[討論] What role do private companies play, and what is the harm in using them?

密西

Both the FBI and DHS have reportedly hired private firms to help conduct social media surveil lance, including to help identify threats online. This raises concerns around trans par ency and account ab il ity as well as effect liveness.

Trans par ency and account ab il ity: Outsourcing surveil lance to private industry obscures how monit or ing is being carried out; limited inform a tion is avail able about rela tion ships between the federal govern ment and social media surveil lance contract ors, and the contract ors, unlike the govern ment, are not subject to free dom of inform a tion laws. Outsourcing also weak ens safe guards because private vendors may not be subject to the same legal or insti tutional constraints as public age cies.

Effic acy: The most ambi tious tools use arti fi cial intel ligence with the goal of making judg ments about which threats, calls for viol ence, or indi vidu als pose the highest risk. But doing so reli ably is beyond the capa city of both humans and exist ing tech no logy, as more than 50 tech no lo gists wrote in oppos ing an ICE proposal aimed at predict ing whether a given person would commit terror ism or crime. The more rudi ment ary of these tools look for specific words and then flag posts contain ing those words. Such flags are over in clus ive, and garden-vari ety content will regu larly be elev ated. Consider how the word “extrem ism, ” for instance, could appear in a range of news articles, be used in reference to a friend's strict diet ary stand ards , or arise in connection with discus sion about U.S. politic ics. Even the best Natural Language Processing tools, which attempt to ascer tain the mean ing of text, are prone to error, and fare partic u larly poorly on speak e rs of non-stand ard English, who may more frequently be from minor ity communit ies, as well as speak ers of languages ​​other than English. Similar concerns apply to mech an isms used to flag images and videos, which gener ally lack the context neces sary to differ en ti ate a scen ario in which an image is used for report ing or comment ary from one where it is used by a group or person to incite viol ence.