law – Page 20 – The Living Library

The Nudging Divide in the Digital Big Data Era

Curated on August 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Julia M. Puaschunder in the International Robotics & Automation Journal: “Since the end of the 1970ies a wide range of psychological, economic and sociological laboratory and field experiments proved human beings deviating from rational choices and standard neo-classical profit maximization axioms to fail to explain how human actually behave. Behavioral economists proposed to nudge and wink citizens to make better choices for them with many different applications. While the motivation behind nudging appears as a noble endeavor to foster peoples’ lives around the world in very many different applications, the nudging approach raises questions of social hierarchy and class division. The motivating force of the nudgital society may open a gate of exploitation of the populace and – based on privacy infringements – stripping them involuntarily from their own decision power in the shadow of legally-permitted libertarian paternalism and under the cloak of the noble goal of welfare-improving global governance. Nudging enables nudgers to plunder the simple uneducated citizen, who is neither aware of the nudging strategies nor able to oversee the tactics used by the nudgers.

The nudgers are thereby legally protected by democratically assigned positions they hold or by outsourcing strategies used, in which social media plays a crucial rule. Social media forces are captured as unfolding a class dividing nudgital society, in which the provider of social communication tools can reap surplus value from the information shared of social media users. The social media provider thereby becomes a capitalist-industrialist, who benefits from the information shared by social media users, or so-called consumer-workers, who share private information in their wish to interact with friends and communicate to public. The social media capitalist-industrialist reaps surplus value from the social media consumer-workers’ information sharing, which stems from nudging social media users. For one, social media space can be sold to marketers who can constantly penetrate the consumer-worker in a subliminal way with advertisements. But also nudging occurs as the big data compiled about the social media consumer-worker can be resold to marketers and technocrats to draw inferences about consumer choices, contemporary market trends or individual personality cues used for governance control, such as, for instance, border protection and tax compliance purposes.

The law of motion of the nudging societies holds an unequal concentration of power of those who have access to compiled data and who abuse their position under the cloak of hidden persuasion and in the shadow of paternalism. In the nudgital society, information, education and differing social classes determine who the nudgers and who the nudged are. Humans end in different silos or bubbles that differ in who has power and control and who is deceived and being ruled. The owners of the means of governance are able to reap a surplus value in a hidden persuasion, protected by the legal vacuum to curb libertarian paternalism, in the moral shadow of the unnoticeable guidance and under the cloak of the presumption that some know what is more rational than others. All these features lead to an unprecedented contemporary class struggle between the nudgers (those who nudge) and the nudged (those who are nudged), who are divided by the implicit means of governance in the digital scenery. In this light, governing our common welfare through deceptive means and outsourced governance on social media appears critical. In combination with the underlying assumption of the nudgers knowing better what is right, just and fair within society, the digital age and social media tools hold potential unprecedented ethical challenges….(More)”

Algorithmic Transparency for the Smart City

Curated on August 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Robert Brauneis and Ellen P. Goodman: “Emerging across many disciplines are questions about algorithmic ethics – about the values embedded in artificial intelligence and big data analytics that increasingly replace human decisionmaking. Many are concerned that an algorithmic society is too opaque to be accountable for its behavior. An individual can be denied parole or denied credit, fired or not hired for reasons she will never know and cannot be articulated. In the public sector, the opacity of algorithmic decisionmaking is particularly problematic both because governmental decisions may be especially weighty, and because democratically-elected governments bear special duties of accountability. Investigative journalists have recently exposed the dangerous impenetrability of algorithmic processes used in the criminal justice field – dangerous because the predictions they make can be both erroneous and unfair, with none the wiser.

We set out to test the limits of transparency around governmental deployment of big data analytics, focusing our investigation on local and state government use of predictive algorithms. It is here, in local government, that algorithmically-determined decisions can be most directly impactful. And it is here that stretched agencies are most likely to hand over the analytics to private vendors, which may make design and policy choices out of the sight of the client agencies, the public, or both. To see just how impenetrable the resulting “black box” algorithms are, we filed 42 open records requests in 23 states seeking essential information about six predictive algorithm programs. We selected the most widely-used and well-reviewed programs, including those developed by for-profit companies, nonprofits, and academic/private sector partnerships. The goal was to see if, using the open records process, we could discover what policy judgments these algorithms embody, and could evaluate their utility and fairness.

To do this work, we identified what meaningful “algorithmic transparency” entails. We found that in almost every case, it wasn’t provided. Over-broad assertions of trade secrecy were a problem. But contrary to conventional wisdom, they were not the biggest obstacle. It will not usually be necessary to release the code used to execute predictive models in order to dramatically increase transparency. We conclude that publicly-deployed algorithms will be sufficiently transparent only if (1) governments generate appropriate records about their objectives for algorithmic processes and subsequent implementation and validation; (2) government contractors reveal to the public agency sufficient information about how they developed the algorithm; and (3) public agencies and courts treat trade secrecy claims as the limited exception to public disclosure that the law requires. Although it would require a multi-stakeholder process to develop best practices for record generation and disclosure, we present what we believe are eight principal types of information that such records should ideally contain….(More)”.

Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information Removed from the Internet Be Reclaimed?

Curated on August 3, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Susan Nevelow Mart: “…examines the legal bases of the public’s right to access government information, reviews the types of information that have recently been removed from the Internet, and analyzes the rationales given for the removals. She suggests that the concerted use of the Freedom of Information Act by public interest groups and their constituents is a possible method of returning the information to the Internet….(More)”.

Rage against the machines: is AI-powered government worth it?

Curated on July 30, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Maëlle Gavet at the WEF: “…the Australian government’s new “data-driven profiling” trial for drug testing welfare recipients, to US law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology and the deployment of proprietary software in sentencing in many US courts … almost by stealth and with remarkably little outcry, technology is transforming the way we are policed, categorized as citizens and, perhaps one day soon, governed. We are only in the earliest stages of so-called algorithmic regulation — intelligent machines deploying big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate human behaviour and enforce laws — but it already has profound implications for the relationship between private citizens and the state….

Some may herald this as democracy rebooted. In my view it represents nothing less than a threat to democracy itself — and deep scepticism should prevail. There are five major problems with bringing algorithms into the policy arena:

Self-reinforcing bias…
Vulnerability to attack…
Who’s calling the shots?…
Are governments up to it?…
Algorithms don’t do nuance….

All the problems notwithstanding, there’s little doubt that AI-powered government of some kind will happen. So, how can we avoid it becoming the stuff of bad science fiction? To begin with, we should leverage AI to explore positive alternatives instead of just applying it to support traditional solutions to society’s perceived problems. Rather than simply finding and sending criminals to jail faster in order to protect the public, how about using AI to figure out the effectiveness of other potential solutions? Offering young adult literacy, numeracy and other skills might well represent a far superior and more cost-effective solution to crime than more aggressive law enforcement. Moreover, AI should always be used at a population level, rather than at the individual level, in order to avoid stigmatizing people on the basis of their history, their genes and where they live. The same goes for the more subtle, yet even more pervasive data-driven targeting by prospective employers, health insurers, credit card companies and mortgage providers. While the commercial imperative for AI-powered categorization is clear, when it targets individuals it amounts to profiling with the inevitable consequence that entire sections of society are locked out of opportunity….(More)”.

‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

Curated on July 27, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings….(More)”

Global network of ‘hunters’ aim to take down terrorists on the internet

Curated on July 21, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Olivia Solon at The Guardian: “Colonel Kurtz used to spend hours playing social games like Farmville. Now he hunts terrorists on the internet.

The pseudonymous 41-year-old, who runs his own construction company, is one of dozens of volunteer “hunters” to dedicate hours each day trying to identify and infiltrate terror groups online and block the spread of their propaganda.

“We’re trying to save lives and get this crap off the net to keep the next vulnerable kid from seeing propaganda and thinking it’s cool,” said Kurtz.

These hunters plug a gap in social media companies’ ability to keep terrorists off their networks by obsessively tracking and reporting Isis’s most prominent recruiters and propagandists across private messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp and public networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Some of them also provide valuable tip-offs of credible threats to law enforcement.

This type of hunting originated in 2014, when hacktivist collective Anonymous declared “war” on Islamic State with the #OpIsis campaign. The loosely affiliated army of digital activists set out to expose and report Isis supporters on social media, and hack or take down their websites.

Kurtz became a hunter following the November 2015 Paris attack. He had been watching the France-Germany friendly football match online when it was disrupted by loud explosions. That day seven attackers carried out mass shootings and suicide bombings that killed 129 people in France’s capital.

After writing an angry Facebook post about the attack, Kurtz was contacted by a friend and member of Anonymous asking if he’d like to help out with #OpIsis. “It took me a few days to figure things out and after a few weeks I was dropping accounts like flies,” he said.

Out of Anonymous’ #OpIsis there have emerged more considered, organized groups including Ghost Security Group, KDK and a “drama and ego-free” group that Kurtz formed in 2016 after getting tired of the Islamophobia and inaccuracy within the operation…(More).

Features of Parliamentary Websites in Selected Jurisdictions

Curated on July 17, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by The Law Library of Congress, Global Legal Research Center: “In recent years, parliaments around the world have enhanced their websites in order to improve access to legislative information and other parliamentary resources. Innovative features allow constituents and researchers to locate and utilize detailed information on laws and lawmaking in various ways. These include tracking tools and alerts, apps, the use of open data technology, and different search functions. In order to demonstrate some of the developments in this area, staff from the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Law Library of Congress surveyed the official parliamentary websites of fifty countries from all regions of the world, plus the website of the European Parliament. In some cases, information on more than one website is provided where separate sites have been established for different chambers of the national parliament, bringing the total number of individual websites surveyed to seventy.

While the information on the parliamentary websites is primarily in the national language of the particular country, around forty of the individual websites surveyed were found to provide at least limited information in one or more other languages. The European Parliament website can be translated into any of the twenty-four official languages of the members of the European Union.

All of the parliamentary websites included in the survey have at least basic browse tools that allow users to view legislation in a list format, and that may allow for viewing in, for example, date or title order. All of the substantive websites also enable searching, often providing a general search box for the whole site at the top of each page as well as more advanced search options for different types of documents. Some sites provide various facets that can be used to further narrow searches.

Around thirty-nine of the individual websites surveyed provide users with some form of tracking or alert function to receive updates on certain documents (including proposed legislation), parliamentary news, committee activities, or other aspects of the website. This includes the ability to subscribe to different RSS feeds and/or email alerts.

The ability to watch live or recorded proceedings of different parliaments, including debates within the relevant chamber as well as committee hearings, is a common feature of the parliamentary websites surveyed. Fifty-eight of the websites surveyed featured some form of video, including links to dedicated YouTube channels, specific pages where users can browse and search for embedded videos, and separate video services or portals that are linked to or viewable from the main site. Some countries also make videos available on dedicated mobile-friendly sites or apps, including Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. In total, apps containing parliamentary information are provided in just fourteen of the countries surveyed. In comparison, the parliamentary websites of thirty countries are available in mobile-friendly formats, enabling easy access to information and different functionalities using smartphones and tablets.

The table also provides information on some of the additional special features available on the surveyed websites. Examples include dedicated sites or pages that provide educational information about the parliament for children (Argentina, El Salvador, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey); calendar functions, including those that allow users to save information to their personal calendars or otherwise view information about different types of proceedings or events (available on at least twenty websites); and open data portals or other features that allow information to be downloaded in bulk for reuse or analysis, including through the use of APIs (application programming interfaces) (at least six countries)….(More)”.

Democracy Promotion: An Objective of U.S. Foreign Assistance

Curated on July 16, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report by Congressional Research Service: “Promoting democratic institutions, processes, and values has long been a U.S. foreign policy objective, though the priority given to this objective has been inconsistent. World events, competing priorities, and political change within the United States all shape the attention and resources provided to democracy promotion efforts and influence whether such efforts focus on supporting fair elections abroad, strengthening civil society, promoting rule of law and human rights, or other aspects of democracy promotion.

Proponents of democracy promotion often assert that such efforts are essential to global development and U.S. security because stable democracies tend to have better economic growth and stronger protection of human rights, and are less likely to go to war with one another. Critics contend that U.S. relations with foreign countries should focus exclusively on U.S. interests and stability in the world order. U.S. interest in global stability, regardless of the democratic nature of national political systems, could discourage U.S. support for democratic transitions—the implementation of which is uncertain and may lead to more, rather than less, instability.

Funding for democracy promotion assistance is deeply integrated into U.S. foreign policy institutions. More than $2 billion annually has been allocated from foreign assistance funds over the past decade for democracy promotion activities managed by the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other entities. Programs promoting good governance (characterized by participation, transparency, accountability, effectiveness, and equity), rule of law, and promotion of human rights have typically received the largest share of this funding in contrast to lower funding to promote electoral processes and political competition. In recent years, increasing restrictions imposed by some foreign governments on civil society organizations have resulted in an increased emphasis in democracy promotion assistance for strengthening civil society.

Despite bipartisan support for the general concept of democracy promotion, policy debates in the 115th Congress continue to question the consistency, effectiveness, and appropriateness of such foreign assistance. With the Trump Administration indicating that democracy and human rights might not be a top foreign policy priority, advocates in Congress may be challenged to find common ground with the Administration on this issue.

As part of its budget and oversight responsibilities, the 115th Congress may consider the impact of the Trump Administration’s requested FY2018 foreign assistance spending cuts on U.S. democracy promotion assistance, review the effectiveness of democracy promotion activities, evaluate the various channels available for democracy promotion, and consider where democracy promotion ranks among a wide range of foreign policy and budget priorities….(More)”.

Are Future Bureaucrats More Prosocial?

Curated on July 10, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Markus S. Tepe and Pieter Vanhuysse: “…explores the associations between self-reported Public Service Motivation (PSM) and preferred job traits, study choice, and observable prosocial behavior. We study three subject pools covering over 250 university students in Germany. We use laboratory experiments with monetary rewards to measure altruism, fairness, strategic fairness, and cooperativeness, and a post-experimental survey on subjects’ PSM. Higher levels of PSM are not associated with studying public administration but are positively associated with altruism and negatively with strategic fairness. The experimental data reveals robust subject-pool effects. After controlling for PSM, public administration students behave more altruistically and display less merely strategic fairness than business students. And they behave more cooperatively than business and law students. These behavioral findings about future bureaucrats corroborate cumulative earlier survey evidence about the higher prosocial tendencies of public sector employees. They point to the danger of crowding out such tendencies through overly extrinsic management tools….(More)”