Law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C. have begun to use
technology that they say can predict when crimes will be committed
and who will commit them, before they actually happen.
The Minority Report like pre-crime software has been
developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania.
Previous incarnations of the software, already being used in
Baltimore and Philadelphia were limited to predictions of murders
by and among parolees and offenders on probation.
According to a report
by ABC News, however, the latest version, to be
implemented in Washington D.C., can predict other future crimes
as well.
"When a person goes on probation or parole they are supervised
by an officer. The question that officer has to answer is 'what
level of supervision do you provide?'" Berk told ABC News,
intimating that the program could have a bearing on the length
of sentences and/or bail amounts.
The technology sifts through a database of thousands of crimes
and uses algorithms and different variables, such as geographical
location, criminal records and ages of previous offenders, to
come up with predictions of where, when, and how a crime could
possibly be committed and by who.
The program operates without any direct evidence that a crime
will be committed, it simply takes datasets and computes possibilities.
"People assume that if someone murdered then they will
murder in the future," Berk also states, "But what
really matters is what that person did as a young individual.
If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that's a good predictor.
If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn't predict
very much."
Critics have urged that the program encourages categorizing
individuals on a risk scale via computer mathematics, rather
than on real life, and that monitoring those people based on
such a premise is antithetic to a justice system founded on
the premise of the presumption of innocence.
Other police departments and law agencies across the country
have begun to look into and use similar predictive technologies.
The Memphis Police Department, for example uses a program called
Operation
Blue CRUSH, which uses predictive analytics developed
by IBM.
Other forms of pre-crime technology in use or under development
include surveillance
cameras that can predict when a crime is about
to occur and alert police, and even neurological
brain scanners that can read people's intentions
before they act, thus
detecting whether or not a person has "hostile
intent".
It is not too far fetched to imagine all these forms of the
technology being used together in the future by law enforcement
bodies.
The British government has previously
debated introducing pre-crime laws in the name
of fighting terrorism. The idea was that suspects would be put
on trial using MI5 or MI6 intelligence of an expected terror
attack. This would be enough to convict if found to be true
"on the balance of probabilities," rather than "beyond
reasonable doubt".
The government even has plans
to collect lifelong records on all residents starting
at the age of five, in order to screen for those who might be
more likely to commit crimes in the future.
Another disturbing possibility for such technology comes in
the form of a
financial alliance of sorts between Internet search
engine giant Google and the investment arm of the CIA and the
wider U.S. intelligence network.
Google and In-Q-Tel have recently injected a sum of up to $10
million each into a company called Recorded
Future, which uses analytics to scour Twitter
accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, which
is used to "assemble actual real-time dossiers on people."
The company describes its analytics as "the ultimate tool
for open-source intelligence" and says it can also "predict
the future".
Recorded Future takes in vast amounts of personal information
such as employment changes, personal education and family relations.
Promotional material also shows categories covering pretty much
everything else, including entertainment, music and movie releases,
as well as other innocuous things like patent filings and product
recalls.
Those detached from any kind of moral reality will say "If
you've got nothing to hide then what is the problem with being
scanned for pre-crime? If it keeps us all safe from murderers,
rapists and terrorists I'm all for it".
How far towards a literal technological big brother police
state will we slip before people wake up to the fact?
Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor at
Alex Jones' Infowars.net, and regular contributor to Prisonplanet.com.
He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the
School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.
In the video below, Alex Jones explains how Google's plan to
end the Internet as we know it ties in to the wider surveillance
agenda and the total information awareness network under the
CIA and Homeland Security.
