Environmental Law, Big Data, and the Torrent of Singularities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by William Boyd: “How will big data impact environmental law in the near future? This Essay imagines one possible future for environmental law in 2030 that focuses on the implications of big data for the protection of public health from risks associated with pollution and industrial chemicals. It assumes the perspective of an historian looking back from the end of the twenty-first century at the evolution of environmental law during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The premise of the Essay is that big data will drive a major shift in the underlying knowledge practices of environmental law (along with other areas of law focused on health and safety). This change in the epistemic foundations of environmental law, it is argued, will in turn have important, far-reaching implications for environmental law’s normative commitments and for its ability to discharge its statutory responsibilities. In particular, by significantly enhancing the ability of environmental regulators to make harm more visible and more traceable, big data will put considerable pressure on previous understandings of acceptable risk across populations, pushing toward a more singular and more individualized understanding of harm. This will raise new and difficult questions regarding environmental law’s capacity to confront and take responsibility for the actual lives caught up in the tragic choices it is called upon to make. In imagining this near future, the Essay takes a somewhat exaggerated and, some might argue, overly pessimistic view of the implications of big data for environmental law’s efforts to protect public health. This is done not out of a conviction that such a future is likely, but rather to highlight some of the potential problems that may arise as big data becomes a more prominent part of environmental protection. In an age of data triumphalism, such a perspective, it is hoped, may provide grounds for a more critical engagement with the tools and knowledge practices that inform environmental law and the implications of those tools for environmental law’s ability to meet its obligations. Of course, there are other possible futures, and big data surely has the potential to make many positive contributions to environmental protection in the coming decades. Whether it will do so will depend in no small part on the collective choices we make to manage these new capabilities in the years ahead….(More)”

The Risk to Civil Liberties of Fighting Crime With Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Quentin Hardy  in the New York Times: “…Sharing data, both among the parts of a big police department and between the police and the private sector, “is a force multiplier,” he said.

Companies working with the military and intelligence agencies have long practiced these kinds of techniques, which the companies are bringing to domestic policing, in much the way surplus military gear has beefed upAmerican SWAT teams.

Palantir first built up its business by offering products like maps of social networks of extremist bombers and terrorist money launderers, and figuring out efficient driving routes to avoid improvised explosive devices.

Palantir used similar data-sifting techniques in New Orleans to spot individuals most associated with murders. Law enforcement departments around Salt Lake City used Palantir to allow common access to 40,000 arrest photos, 520,000 case reports and information like highway and airport data — building human maps of suspected criminal networks.

People in the predictive business sometimes compare what they do to controlling the other side’s “OODA loop,” a term first developed by a fighter pilot and military strategist named John Boyd.

OODA stands for “observe, orient, decide, act” and is a means of managing information in battle.

“Whether it’s war or crime, you have to get inside the other side’s decision cycle and control their environment,” said Robert Stasio, a project manager for cyberanalysis at IBM, and a former United States government intelligence official. “Criminals can learn to anticipate what you’re going to do and shift where they’re working, employ more lookouts.”

IBM sells tools that also enable police to become less predictable, for example, by taking different routes into an area identified as a crime hotspot. It has also conducted studies that show changing tastes among online criminals — for example, a move from hacking retailers’ computers to stealing health care data, which can be used to file for federal tax refunds.

But there are worries about what military-type data analysis means for civil liberties, even among the companies that get rich on it.

“It definitely presents challenges to the less sophisticated type of criminal,but it’s creating a lot of what is called ‘Big Brother’s little helpers,’” Mr.Bowman said. For now, he added, much of the data abundance problem is that “most police aren’t very good at this.”…(More)’

The case against democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in the New Yorker: “Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them.

Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. …In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.”…(More)”

Learning Privacy Expectations by Crowdsourcing Contextual Informational Norms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Freedom to Tinker: “The advent of social apps, smart phones and ubiquitous computing has brought a great transformation to our day-to-day life. The incredible pace with which the new and disruptive services continue to emerge challenges our perception of privacy. To keep apace with this rapidly evolving cyber reality, we need to devise agile methods and frameworks for developing privacy-preserving systems that align with evolving user’s privacy expectations.

Previous efforts have tackled this with the assumption that privacy norms are provided through existing sources such law, privacy regulations and legal precedents. They have focused on formally expressing privacy norms and devising a corresponding logic to enable automatic inconsistency checks and efficient enforcement of the logic.

However, because many of the existing regulations and privacy handbooks were enacted well before the Internet revolution took place, they often lag behind and do not adequately reflect the application of logic in modern systems. For example, the Family Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was enacted in 1974, long before Facebook, Google and many other online applications were used in an educational context. More recent legislation faces similar challenges as novel services introduce new ways to exchange information, and consequently shape new, unconsidered information flows that can change our collective perception of privacy.

Crowdsourcing Contextual Privacy Norms

Armed with the theory of Contextual Integrity (CI) in our work, we are exploring ways to uncover societal norms by leveraging the advances in crowdsourcing technology.

In our recent paper, we present the methodology that we believe can be used to extract a societal notion of privacy expectations. The results can be used to fine tune the existing privacy guidelines as well as get a better perspective on the users’ expectations of privacy.

CI defines privacy as collection of norms (privacy rules) that reflect appropriate information flows between different actors. Norms capture who shares what, with whom, in what role, and under which conditions. For example, while you are comfortable sharing your medical information with your doctor, you might be less inclined to do so with your colleagues.

We use CI as a proxy to reason about privacy in the digital world and a gateway to understanding how people perceive privacy in a systematic way. Crowdsourcing is a great tool for this method. We are able to ask hundreds of people how they feel about a particular information flow, and then we can capture their input and map it directly onto the CI parameters. We used a simple template to write Yes-or-No questions to ask our crowdsourcing participants:

“Is it acceptable for the [sender] to share the [subject’s] [attribute] with [recipient] [transmission principle]?”

For example:

“Is it acceptable for the student’s professor to share the student’s record of attendance with the department chair if the student is performing poorly? ”

In our experiments, we leveraged Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) to ask 450 turkers over 1400 such questions. Each question represents a specific contextual information flow that users can approve, disapprove or mark under the Doesn’t Make Sense category; the last category could be used when 1) the sender is unlikely to have the information, 2) the receiver would already have the information, or 3) the question is ambiguous….(More)”

Big Data Is Not a Monolith

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Hamid R. Ekbia and Michael Mattioli: “Big data is ubiquitous but heterogeneous. Big data can be used to tally clicks and traffic on web pages, find patterns in stock trades, track consumer preferences, identify linguistic correlations in large corpuses of texts. This book examines big data not as an undifferentiated whole but contextually, investigating the varied challenges posed by big data for health, science, law, commerce, and politics. Taken together, the chapters reveal a complex set of problems, practices, and policies.

The advent of big data methodologies has challenged the theory-driven approach to scientific knowledge in favor of a data-driven one. Social media platforms and self-tracking tools change the way we see ourselves and others. The collection of data by corporations and government threatens privacy while promoting transparency. Meanwhile, politicians, policy makers, and ethicists are ill-prepared to deal with big data’s ramifications. The contributors look at big data’s effect on individuals as it exerts social control through monitoring, mining, and manipulation; big data and society, examining both its empowering and its constraining effects; big data and science, considering issues of data governance, provenance, reuse, and trust; and big data and organizations, discussing data responsibility, “data harm,” and decision making….(More)”

Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution: hope for disillusioned voters everywhere

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 et al in The Conversation Global: “Western democracies are in turmoil. From Brexit to Donald Trump, to a general lack of trust in politics, disillusioned voters are expressing their frustration in strange ways. In Iceland, they are taking a more proactive, hopeful approach – and it’s a lesson to the rest of the world. It looks as though a crowd-sourced constitution, developed in 2012, could finally be about to make its way through parliament.

The document – the result of four months of consultation – was approved by a two-thirds majority in a national referendum but was ultimately rejected by the government of the time. It includes clauses on environmental protection, puts international human rights law and the rights of refugees and migrants front and centre, and proposes redistributing the fruits of Iceland’s natural resources – notably fishing.

The Pirate Party has made getting the constitution through parliament a priority. And a pre-election agreement between five parties to make that happen within two years suggests a strong commitment on almost every side.

As important as the content is how the constitution was produced. The participatory nature of its writing sets it apart from other similar documents. The soul-searching prompted by the economic crash offered a chance to reassess what Icelandic society stands for and provides the perfect moment to change the way the country operates. This existential reimagining is the heart of the constitution and cannot be underestimated.

The process has been reminiscent of the Occupy movement that sprang up across the world in 2011. For radical politics, legitimacy comes not simply through single-shot participation, such as through elections, but through a continued involvement in “constitutionalising” – in the processes of rule-making and defining the identity or ethos of a particular community.

In mainstream politics, constitutions bring social order. They represent the agreement of a single set of principles and associated rules. But once these are decided on, they are often fixed (think of the way the US Constitution is used as an unquestionable governing rule-book and how hard it is to pass amendments). Popular change is often virtually impossible. Elites can even sometimes overrule or ignore constitutional provisions…

Constitutionalising does not stop after a certain point, but ought to continue as a fundamental part of social and political activity. The problem with the nation state, potentially with the exception of Iceland, is that it has become ossified. So what might an alternative look like?

Rather than handing collective responsibility to institutions such as parliaments and courts, no matter how well-intentioned, protection is assured via a set of rules to which everyone consents and has a hand in designing…

In Iceland the crowd-sourced constitution contains a provision for citizen-led initiatives to propose and alter legislation. So the great promise of this next phase in Iceland’s politics is not simply a social democratic consensus around financial and industrial regulation and human rights, but also an attempt to redress the balance of power between citizens and government. Beyond being given a chance to help write the constitution or to vote every few years, the people are being given the chance to remain constantly involved in the shaping of the rules that govern their society….(More)”

Supporting Collaborative Political Decision Making: An Interactive Policy Process Visualization System

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tobias Ruppert et al: “The process of political decision making is often complex and tedious. The policy process consists of multiple steps, most of them are highly iterative. In addition, different stakeholder groups are involved in political decision making and contribute to the process. A series of textual documents accompanies the process. Examples are official documents, discussions, scientific reports, external reviews, newspaper articles, or economic white papers. Experts from the political domain report that this plethora of textual documents often exceeds their ability to keep track of the entire policy process. We present PolicyLine, a visualization system that supports different stakeholder groups in overview-and-detail tasks for large sets of textual documents in the political decision making process. In a longitudinal design study conducted together with domain experts in political decision making, we identified missing analytical functionality on the basis of a problem and domain characterization. In an iterative design phase, we created PolicyLine in close collaboration with the domain experts. Finally, we present the results of three evaluation rounds, and reflect on our collaborative visualization system….(More)”

The Future of Drone Use: Opportunities and Threats from Ethical and Legal Perspectives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bart Custers: “Given the popularity of drones and the fact that they are easy and cheap to buy, it is generally expected that the ubiquity of drones will significantly increase within the next few years. This raises questions as to what is technologically feasible (now and in the future), what is acceptable from an ethical point of view and what is allowed from a legal point of view. Drone technology is to some extent already available and to some extent still in development. The aim and scope of this book is to map the opportunities and threats associated with the use of drones and to discuss the ethical and legal issues of the use of drones.
This book provides an overview of current drone technologies and applications and of what to expect in the next few years. The question of how to regulate the use of drones in the future is addressed, by considering conditions and contents of future drone legislation and by analyzing issues surrounding privacy and safeguards that can be taken. As such, this book is valuable to scholars in several disciplines, such as law, ethics, sociology, politics and public administration, as well as to practitioners and others who may be confronted with the use of drones in their work, such as professionals working in the military, law enforcement, disaster management and infrastructure management. Individuals and businesses with a specific interest in drone use may also find in the nineteen contributions contained in this volume unexpected perspectives on this new field of research and innovation….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Gun Violence Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Penn Engineering: “Gun violence is often described as an epidemic, but as visible and shocking as shooting incidents are, epidemiologists who study that particular source of mortality have a hard time tracking them. The Centers for Disease Control is prohibited by federal law from conducting gun violence research, so there is little in the way of centralized infrastructure to monitor where, how,when, why and to whom shootings occur.

Chris Callison-Burch, Aravind K.Joshi Term Assistant Professor in Computer and InformationScience, and graduate studentEllie Pavlick are working to solve this problem.

They have developed the GunViolence Database, which combines machine learning and crowdsourcing techniques to produce a national registry of shooting incidents. Callison-Burch and Pavlick’s algorithm scans thousands of articles from local newspaper and television stations,determines which are about gun violence, then asks everyday people to pullout vital statistics from those articles, compiling that information into a unified, open database.

For natural language processing experts like Callison-Burch and Pavlick, the most exciting prospect of this effort is that it is training computer systems to do this kind of analysis automatically. They recently presented their work on that front at Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange conference.

The Gun Violence Database project started in 2014, when it became the centerpiece of Callison-Burch’s “Crowdsourcing and Human Computation”class. There, Pavlick developed a series of homework assignments that challenged undergraduates to develop a classifier that could tell whether a given news article was about a shooting incident.

“It allowed us to teach the things we want students to learn about datascience and natural language processing, while giving them the motivation to do a project that could contribute to the greater good,” says Callison-Burch.

The articles students used to train their classifiers were sourced from “TheGun Report,” a daily blog from New York Times reporters that attempted to catalog shootings from around the country in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Realizing that their algorithmic approach could be scaled up to automate what the Times’ reporters were attempting, the researchers began exploring how such a database could work. They consulted with DouglasWiebe, a Associate Professor of Epidemiology in Biostatistics andEpidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, to learn more about what kind of information public health researchers needed to better study gun violence on a societal scale.

From there, the researchers enlisted people to annotate the articles their classifier found, connecting with them through Mechanical Turk, Amazon’scrowdsourcing platform, and their own website, http://gun-violence.org/…(More)”

Nudging Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by I. Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, and Christopher T. Robertson: “Behavioral nudges are everywhere: calorie counts on menus, automated text reminders to encourage medication adherence, a reminder bell when a driver’s seatbelt isn’t fastened. Designed to help people make better health choices, these reminders have become so commonplace that they often go unnoticed. In Nudging Health, forty-five experts in behavioral science and health policy from across academia, government, and private industry come together to explore whether and how these tools are effective in improving health outcomes.

Behavioral science has swept the fields of economics and law through the study of nudges, cognitive biases, and decisional heuristics—but it has only recently begun to impact the conversation on health care.Nudging Health wrestles with some of the thorny philosophical issues, legal limits, and conceptual questions raised by behavioral science as applied to health law and policy. The volume frames the fundamental issues surrounding health nudges by addressing ethical questions. Does cost-sharing for health expenditures cause patients to make poor decisions? Is it right to make it difficult for people to opt out of having their organs harvested for donation when they die? Are behavioral nudges paternalistic? The contributors examine specific applications of behavioral science, including efforts to address health care costs, improve vaccination rates, and encourage better decision-making by physicians. They wrestle with questions regarding the doctor-patient relationship and defaults in healthcare while engaging with larger, timely questions of healthcare reform.

Nudging Health is the first multi-voiced assessment of behavioral economics and health law to span such a wide array of issues—from the Affordable Care Act to prescription drugs….(More)”