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Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Murder prediction' algorithms echo some of Stalin's most horrific policies — governments are treading a very dangerous line in pursuing them
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Describing the horrors of communism under Stalin and others, Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his magnum opus, "The Gulag Archipelago," that "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." Indeed, under the communist regime, citizens were removed from society before they could cause harm to it. This removal, which often entailed a trip to the labor camp from which many did not return, took place in a manner that deprived the accused of due process. In many cases, the mere suspicion or even hint that an act against the regime might occur was enough to earn a one way ticket with little to no recourse. The underlying premise here that the officials knew when someone might commit a transgression. In other words, law enforcement knew where that line lies in people's hearts. The U.K. government has decided to chase this chimera by investing in a program that seeks to preemptively identify who might commit murder. Specifically, the project uses government and police data to profile people to "predict" who have a high likelihood to commit murder. Currently, the program is in its research stage, with similar programs being used for the context of making probation decisions. Such a program that reduces individuals to data points carries enormous risks that might outweigh any gains. First, the output of such programs is not error free, meaning it might wrongly implicate people. Second, we will never know if a prediction was incorrect because there's no way of knowing if something doesn't happen — was a murder prevented, or would it never have taken place remains unanswerable? Third, the program can be misused by opportunistic actors to justify targeting people, especially minorities — the ability to do so is baked into a bureaucracy. Consider: the basis of a bureaucratic state rests on its ability to reduce human beings to numbers. In doing so, it offers the advantages of efficiency and fairness — no one is supposed to get preferential treatment. Regardless of a person's status or income, the DMV (DVLA in the U.K.) would treat the application for a driver's license or its renewal the same way. But mistakes happen, and navigating the labyrinth of bureaucratic procedures to rectify them is no easy task. In the age of algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), this problem of accountability and recourse in case of errors has become far more pressing. Mathematician Cathy O'Neil has documented cases of wrongful termination of school teachers because of poor scores as calculated by an AI algorithm. The algorithm, in turn, was fueled by what could be easily measured (e.g., test scores) rather than the effectiveness of teaching (a poor performing student improved significantly or how much teachers helped students in non quantifiable ways). The algorithm also glossed over whether grade inflation had occurred in the previous years. When the teachers questioned the authorities about the performance reviews that led to their dismissal, the explanation they received was in the form of "the math told us to do so" — even after authorities admitted that the underlying math was not 100% accurate. If a potential future murderer is preemptively arrested, "Minority Report"-style, how can we know if the person may have decided on their own not to commit murder? As such, the use of algorithms creates what journalist Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink" — it strips accountability by ensuring that no one person or entity can be held responsible, and it prevents the person affected by a decision from being able to fix mistakes. This creates a twofold problem: An algorithm's estimates can be flawed, and the algorithm does not update itself because no one is held accountable. No algorithm can be expected to be accurate all the time; it can be calibrated with new data. But this is an idealistic view that does not even hold true in science; scientists can resist updating a theory or schema, especially when they are heavily invested in it. And similarly and unsurprisingly, bureaucracies do not readily update their beliefs. To use an algorithm in an attempt to predict who is at risk of committing murder is perplexing and unethical. Not only could it be inaccurate, but there's no way to know if the system was right. In other words, if a potential future murderer is preemptively arrested, "Minority Report"-style, how can we know if the person may have decided on their own not to commit murder? The UK government is yet to clarify how they intend to use the program other than stating that the research is being carried for the purposes of "preventing and detecting unlawful acts." We're already seeing similar systems being used in the United States. In Louisiana, an algorithm called TIGER (short for "Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry") — predicts whether an inmate might commit a crime if released, which then serves as a basis for making parole decisions. Recently, a 70-year-old nearly blind inmate was denied parole because TIGER predicted he had a high risk of re-offending.. In another case that eventually went to the Wisconsin Supreme Court (State vs. Loomis), an algorithm was used to guide sentencing. Challenges to the sentence — including a request for access to the algorithm to determine how it reached its recommendation — were denied on grounds that the technology was proprietary. In essence, the technological opaqueness of the system was compounded in a way that potentially undermined due process. Equally, if not more troublingly, the dataset underlying the program in the U.K. — initially dubbed the Homicide Prediction Project — consists of hundreds of thousands of people who never granted permission for their data to be used to train the system. Worse, the dataset — compiled using data from the Ministry, Greater Manchester Police of Justice, and the Police National Computer — contains personal data, including, but not limited to, information on addiction, mental health, disabilities, previous instances of self-harm, and whether they had been victims of a crime. Indicators such as gender and race are also included. Related stories —The US is squandering the one resource it needs to win the AI race with China — human intelligence —Climate wars are approaching — and they will redefine global conflict —'It is a dangerous strategy, and one for which we all may pay dearly': Dismantling USAID leaves the US more exposed to pandemics than ever These variables naturally increase the likelihood of bias against ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups. So the algorithm's predictions may simply reflect policing choices of the past — predictive AI algorithms rely on statistical induction, so they project past (troubling) patterns in the data into the future. In addition, the data overrepresents Black offenders from affluent areas as well as all ethnicities from deprived neighborhoods. Past studies show that AI algorithms that make predictions about behavior work less well for Black offenders than they do for other groups. Such findings do little to allay genuine fears that racial minority groups and other vulnerable groups will be unfairly targeted. In his book, Solzhenitsyn informed the Western world of the horrors of a bureaucratic state grinding down its citizens in service of an ideal, with little regard for the lived experience of human beings. The state was almost always wrong (especially on moral grounds), but, of course, there was no mea culpa. Those who were wronged were simply collateral damage to be forgotten. Now, half a century later, it is rather strange that a democracy like the U.K. is revisiting a horrific and failed project from an authoritarian Communist country as a way of "protecting the public." The public does need to be protected — not only from criminals but also from a "technopoly" that vastly overestimates the role of technology in building and maintaining a healthy society.
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The CIA Book Club by Charlie English review – chapter and verse as a weapon of war
In March 1984 Polish customs officers noticed a suspicious truck. It had arrived on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen, docking at the Baltic port of Świnoujście. The truck's interior was smaller than its exterior. Workmen broke through a walled-off inside panel. To their surprise, they found a cache of books – 800 of them – and illicit printing presses. And forbidden walkie-talkies. 'Oh shit! Reactionary propaganda!' the officer exclaimed. The shipment was to be delivered to the Polish opposition movement Solidarity. The country's communist leader, Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski, had banned Solidarity three years earlier. The forbidden books included critiques of the socialist system and pamphlets on human rights. Other works smuggled behind the iron curtain included Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, philosophical texts by Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, and copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly. The organisation that funded this highbrow delivery service was none other than the CIA. For 35 years it sent books, magazines and video cassettes to the Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe, as well as to the USSR. The methods used were ingenious. They included travellers hiding material in their luggage, as well as balloons, yachts and a baby's nappy, taken on a flight to Warsaw and containing Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. As Charlie English argues, in his entertaining and vivid new work, The CIA Book Club, this programme was a success. It played a part in defeating Polish communism and in hastening the demise of similar regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And it was cheap. It cost $2-4m annually. During the same cold war period the CIA was splurging $700m on supporting Mujahideen fighters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. For Poland's dissidents the printing presses sent by the west were the equivalent of guns or tanks. As one put it, literature nourished the soul and gave Poles a sense of a bigger human context. Books encouraged dissent. The editor Adam Michnik – who played a leading role in Solidarity's struggle and spent much of the 1980s in jail – said that after reading a book 'your spine would be straightening up'. He observed: 'You knew then you could tell the state 'No'.' The Polish democracy activists helped by the CIA were not stooges. They selected which titles to distribute, many of them written by people who had lived in the eastern bloc. A key person was Mirosław Chojecki, whom English dubs Solidarity's minister for smuggling. Chojecki was a talented publisher who had numerous run-ins with the secret police. They arrested him more than 40 times, but failed to stop his underground operation. When strikes broke out in 1980 at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk, the authorities cut the phones. Chojecki brought out a special newsletter, Bulletin, in support of the workers. The country's communist rulers blinked, with Solidarity recognised. Fifteen months later, though, and under pressure from Moscow, Jaruzelski imposed martial law. Solidarity officials were rounded up. Chojecki was out of the country and, for the next decade, produced dissident literature from Paris. English writes thrillingly about the activists inside Poland, and their efforts to defy the clampdown. Women played a crucial role. In 1982 the journalist Helena Łuczywo launched the Mazovia Weekly, a vital source of information in dark times. She and her colleagues slept in safe-houses, carried fake IDs, and used contacts to source banned offset presses. The Polish security services were deeply chauvinist. They assumed – wrongly – that the reporters they were hunting were men. For the next few years Solidarity's cause looked hopeless. At the same time, Chojecki's distribution network flourished. By the mid-1980s books were being sent into Poland on routes stretching from Stockholm to Turin. Illicit print sites sprung up in lofts and kitchen cellars, under a trap door concealed by a fridge. The regime had triumphs too. Spies infiltrated Solidarity and intercepted international deliveries, calling them 'provocations'. CIA records from this giddy period remain classified. Senior US politicians were privately supportive, including president Jimmy Carter and his Polish-American national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. The clandestine book programme had a codename, QRHELPFUL. Its results were impressive. George Minden, the CIA officer in charge, estimated that almost 10 million items were smuggled east, with 316,020 books dispatched in the programme's final year. English has interviewed the surviving dissidents, whose cat-and mouse struggle led in 1989 to the regime's collapse. I would have liked to read more on the books themselves and reaction from underground readers. Who, for example, decided to include Virginia Woolf's advice on writing? What did communist-era Poles make of Agatha Christie? This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known cold war moment. In contrast to our own fascist-tinged times, liberal ideas won. Luke Harding's Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War by Charlie English is published by Harper Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Andrey Kurkov: ‘At 17, I got my hands on an illegal copy of The Gulag Archipelago'
My earliest reading memory My grandmother's medical encyclopedias. She was a military surgeon during the second world war and then a doctor for children with tuberculosis. I spent five years of my childhood in her house. I really only looked at the pictures of tumours and wounds, but my curiosity forced me to decode the annotations, which were, as you can imagine, not designed for an emergent reader. My favourite book growing upMartin Eden by Jack London. The main character's dream of becoming a writer – his tremendously strong will – was probably what captivated me most. The book that changed me as a teenagerThe Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I read it when I was about 17 – somebody brought an illegal copy to my brother, Misha, who was an anti-Soviet dissident at that time. This book pushed me to take an interest in the real history of the Soviet Union. A few years later I travelled around the USSR with a tape recorder, trying to get retired Soviet officials to talk about their experiences. My first 'adult' novel, The Bickford Fuse, came out of that journey. The book that changed my mindThe Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. I was 18. I started it five times and, in the end, only succeeded by reading it in the wrong order – starting with the poems, then reading the short prose section, and finally the rest. The book exploded my concept of narrative. I liked the idea of the novel as a puzzle and I tried to work with this for a while, eventually realising that it was not suited to my voice as a writer. The book that made me want to be a writer Goat Song by the Russian poet and novelist Konstantin Vaginov. Banned in the USSR, it was given to me by an American professor of literature who, when I was about 19, visited the university in Kyiv where I was studying English and French. You'll find traces of Goat Song in my novel The Silver Bone. The book I came back to The Witch of Konotop by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko. It was compulsory reading at school and I found it ridiculous, but, years later, perhaps when I was in my late 20s, I had the feeling I had not done the book justice. Rereading, I found it thought-provoking and rather funny. The book I reread Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk. I always enjoyed coming back to this novel, which satirises army life, though I have not wanted to read it since Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine. The book I could never read again Martin Eden by Jack London. The book I discovered later in lifeEast West Street by Philippe Sands. It only appeared a few years ago. Had I read it earlier, I might have become a nonfiction writer! The book I am currently reading Civil War Newspaper Reports 1917-1919 Kharkiv, by Ukrainian historian Gennadii Izhitsky. My work on the Kyiv Mysteries series has greatly deepened my interest in and understanding of life in Kyiv during the civil war. Now I am branching out into the histories of other Ukrainian cities during that time. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion My comfort readHow Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman. His love for humanity shines through the brutality of his subjects. The Stolen Heart: The Kyiv Mysteries by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk, is published by MacLehose on 27 February. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
