(EN) THE NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN IS A MACHINE: THE PROBLEMS WITH USING AI, PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS, AND BIG DATA TO FIGHT CRIME AND FIND “TERRORISTS" WITH JENNIFER LYNCH

In the last few years, law enforcement technologies have become “smarter” and cheaper. Now even small agencies can buy their own drones or collect face recognition images or DNA from anyone right out on the street. But as police technologies have advanced and become more widely used, laws to protect privacy and prevent unreasonable searches have not kept up. In countries across the globe, governments are adopting these privacy-invasive tools without a proper discussion about the very real trade-offs for civil liberties.

This presentation will cover the latest developments in face and object recognition and analytics to predict where crime will occur and who is a criminal. It will discuss the problems with black-box algorithms used to determine guilt or a person's likelihood of committing future crimes. It will discuss the impact on free expression posed by AI-enhanced surveillance cameras on every street corner. And it will discuss research that shows these technologies are not unbiased but instead exacerbate existing racist and privacy-invasive police practices.

About Jennifer Lynch

Jennifer Lynch is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in California and works on privacy and civil liberties issues implicated by new technologies. She writes and speaks frequently on government surveillance programs, and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others. Jennifer challenges surveillance technologies like location tracking devices, biometrics and drones, through the courts and successfully sued the U.S. government to obtain thousands of pages of previously unpublished drone records. Jennifer also works to promote privacy-protective laws in the United States and has testified about face recognition and surveillance in the United States Congress and in the California state legislature. She is regularly consulted as an expert on the Fourth Amendment and surveillance by major and technical news media.