input.
Today, we presented our findings to the President. We knew better than to try to answer every question about big data in three months. But we are able to draw important conclusions and make concrete recommendations for Administration attention and policy development in a few key areas.
There are a few technological trends that bear drawing out. The declining cost of collection, storage, and processing of data, combined with new sources of data like sensors, cameras, and geospatial technologies, mean that we live in a world of near-ubiquitous data collection. All this data is being crunched at a speed that is increasingly approaching real-time, meaning that big data algorithms could soon have immediate effects on decisions being made about our lives.
The big data revolution presents incredible opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy and every corner of society.
Big data is saving lives. Infections are dangerous—even deadly—for many babies born prematurely. By collecting and analyzing millions of data points from a NICU, one study was able to identify factors, like slight increases in body temperature and heart rate, that serve as early warning signs an infection may be taking root—subtle changes that even the most experienced doctors wouldn’t have noticed on their own.
Big data is making the economy work better. Jet engines and delivery trucks now come outfitted with sensors that continuously monitor hundreds of data points and send automatic alerts when maintenance is needed. Utility companies are starting to use big data to predict periods of peak electric demand, adjusting the grid to be more efficient and potentially averting brown-outs.
Big data is making government work better and saving taxpayer dollars. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have begun using predictive analytics—a big data technique—to flag likely instances of reimbursement fraud before claims are paid. The Fraud Prevention System helps identify the highest-risk health care providers for waste, fraud, and abuse in real time and has already stopped, prevented, or identified $115 million in fraudulent payments.
But big data raises serious questions, too, about how we protect our privacy and other values in a world where data collection is increasingly ubiquitous and where analysis is conducted at speeds approaching real time. In particular, our review raised the question of whether the “notice and consent” framework, in which a user grants permission for a service to collect and use information about them, still allows us to meaningfully control our privacy as data about us is increasingly used and reused in ways that could not have been anticipated when it was collected.
Big data raises other concerns, as well. One significant finding of our review was the potential for big data analytics to lead to discriminatory outcomes and to circumvent longstanding civil rights protections in housing, employment, credit, and the consumer marketplace.
No matter how quickly technology advances, it remains within our power to ensure that we both encourage innovation and protect our values through law, policy, and the practices we encourage in the public and private sector. To that end, we make six actionable policy recommendations in our report to the President:
Advance the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Consumers deserve clear, understandable, reasonable standards for how their personal information is used in the big data era. We recommend the Department of Commerce take appropriate consultative steps to seek stakeholder and public comment on what changes, if any, are needed to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, first proposed by the President in 2012, and to prepare draft legislative text for consideration by stakeholders and submission by the President to Congress.
Pass National Data Breach Legislation. Big data technologies make it possible to store significantly more data, and further derive intimate insights into a person’s character, habits, preferences, and activities. That makes the potential impacts of data breaches at businesses or other organizations even more serious. A patchwork of state laws currently governs requirements for reporting data breaches. Congress should pass legislation that provides for a single national data breach standard, along the lines of the Administration’s 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.
Extend Privacy Protections to non-U.S. Persons. Privacy is a worldwide value that should be reflected in how the federal government handles personally identifiable information about non-U.S. citizens. The Office of Management and Budget should work with departments and agencies to apply the Privacy Act of 1974 to non-U.S. persons where practicable, or to establish alternative privacy policies that apply appropriate and meaningful protections to personal information regardless of a person’s nationality.
Ensure Data Collected on Students in School is used for Educational Purposes. Big data and other technological innovations, including new online course platforms that provide students real time feedback, promise to transform education by personalizing learning. At the same time, the federal government must ensure educational data linked to individual students gathered in school is used for educational purposes, and protect students against their data being shared or used inappropriately.
Expand Technical Expertise to Stop Discrimination. The detailed personal profiles held about many consumers, combined with automated, algorithm-driven decision-making, could lead—intentionally or inadvertently—to discriminatory outcomes, or what some are already calling “digital redlining.” The federal government’s lead civil rights and consumer protection agencies should expand their technical expertise to be able to identify practices and outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that have a discriminatory impact on protected classes, and develop a plan for investigating and resolving violations of law.
Amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The laws that govern protections afforded to our communications were written before email, the internet, and cloud computing came into wide use. Congress should amend ECPA to ensure the standard of protection for online, digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical world—including by removing archaic distinctions between email left unread or over a certain age.
We also identify several broader areas ripe for further study, debate, and public engagement that, collectively, we hope will spark a national conversation about how to harness big data for the public good. We conclude that we must find a way to preserve our privacy values in both the domestic and international marketplace. We urgently need to build capacity in the federal government to identify and prevent new modes of discrimination that could be enabled by big data. We must ensure that law enforcement agencies using big data technologies do so responsibly, and that our fundamental privacy rights remain protected. Finally, we recognize that data is a valuable public resource, and call for continuing the Administration’s efforts to open more government data sources and make investments in research and technology.
While big data presents new challenges, it also presents immense opportunities to improve lives, the United States is perhaps better suited to lead this conversation than any other nation on earth. Our innovative spirit, technological know-how, and deep commitment to values of privacy, fairness, non-discrimination, and self-determination will help us harness the benefits of the big data revolution and encourage the free flow of information while working with our international partners to protect personal privacy. This review is but one piece of that effort, and we hope it spurs a conversation about big data across the country and around the world.
Read the Big Data Report.
See the fact sheet from today’s announcement.“
Looking for the Needle in a Stack of Needles: Tracking Shadow Economic Activities in the Age of Big Data
Manju Bansal in MIT Technology Review: “The undocumented guys hanging out in the home-improvement-store parking lot looking for day labor, the neighborhood kids running a lemonade stand, and Al Qaeda terrorists plotting to do harm all have one thing in common: They operate in the underground economy, a shadowy zone where businesses, both legitimate and less so, transact in the currency of opportunity, away from traditional institutions and their watchful eyes.
One might think that this alternative economy is limited to markets that are low on the Transparency International rankings (such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, for instance). However, a recent University of Wisconsin report estimates the value of the underground economy in the United States at about $2 trillion, about 15% of the total U.S. GDP. And a 2013 study coauthored by Friedrich Schneider, a noted authority on global shadow economies, estimated the European Union’s underground economy at more than 18% of GDP, or a whopping 2.1 trillion euros. More than two-thirds of the underground activity came from the most developed countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Underground economic activity is a multifaceted phenomenon, with implications across the board for national security, tax collections, public-sector services, and more. It includes the activity of any business that relies primarily on old-fashioned cash for most transactions — ranging from legitimate businesses (including lemonade stands) to drug cartels and organized crime.
Though it’s often soiled, heavy to lug around, and easy to lose to theft, cash is still king simply because it is so easy to hide from the authorities. With the help of the right bank or financial institution, “dirty” money can easily be laundered and come out looking fresh and clean, or at least legitimate. Case in point is the global bank HSBC, which agreed to pay U.S. regulators $1.9 billion in fines to settle charges of money laundering on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. According to a U.S. Senate subcommittee report, that process involved transferring $7 billion in cash from the bank’s branches in Mexico to those in the United States. Just for reference, each $100 bill weighs one gram, so to transfer $7 billion, HSBC had to physically transport 70 metric tons of cash across the U.S.-Mexican border.
The Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body established in 1989, has estimated the total amount of money laundered worldwide to be around 2% to 5% of global GDP. Many of these transactions seem, at first glance, to be perfectly legitimate. Therein lies the conundrum for a banker or a government official: How do you identify, track, control, and, one hopes, prosecute money launderers, when they are hiding in plain sight and their business is couched in networked layers of perfectly defensible legitimacy?
Enter big-data tools, such as those provided by SynerScope, a Holland-based startup that is a member of the SAP Startup Focus program. This company’s solutions help unravel the complex networks hidden behind the layers of transactions and interactions.
Networks, good or bad, are near omnipresent in almost any form of organized human activity and particularly in banking and insurance. SynerScope takes data from both structured and unstructured data fields and transforms these into interactive computer visuals that display graphic patterns that humans can use to quickly make sense of information. Spotting of deviations in complex networked processes can easily be put to use in fraud detection for insurance, banking, e-commerce, and forensic accounting.
SynerScope’s approach to big-data business intelligence is centered on data-intense compute and visualization that extend the human “sense-making” capacity in much the same way that a telescope or microscope extends human vision.
To understand how SynerScope helps authorities track and halt money laundering, it’s important to understand how the networked laundering process works. It typically involves three stages.
1. In the initial, or placement, stage, launderers introduce their illegal profits into the financial system. This might be done by breaking up large amounts of cash into less-conspicuous smaller sums that are then deposited directly into a bank account, or by purchasing a series of monetary instruments (checks, money orders) that are then collected and deposited into accounts at other locations.
2. After the funds have entered the financial system, the launderer commences the second stage, called layering, which uses a series of conversions or transfers to distance the funds from their sources. The funds might be channeled through the purchase and sales of investment instruments, or the launderer might simply wire the funds through a series of accounts at various banks worldwide.
Such use of widely scattered accounts for laundering is especially prevalent in those jurisdictions that do not cooperate in anti-money-laundering investigations. Sometimes the launderer disguises the transfers as payments for goods or services.
3. Having successfully processed the criminal profits through the first two phases, the launderer then proceeds to the third stage, integration, in which the funds re-enter the legitimate economy. The launderer might invest the funds in real estate, luxury assets, or business ventures.
Current detection tools compare individual transactions against preset profiles and rules. Sophisticated criminals quickly learn how to make their illicit transactions look normal for such systems. As a result, rules and profiles need constant and costly updating.
But SynerScope’s flexible visual analysis uses a network angle to detect money laundering. It shows the structure of the entire network with data coming in from millions of transactions, a structure that launderers cannot control. With just a few mouse clicks, SynerScope’s relation and sequence views reveal structural interrelationships and interdependencies. When those patterns are mapped on a time scale, it becomes virtually impossible to hide abnormal flows.
SynerScope’s relation and sequence views reveal structural and temporal transaction patterns which make it virtually impossible to hide abnormal money flows.”
Feds see innovation decline within government
Federal Times: “Support for innovation is declining across the government, according to a report by the Partnership for Public Service released April 23.
Federal employee answers to three innovation-related questions on the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey dropped from 61.5 out of 100 in 2012 to 59.4 out of 100, according to the report, produced in partnership with Deloitte.
Federal employee answers to three innovation-related questions on the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey dropped from 61.5 out of 100 in 2012 to 59.4 out of 100, according to the report, produced in partnership with Deloitte.
This chart, extracted from the Partnership for Public Service report, shows the slow but steady decline of innovation measures. (Partnership for Public Service)
While 90 percent of employees surveyed report they are always looking for better ways to do their jobs only 54.7 percent feel encouraged to do so and only 33.4 percent believe their agency rewards creativity and innovation.
“The bottom line is that federal workers are motivated to improve the way they do their work, but they do not feel supported by their organizations,” the report said.
Dave Dye, a director of human capital at Deloitte, LLP, said the report is a message to agency leaders to pay attention and have discussions on innovation and make concerted efforts to enhance innovation in their areas.
“It’s not that leaders have to be innovative in their own right it means they need to set up environments for people to feel that innovation Is encouraged, rewarded and respected,” Dye said.
Most agencies saw a decline in their “innovation score” according to the report, including:
■ The Army saw one of the largest drops in its innovation score – from 64.2 out of 100 I 2012 to 60.1 out of 100 in 2013.
■ NASA – which had the highest score at 76.0 out of 100 in 2013 – also dropped from 76.5 in 2012.
■ The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network at the Treasury Department saw one of the largest drops among component agencies, from 63.8 out of 100 in 2012 to 52.0 in 2013.
Some agencies that have shown improvement are the National Science Foundation and the Peace Corps. Some NASA facilities also saw improvement, including the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
The ongoing effects of sequestration, budget cuts and threat of furloughs may also have had a dampening effect on federal employees, Dye said.
“When people feel safer or more sure about whats going on they are going to better focus on the mission,” he said.
Agency managers should also work to improve their work environments to build trust and confidence in their workforce by showing concerns about people’s careers and supporting development opportunities while recognizing good work, according to Dye.
The report recommends that agencies recognize employees at team meetings or with more formal awards to highlight innovation and creativity and reward success. Managers should make sure to share specific goals, provide a forum for open discussion and work to build trust among the workforce that is needed to help spur innovation.”
Can Government Play Moneyball?
David Bornstein in the New York Times: “…For all the attention it’s getting inside the administration, evidence-based policy-making seems unlikely to become a headline grabber; it lacks emotional appeal. But it does have intellectual heft. And one group that has been doing creative work to give the message broader appeal is Results for America, which has produced useful teaching aids under the banner “Moneyball for Government,” building on the popularity of the book and movie about Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, and the rise of data-driven decision making in major league baseball. (Watch their video explainers here and here.)
Results for America works closely with leaders across political parties and social sectors, to build awareness about evidence-based policy making — drawing attention to key areas where government could dramatically improve people’s lives by augmenting well-tested models. They are also chronicling efforts by local governments around the country, to show how an emerging group of “Geek Cities,” including Baltimore, Denver, Miami, New York, Providence and San Antonio, are using data and evidence to drive improvements in various areas of social policy like education, youth development and employment.
“It seems like common sense to use evidence about what works to get better results,” said Michele Jolin, Results for America’s managing partner. “How could anyone be against it? But the way our system is set up, there are so many loud voices pushing to have dollars spent and policy shaped in the way that works for them. There has been no organized constituency for things that work.”
“The debate in Washington is usually about the quantity of resources,” said David Medina, a partner in Results for America. “We’re trying to bring it back to talking about quality.”
Not everyone will find this change appealing. “When you have a longstanding social service policy, there’s going to be a network of [people and groups] who are organized to keep that money flowing regardless of whether evidence suggests it’s warranted,” said Daniel Stid. “People in social services don’t like to think they’re behaving like other organized interests — like dairy farmers or mortgage brokers — but it leads to tremendous inertia in public policy.”
Beyond the politics, there are practical obstacles to overcome, too. Federal agencies lack sufficient budgets for evaluation or a common definition for what constitutes rigorous evidence. (Any lobbyist can walk into a legislator’s office and claim to have solid data to support an argument.) Up-to-date evidence also needs to be packaged in accessible ways and made available on a timely basis, so it can be used to improve programs, rather than to threaten them. Governments need to build regular evaluations into everything they do — not just conduct big, expensive studies every 10 years or so.
That means developing new ways to conduct quick and inexpensive randomized studies using data that is readily available, said Haskins, who is investigating this approach. “We should be running 10,000 evaluations a year, like they do in medicine.” That’s the only way to produce the rapid trial-and-error learning needed to drive iterative program improvements, he added. (I reported on a similar effort being undertaken by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy.)
Results for America has developed a scorecard to rank federal departments about how prepared they are to produce or incorporate evidence in their programs. It looks at whether a department has an office and a leader with the authority and budget to evaluate its programs. It asks: Does it make its data accessible to the public? Does it compile standards about what works and share them widely? Does it spend at least 1 percent of its budget evaluating its programs? And — most important — does it incorporate evidence in its big grant programs? For now, the Department of Education gets the top score.
The stakes are high. In 2011, for example, the Obama administration launched a process to reform Head Start, doing things like spreading best practices and forcing the worst programs to improve or lose their funding. This February, for the third time, the government released a list of Head Start providers (103 out of about 1,600) who will have to recompete for federal funding because of performance problems. That list represents tens of thousands of preschoolers, many of whom are missing out on the education they need to succeed in kindergarten — and life.
Improving flagship programs like Head Start, and others, is not just vital for the families they serve; it’s vital to restore trust in government. “I am a card-carrying member of the Republican Party and I want us to be governed well,” said Robert Shea, who pushed for better program evaluations as associate director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Bush administration, and continues to focus on this issue as chairman of the National Academy of Public Administration. “This is the most promising thing I know of to get us closer to that goal.”
“This idea has the prospect of uniting Democrats and Republicans,” said Haskins. “But it will involve a broad cultural change. It has to get down to the program administrators, board members and local staff throughout the country — so they know that evaluation is crucial to their operations.”
“There’s a deep mistrust of government and a belief that problems can’t be solved,” said Michele Jolin. “This movement will lead to better outcomes — and it will help people regain confidence in their public officials by creating a more effective, more credible way for policy choices to be made.”