Big Brother & Big Data

[alice wellintown]

BIG DATA OR BIG BROTHER?

States will need to help protect their citizens and their markets from new
vulnerabilities caused by big data. But there is another potential dark
side: big data could become Big Brother. In all countries, but particularly
in nondemocratic ones, big data exacerbates the existing asymmetry of power
between the state and the people.

The asymmetry could well become so great that it leads to big-data
authoritarianism, a possibility vividly imagined in science-fiction movies
such as *Minority Report*. That 2002 film took place in a near-future
dystopia in which the character played by Tom Cruise headed a “Precrime”
police unit that relied on clairvoyants whose visions identified people who
were about to commit crimes. The plot revolves around the system’s obvious
potential for error and, worse yet, its denial of free will.

Although the idea of identifying potential wrongdoers before they have
committed a crime seems fanciful, big data has allowed some authorities to
take it seriously. In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security launched a
research project called FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology), aimed
at identifying potential terrorists by analyzing data about individuals’
vital signs, body language, and other physiological patterns. Police forces
in many cities, including Los Angeles, Memphis, Richmond, and Santa Cruz,
have adopted “predictive policing” software, which analyzes data on
previous crimes to identify where and when the next ones might be committed.
For the moment, these systems do not identify specific individuals as
suspects. But that is the direction in which things seem to be heading.
Perhaps such systems would identify which young people are most likely to
shoplift.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130427/82e165d0/attachment.html>