In Argentina, President Javier Milley’s drive to harmonize and streamline public institutions does not apply to the field of security and defense. After reviving the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and allocating millions in reserve funds (for which the president is not accountable), the president has created special units to handle social media and Internet cyber patrols, real-time security camera analysis, and aerial surveillance using drones. Moreover, as dreamed by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and later made famous in the film Predicting Future Crimes, the president intends to use “machine learning algorithms” to “predict future crimes.” Minority ReportHow will Millay do it all? Through artificial intelligence, executives announced.
President Milley has said he wants to replace government officials and organizations with AI systems as part of his plan to downsize the state, but the first role he will give to the technology will be in expanding state institutions. On Monday, the government created an artificial intelligence unit for security applications.
The new agency will report to the Ministry of Security. “The use of artificial intelligence in the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crimes and related acts is essential,” said the resolution signed by Minister Patricia Bullrich, who noted similar moves in other countries. The decision was driven by the belief that the use of AI “will significantly increase the efficiency of various departments, the federal police and security forces, enabling a faster and better response to threats and emergencies.”
The artificial intelligence unit will be made up of police officers and agents from other security forces. Its tasks will include “patrolling open social platforms, applications and websites” where it will aim to “detect potential threats, identify the movements of criminal groups or predict disturbances.” It will also be dedicated to “analyzing security camera images in real time to detect suspicious activity and identify wanted persons through facial recognition.” The resolution also gives the unit the powers that rival science fiction to “use machine learning algorithms to analyze past crime data and predict future crimes.” Another objective will be to spot “suspicious financial transactions and anomalous behavior that may be a sign of illegal activity.”
The new unit won’t just be virtual: it will be able to “use drones to patrol large areas, conduct aerial surveillance and respond to emergency situations” and “use robots to carry out dangerous missions such as explosive defusal.”
The right to risk
Various experts and private organizations have warned that the new AI unit will threaten citizens’ rights.
“The government body established to monitor social networks, applications and websites contradicts several provisions of the national constitution,” said Martín Becerra, professor and researcher of media and information technology. “The Millay (and Bullrich) administration is illiberal. It enacts new regulations, strengthens the repressive functions of the state, increases the opacity of public funds and eliminates norms that seek to protect the most vulnerable,” he warned on his social media accounts.
For digital policy expert Natalia Zuazo, the initiative essentially represents “illegal information disguised as the use of ‘modern’ technologies.” The implicit risk, she explained, is that there is little control and that many security forces have access to the information collected.
The Center for Research on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information at the University of Palermo said that its studies on cyber patrol practices in Argentina and other Latin American countries showed that “the principles of legality and transparency are often not met.” “The opacity and lack of accountability in the acquisition and implementation of the techniques is alarming. In the past, these techniques have been used to profile academics, journalists, politicians and activists.” In that context, “without oversight or checks and balances, privacy and freedom of expression are threatened.”
The Argentine Observatory for Information Technology Law noted that the security resolution “justifies measures by citing comparative experience, but without any analysis of that experience. Can the security systems of China and India really be compared to those of France and Singapore, and at the same time, can they all be compared to Argentina’s?”
Becerra specifically questioned the crime prediction capabilities assigned to the new unit, calling it “a clearly failed use of AI and therefore one that must be avoided.”
The Philip K. Dick novel that inspired Steven Spielberg’s film warns about the problems with predicting crime: “We stopped them.” [future criminals] “We have to punish them before they commit an act of violence, before they commit a crime,” one of the characters in the story says. “So the act of committing a crime is a completely metaphysical matter. We insist that they are guilty, and they continue to say that they are innocent. And in a sense, they teeth Innocent.”
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