NewsVine_Mariyam
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...How It Works.
The article asks the question "Would you rather a group of government administrators, who meet in secret and are exempt from disclosure, decide who is unfit to fly? Or would it be better for a computer, accountable only to its own code, to make that call?"
If I could write the code, I'd be comfortable with the computer doing the analyzing, however it's not the code that is the problem it's the business rules that it implements, and the individuals who decide what constitutes "suspicious".
More importantly, the TSA has several failed profiling programs under it's belt already. If all they do is take their prejudices and biases and turn them into computer code, then we're no better off with the computer doing it.
WHEN they get sued, it will be critical for the plaintiff attorney/investigator to subpoena their decision tree if they don't want to turn over the code itself.
Homeland Security Will Let Computers Predict Who Might Be a Terrorist on Your Plane — Just Don’t Ask How It Works
You’re rarely allowed to know exactly what’s keeping you safe. When you fly, you’re subject to secret rules, secret watchlists, hidden cameras, and other trappings of a plump, thriving surveillance culture. The Department of Homeland Security is now complicating the picture further by paying a private Virginia firm to build a software algorithm with the power to flag you as someone who might try to blow up the plane.
The new DHS program will give foreign airports around the world free software that teaches itself who the bad guys are, continuing society’s relentless swapping of human judgment for machine learning. DataRobot, a northern Virginia-based automated machine learning firm, won a contract from the department to develop “predictive models to enhance identification of high risk passengers” in software that should “make real-time prediction with a reasonable response time” of less than one second, according to a technical overview that was written for potential contractors and reviewed by The Intercept. The contract assumes the software will produce false positives and requires that the terrorist-predicting algorithm’s accuracy should increase when confronted with such mistakes. DataRobot is currently testing the software, according to a DHS news release.
The contract also stipulates that the software’s predictions must be able to function “solely” using data gleaned from ticket records and demographics — criteria like origin airport, name, birthday, gender, and citizenship. The software can also draw from slightly more complex inputs, like the name of the associated travel agent, seat number, credit card information, and broader travel itinerary. The overview document describes a situation in which the software could “predict if a passenger or a group of passengers is intended to join the terrorist groups overseas, by looking at age, domestic address, destination and/or transit airports, route information (one-way or round trip), duration of the stay, and luggage information, etc., and comparing with known instances.”
The article asks the question "Would you rather a group of government administrators, who meet in secret and are exempt from disclosure, decide who is unfit to fly? Or would it be better for a computer, accountable only to its own code, to make that call?"
If I could write the code, I'd be comfortable with the computer doing the analyzing, however it's not the code that is the problem it's the business rules that it implements, and the individuals who decide what constitutes "suspicious".
More importantly, the TSA has several failed profiling programs under it's belt already. If all they do is take their prejudices and biases and turn them into computer code, then we're no better off with the computer doing it.
WHEN they get sued, it will be critical for the plaintiff attorney/investigator to subpoena their decision tree if they don't want to turn over the code itself.
Homeland Security Will Let Computers Predict Who Might Be a Terrorist on Your Plane — Just Don’t Ask How It Works
You’re rarely allowed to know exactly what’s keeping you safe. When you fly, you’re subject to secret rules, secret watchlists, hidden cameras, and other trappings of a plump, thriving surveillance culture. The Department of Homeland Security is now complicating the picture further by paying a private Virginia firm to build a software algorithm with the power to flag you as someone who might try to blow up the plane.
The new DHS program will give foreign airports around the world free software that teaches itself who the bad guys are, continuing society’s relentless swapping of human judgment for machine learning. DataRobot, a northern Virginia-based automated machine learning firm, won a contract from the department to develop “predictive models to enhance identification of high risk passengers” in software that should “make real-time prediction
The contract also stipulates that the software’s predictions must be able to function “solely” using data gleaned from ticket records and demographics — criteria like origin airport, name, birthday, gender, and citizenship. The software can also draw from slightly more complex inputs, like the name of the associated travel agent, seat number, credit card information, and broader travel itinerary. The overview document describes a situation in which the software could “predict if a passenger or a group of passengers is intended to join the terrorist groups overseas, by looking at age, domestic address, destination and/or transit airports, route information (one-way or round trip), duration of the stay, and luggage information, etc., and comparing with known instances.”
