AI, huge hacks leave consumers facing a perfect storm of privacy perils

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Joseph Menn: “Hackers are using artificial intelligence to mine unprecedented troves of personal information dumped online in the past year, along with unregulated commercial databases, to trick American consumers and even sophisticated professionals into giving up control of bank and corporate accounts.

Armed with sensitive health information, calling records and hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers, criminals and operatives of countries hostile to the United States are crafting emails, voice calls and texts that purport to come from government officials, co-workers or relatives needing help, or familiar financial organizations trying to protect accounts instead of draining them.

“There is so much data out there that can be used for phishing and password resets that it has reduced overall security for everyone, and artificial intelligence has made it much easier to weaponize,” said Ashkan Soltani, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, the only such state-level agency.

The losses reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center nearly tripled from 2020 to 2023, to $12.5 billion, and a number of sensitive breaches this year have only increased internet insecurity. The recently discovered Chinese government hacks of U.S. telecommunications companies AT&T, Verizon and others, for instance, were deemed so serious that government officials are being told not to discuss sensitive matters on the phone, some of those officials said in interviews. A Russian ransomware gang’s breach of Change Healthcare in February captured data on millions of Americans’ medical conditions and treatments, and in August, a small data broker, National Public Data, acknowledged that it had lost control of hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers and addresses now being sold by hackers.

Meanwhile, the capabilities of artificial intelligence are expanding at breakneck speed. “The risks of a growing surveillance industry are only heightened by AI and other forms of predictive decision-making, which are fueled by the vast datasets that data brokers compile,” U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra said in September…(More)”.

Courts in Buenos Aires are using ChatGPT to draft rulings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Victoria Mendizabal: “In May, the Public Prosecution Service of the City of Buenos Aires began using generative AI to predict rulings for some public employment cases related to salary demands.

Since then, justice employees at the office for contentious administrative and tax matters of the city of Buenos Aires have uploaded case documents into ChatGPT, which analyzes patterns, offers a preliminary classification from a catalog of templates, and drafts a decision. So far, ChatGPT has been used for 20 legal sentences.

The use of generative AI has cut down the time it takes to draft a sentence from an hour to about 10 minutes, according to recent studies conducted by the office.

“We, as professionals, are not the main characters anymore. We have become editors,” Juan Corvalán, deputy attorney general in contentious administrative and tax matters, told Rest of World.

The introduction of generative AI tools has improved efficiency at the office, but it has also prompted concerns within the judiciary and among independent legal experts about possiblebiases, the treatment of personal data, and the emergence of hallucinations. Similar concerns have echoed beyond Argentina’s borders.

“We, as professionals, are not the main characters anymore. We have become editors.”

“Any inconsistent use, such as sharing sensitive information, could have a considerable legal cost,” Lucas Barreiro, a lawyer specializing in personal data protection and a member of Privaia, a civil association dedicated to the defense of human rights in the digital era, told Rest of World.

Judges in the U.S. have voiced skepticism about the use of generative AI in the courts, with Manhattan Federal Judge Edgardo Ramos saying earlier this year that “ChatGPT has been shown to be an unreliable resource.” In Colombia and the Netherlands, the use of ChatGPT by judges was criticized by local experts. But not everyone is concerned: A court of appeals judge in the U.K. who used ChatGPT to write part of a judgment said that it was “jolly useful.”

For Corvalán, the move to generative AI is the culmination of a years-long transformation within the City of Buenos Aires’ attorney general’s office.In 2017, Corvalán put together a group of developers to train an AI-powered system called PROMETEA, which was intended to automate judicial tasks and expedite case proceedings. The team used more than 300,000 rulings and case files related to housing protection, public employment bonuses, enforcement of unpaid fines, and denial of cab licenses to individuals with criminal records…(More)”.

AI Analysis of Body Camera Videos Offers a Data-Driven Approach to Police Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ingrid Wickelgren: But unless something tragic happens, body camera footage generally goes unseen. “We spend so much money collecting and storing this data, but it’s almost never used for anything,” says Benjamin Graham, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

Graham is among a small number of scientists who are reimagining this footage as data rather than just evidence. Their work leverages advances in natural language processing, which relies on artificial intelligence, to automate the analysis of video transcripts of citizen-police interactions. The findings have enabled police departments to spot policing problems, find ways to fix them and determine whether the fixes improve behavior.

Only a small number of police agencies have opened their databases to researchers so far. But if this footage were analyzed routinely, it would be a “real game changer,” says Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford University psychologist, who pioneered this line of research. “We can see beat-by-beat, moment-by-moment how an interaction unfolds.”

In papers published over the past seven years, Eberhardt and her colleagues have examined body camera footage to reveal how police speak to white and Black people differently and what type of talk is likely to either gain a person’s trust or portend an undesirable outcome, such as handcuffing or arrest. The findings have refined and enhanced police training. In a study published in PNAS Nexus in September, the researchers showed that the new training changed officers’ behavior…(More)”.

Once Upon a Crime: Towards Crime Prediction from Demographics and Mobile Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Andrey Bogomolov, Bruno Lepri, Jacopo Staiano, Nuria Oliver, Fabio Pianesi, and Alex Pentland: “In this paper, we present a novel approach to predict crime in a geographic space from multiple data sources, in particular mobile phone and demographic data. The main contribution of the proposed approach lies in using aggregated and anonymized human behavioral data derived from mobile network activity to tackle the crime prediction problem. While previous research efforts have used either background historical knowledge or offenders’ profiling, our findings support the hypothesis that aggregated human behavioral data captured from the mobile network infrastructure, in combination with basic demographic information, can be used to predict crime. In our experimental results with real crime data from London we obtain an accuracy of almost 70% when predicting whether a specific area in the city will be a crime hotspot or not. Moreover, we provide a discussion of the implications of our findings for data-driven crime analysis…(More)”.

Towards effective governance of justice data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD working paper: “…explores the role of data governance in advancing people-centred justice systems. It outlines the objectives, values, and practices necessary to harness data effectively, drawing on OECD policy instruments. The paper provides actionable insights for policymakers aiming to implement data-driven justice reforms. It also addresses the challenges and opportunities presented by digital transformation in the justice sector, advocating for a strategic approach that balances innovation with the protection of fundamental rights. It incorporates lessons from data governance activities and experiences in justice and other relevant sectors. This paper is essential reading for those involved in modernisation of justice and data governance…(More)”.

Civic Monitoring for Environmental Law Enforcement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Anna Berti Suman: “This book presents a thought-provoking inquiry demonstrating how civic environmental monitoring can support law enforcement. It provides an in-depth analysis of applicable legal frameworks and conventions such as the Aarhus Convention, with an enlightening discussion on the civic right to contribute environmental information.

Civic Monitoring for Environmental Law Enforcement discusses multi- and interdisciplinary research into how civil society uses monitoring techniques to gather evidence of environmental issues. The book argues that civic monitoring is a constructive approach for finding evidence of environmental wrongdoings and for leveraging this evidence in different institutional fora, including judicial proceedings and official reporting for environmental protection agencies. It also reveals the challenges and implications associated with a greater reliance on civic monitoring practices by institutions and society at large.

Adopting original methodological approaches to drive inspiration for further research, this book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of environmental governance and regulation, environmental law, politics and policy, and science and technology studies. It is also beneficial to civil society actors, civic initiatives, legal practitioners, and policymakers working in institutions engaged in the application of environmental law…(More)”

An Algorithm Told Police She Was Safe. Then Her Husband Killed Her.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Adam Satariano and Roser Toll Pifarré: “Spain has become dependent on an algorithm to combat gender violence, with the software so woven into law enforcement that it is hard to know where its recommendations end and human decision-making begins. At its best, the system has helped police protect vulnerable women and, overall, has reduced the number of repeat attacks in domestic violence cases. But the reliance on VioGén has also resulted in victims, whose risk levels are miscalculated, getting attacked again — sometimes leading to fatal consequences.

Spain now has 92,000 active cases of gender violence victims who were evaluated by VioGén, with most of them — 83 percent — classified as facing little risk of being hurt by their abuser again. Yet roughly 8 percent of women who the algorithm found to be at negligible risk and 14 percent at low risk have reported being harmed again, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the system.

At least 247 women have also been killed by their current or former partner since 2007 after being assessed by VioGén, according to government figures. While that is a tiny fraction of gender violence cases, it points to the algorithm’s flaws. The New York Times found that in a judicial review of 98 of those homicides, 55 of the slain women were scored by VioGén as negligible or low risk for repeat abuse…(More)”.

Brazil hires OpenAI to cut costs of court battles

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Marcela Ayres and Bernardo Caram: “Brazil’s government is hiring OpenAI to expedite the screening and analysis of thousands of lawsuits using artificial intelligence (AI), trying to avoid costly court losses that have weighed on the federal budget.

The AI service will flag to government the need to act on lawsuits before final decisions, mapping trends and potential action areas for the solicitor general’s office (AGU).

AGU told Reuters that Microsoft would provide the artificial intelligence services from ChatGPT creator OpenAI through its Azure cloud-computing platform. It did not say how much Brazil will pay for the services.

Court-ordered debt payments have consumed a growing share of Brazil’s federal budget. The government estimated it would spend 70.7 billion reais ($13.2 billion) next year on judicial decisions where it can no longer appeal. The figure does not include small-value claims, which historically amount to around 30 billion reais annually.

The combined amount of over 100 billion reais represents a sharp increase from 37.3 billion reais in 2015. It is equivalent to about 1% of gross domestic product, or 15% more than the government expects to spend on unemployment insurance and wage bonuses to low-income workers next year.

AGU did not provide a reason for Brazil’s rising court costs…(More)”.

The Crime Data Handbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Laura Huey and David Buil-Gil: “Crime research has grown substantially over the past decade, with a rise in evidence-informed approaches to criminal justice, statistics-driven decision-making and predictive analytics. The fuel that has driven this growth is data – and one of its most pressing challenges is the lack of research on the use and interpretation of data sources.

This accessible, engaging book closes that gap for researchers, practitioners and students. International researchers and crime analysts discuss the strengths, perils and opportunities of the data sources and tools now available and their best use in informing sound public policy and criminal justice practice…(More)”.

Measuring the mobile body

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Laura Jung: “…While nation states have been collecting data on citizens for the purposes of taxation and military recruitment for centuries, its indexing, organization in databases and classification for particular governmental purposes – such as controlling the mobility of ‘undesirable’ populations – is a nineteenth-century invention. The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault describes how, in the context of growing urbanization and industrialization, states became increasingly preoccupied with the question of ‘circulation’. Persons and goods, as well as pathogens, circulated further than they had in the early modern period. While states didn’t seek to suppress or control these movements entirely, they sought means to increase what was seen as ‘positive’ circulation and minimize ‘negative’ circulation. They deployed the novel tools of a positivist social science for this purpose: statistical approaches were used in the field of demography to track and regulate phenomena such as births, accidents, illness and deaths. The emerging managerial nation state addressed the problem of circulation by developing a very particular toolkit amassing detailed information about the population and developing standardized methods of storage and analysis.

One particularly vexing problem was the circulation of known criminals. In the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that if a person offended once, they would offend again. However, the systems available for criminal identification were woefully inadequate to the task.

As criminologist Simon Cole explains, identifying an unknown person requires a ‘truly unique body mark’. Yet before the advent of modern systems of identification, there were only two ways to do this: branding or personal recognition. While branding had been widely used in Europe and North America on convicts, prisoners and enslaved people, evolving ideas around criminality and punishment largely led to the abolition of physical marking in the early nineteenth century. The criminal record was established in its place: a written document cataloguing the convict’s name and a written description of their person, including identifying marks and scars…(More)”.