Fraudejagers van de overheid die samenwerken onder de vlag van de Landelijke Stuurgroep Interventieteams selecteren overal in het land ‘verwonderadressen’ waar bewoners misschien wel frauderen. Uit een reconstructie blijkt hoe een familie in Veenendaal in beeld kwam en op drie adressen controleurs aan de deur kreeg. ‘We hoorden van de buren dat ze vanuit de bosjes ons huis in de gaten hielden.’
By David Davidson for Follow the Money on September 6, 2023
De politie stopt ‘per direct’ met het algoritme waarmee ze voorspelt of iemand in de toekomst geweld gaat gebruiken. Eerder deze week onthulde Follow the Money dat het zogeheten Risicotaxatie Instrument Geweld op ethisch en statistisch gebied ondermaats is.
By David Davidson for Follow the Money on August 25, 2023
De politie voorspelt al sinds 2015 met een algoritme wie er in de toekomst geweld zal plegen. Van Marokkaanse en Antilliaanse Nederlanders werd die kans vanwege hun achtergrond groter geschat. Dat gebeurt nu volgens de politie niet meer, maar daarmee zijn de gevaren van het model niet opgelost. ‘Aan dit algoritme zitten enorme risico’s.’
By David Davidson and Marc Schuilenburg for Follow the Money on August 23, 2023
The police in America is using facial recognition software to match security footage of crimes to people. Kashmir Hill describes for the New York Times another example of a wrong match leading to a wrongful arrest.
Continue reading “Another false facial recognition match: pregnant woman wrongfully arrested”
For many years the Dutch police has used a risk modeling algorithm to predict the chance that an individual suspect will commit a violent crime. Follow the Money exposed the total lack of a moral, legal, and statistical justification for its use, and now the police has stopped using the system.
Continue reading “Dutch police used algorithm to predict violent behaviour without any safeguards”
US government tests find even top-performing facial recognition systems misidentify blacks at rates 5 to 10 times higher than they do whites.
By Tom Simonite for WIRED on July 22, 2019
Porcha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.
By Kashmir Hill for The New York Times on August 6, 2023
Many governments are using mass surveillance to support law enforcement for the purposes of safety and security. In France, the French Parliament (and before, the French Senate) have approved the use of automated behavioural video surveillance at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Simply put, France wants to legalise mass surveillance at the national level which can violate many rights, such as the freedom of assembly and association, privacy, and non-discrimination.
Continue reading “France wants to legalise mass surveillance for the Paris Olympics 2024: “Safety” and “security”, for whom?”
On June 1, Democracy Now featured a roundtable discussion hosted by Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, with three experts on Artificial Intelligence (AI), about their views on AI in the world. They included Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the Université de Montréal, long considered a “godfather of AI,” Tawana Petty, an organiser and Director of Policy at the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), and Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently, the Future of Life Institute, of which Tegmark is president, issued an open letter “on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” Bengio is a signatory on the letter (as is Elon Musk). The AJL has been around since 2016, and has (along with other organisations) been calling for a public interrogation of racialised surveillance technology, the use of police robots, and other ways in which AI can be directly responsible for bodily harm and even death.
By Yasmin Nair for Yasmin Nair on June 3, 2023
Chinese social media, like Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, and Douyin, are full of hundreds of users with American cop profile photos with the aim of taunting Black users.
By Viola Zhou for Rest of World on May 23, 2023
Because of a bad facial recognition match and other hidden technology, Randal Reid spent nearly a week in jail, falsely accused of stealing purses in a state he said he had never even visited.
By Kashmir Hill and Ryan Mac for The New York Times on March 31, 2023
The application of face recognition technology in the criminal justice system threatens to perpetuate racial inequality.
By Alex Najibi for Science in the News on October 24, 2020
Cities and counties across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so. From Boston to San Francisco, Jackson, Mississippi to Minneapolis, elected officials and activists know that face surveillance gives police the power to track us wherever we go. It also disproportionately impacts people of color, turns us all into perpetual suspects, increases the likelihood of being falsely arrested, and chills people’s willingness to participate in first amendment protected activities. Even Amazon, known for operating one of the largest video surveillance networks in the history of the world, extended its moratorium on selling face recognition to police.
By Matthew Guariglia for Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on April 4, 2023
Ignoring earlier Dutch failures in automated decision making, and ignoring advice from its own experts, the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided to cut costs and cut corners through implementing a discriminatory profiling system to process visa applications.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: You look similar to someone we didn’t like → Dutch visa denied”
The current wave of reporting on the AI-bubble has one advantage: it also creates a bit of space in the media to write about how AI reflects the existing inequities in our society.
Continue reading “Work related to the Racism and Technology Center is getting media attention”
As part of a series of investigative reporting by Lighthouse Reports and WIRED, Gabriel Geiger has revealed some of the findings about the use of welfare fraud algorithms in Denmark. This comes in the trajectory of the increasing use of algorithmic systems to detect welfare fraud across European cities, or at least systems which are currently known.
Continue reading “Denmark’s welfare fraud system reflects a deeply racist and exclusionary society”
Nederland wil graag een voorloper zijn in het gebruik van kunstmatige intelligentie in militaire situaties. Deze technologie kan echter leiden tot racisme en discriminatie. In een open brief roepen critici op tot een moratorium op het gebruik van kunstmatige intelligentie. Initiatiefnemer Oumaima Hajri legt uit waarom.
By Oumaima Hajri for De Kanttekening on February 22, 2023
The past week the Dutch goverment hosted and organised the military AI conference REAIM 2023. Together with eight other NGOs we signed an open letter, initated by Oumaima Hajri, that calls on the Dutch government to stop promoting narratives of “innovation” and “opportunities” but, rather, centre the very real and often disparate human impact.
Continue reading “An alliance against military AI”
Civil society organisations urge the Dutch government to immediately establish a moratorium on developing AI systems in the military domain.
By Oumaima Hajri for Alliantie tegen militaire AI on February 15, 2023
Tiera Tanksley’s work seeks to better understand how forms of digitally mediated traumas, such as seeing images of Black people dead and dying on social media, are impacting Black girls’ mental and emotional wellness in the U.S. and Canada. Her fears were confirmed in her findings: Black girls report unprecedented levels of fear, depression, anxiety and chronic stress. Viewing Black people being killed by the state was deeply traumatic, with mental, emotional and physiological effects.
Continue reading “Profiting off Black bodies”
A critical, in depth report on Top400 – a crime prevention project by the Amsterdam municipality – which targets and polices minors (between the ages of 12 to 23) has emphasised the stigmatising, discriminatory, and invasive effects of the Top400 on youths and their families.
Continue reading “Amsterdam’s Top400 project stigmatises and over-criminalises youths”
The UK organisation No Tech for Tyrants (NT4T) has published an extensive report on the use of surveillance technologies by the police in the UK, US, Mexico, Brazil, Denmark and India, in collaboration with researchers and activists from these countries. The report, titled “Surveillance Tech Perpetuates Police Abuse of Power” examines the relation between policing and technology through in-depth case studies.
Continue reading “Report: How police surveillance tech reinforces abuses of power”The advent of predictive policing systems demonstrates an increased interest in more novel forms of data processing for the purpose of crime control. These developments have been the subject of much controversy, as there are significant concerns on the role these technologies play in shaping life chances and opportunities for individuals and different groups in society.
By Fieke Jansen for Data Justive Lab on November 17, 2022
In Moeders – donderdag in première op Idfa – hekelt Nirit Peled de Top 400, een lijst met daarop namen van Amsterdamse jongeren die dreigen af te glijden in de serieuze criminaliteit.
By David Hielkema and Nirit Peled for Het Parool on November 9, 2022
Among global movements to reckon with police powers, a new report from UK research group No Tech For Tyrants unveils how police use surveillance technology to abuse power around the world.
From No Tech for Tyrants on November 7, 2022
Diana Sardjoe writes for Fair Trials about how her sons were profiled by the Amsterdam police on the basis of risk models (a form of predictive policing) called ‘Top600’ (for adults) and ‘Top400’ for people aged 12 to 23). Because of this profiling her sons were “continually monitored and harassed by police.”
Continue reading “The devastating consequences of risk based profiling by the Dutch police”
When I found out my sons were placed on lists called the ‘Top 600’ and the ‘Top 400’ by the local Amsterdam council, I thought I was finally getting help. The council says the purpose of these lists, created by predictive and profiling systems, is to identify and give young people who have been in contact with the police “extra attention from the council and organisations such as the police, local public health service and youth protection,” to prevent them from coming into contact with police again. This could not have been further from the truth.
By Diana Sardjoe for Medium on September 28, 2022
Following the terror attack in Denmark of 2015, the state amped upits data analytics capabilities for counter-terrorism within the police and their Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET). Denmark, a country which hosts an established, normalised, and widely accepted public surveillance infrastructure – justified in service of public health and greater centralisation and coordination between government and municipalities in delivery of citizen services – also boasts an intelligence service with extraordinarily expansive surveillance capabilities, and the enjoyment of wide exemptions from data protection regulations.
From No Tech for Tyrants on July 13, 2020
The Algemene Rekenkamer (Netherlands Court of Audit) looked into nine different algorithms used by the Dutch state. It found that only three of them fulfilled the most basic of requirements.
Continue reading “Shocking report by the Algemene Rekenkamer: state algorithms are a shitshow”
Investigative journalism of the NRC brought to light that the Dutch NCTV (the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security) uses fake social media accounts to track Dutch activists. The agency also targets activists working in the social justice or anti-discrimination space and tracks their work, sentiments and movements through their social media accounts. This is a clear example of how digital communication allows governments to intensify their surveillance and criminalisation of political opinions outside the mainstream.
Continue reading “The Dutch government wants to continue to spy on activists’ social media”
An alarming report outlines an extensive pattern of racial discrimination within the city’s police department.
By Sam Richards and Tate Ryan-Mosley for MIT Technology Review on April 27, 2022
Author Tarcízio Silva on how algorithmic racism exposes the myth of “racial democracy.”
By Alex González Ormerod and Tarcízio Silva for Rest of World on April 22, 2022
Our own Jill Toh recently presented at a symposium on the use of technology and how it intersects with racism in the context of housing and policing. She spoke on a panel organised in the contex of the World Roma Day 2022 titled Technolution: Yearned-for Hopes or Old Injustices?.
Continue reading “Technology, Racism and Justice at Roma Day 2022”
In an official parliamentary investigative committee, the Dutch Senate is investigating how new regulation or law-making processes can help combat discrimination in the Netherlands. The focus of the investigative committee is on four broad domains: labour market, education, social security and policing. As a part of these wide investigative efforts the senate is hearing from a range of experts and civil society organisations. Most notably, one contribution stands out from the perspective of racist technology: Nadia Benaissa from Bits of Freedom highlighted the dangers of predictive policing and other uses of automated systems in law enforcement.
Continue reading “Bits of Freedom speaks to the Dutch Senate on discriminatory algorithms”
Traffic cameras that are used to automatically hand out speeding tickets don’t look at the colour of the person driving the speeding car. Yet, ProPublica has convincingly shown how cameras that don’t have a racial bias can still have a disparate racial impact.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: “Race-neutral” traffic cameras have a racially disparate impact”
De Eerste Kamer doet onderzoek naar de effectiviteit van wetgeving tegen discriminatie. Wij mochten afgelopen vrijdag de parlementsleden vertellen over discriminatie en algoritmen. Hieronder volgt de kern van ons verhaal.
By Nadia Benaissa for Bits of Freedom on February 8, 2022
In the context of the use of crime predictive software in policing, Chris Gilliard reiterated in WIRED how data-driven policing systems and programs are fundamentally premised on the assumption that historical data about crimes determines the future.
Continue reading “Predictive policing constrains our possibilities for better futures”
So long as algorithms are trained on racist historical data and outdated values, there will be no opportunities for change.
By Chris Gilliard for WIRED on January 2, 2022
Refusing to see like a state.
By J. Khadijah Abdurahman and SA Smythe for Logic on December 25, 2022
Hiring sociocultural workers to correct bias overlooks the limitations of these underappreciated fields.
By Elena Maris for WIRED on January 12, 2022
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