From the Intercept, Extreme Vetting is Taking Shape:
"ICE’s hope is that this privately developed software will help go far beyond matters of legality to matters of the heart. The system must “determine and evaluate an applicant’s probability of becoming a positively contributing member of society, as well as their ability to contribute to national interests” and predict “whether an applicant intends to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the United States.” … "The initiative appears to be chiefly aimed at what ICE calls “nonimmigrants,” a term for foreign nationals seeking “temporary entry to the United States for a specific purpose.” Interested contractors were told their system must be capable of scraping not only “data in various law enforcement databases” and “other government agency computer systems” (including FALCON, an immigration database created by Palantir) but will extensively exploit anything that can be found on the public internet. …. "while the FBI has been tripped up when attempting similar data-mining operations against American citizens, an operation focused on non-citizens would be less likely to face such obstacles [from the ACLU]." The vague language here - who defines whether someone's a contributing member to society, etc. - is particularly worrying. It also seems technically challenging - how do you know if a person in database A is the same person as in database B (e.g., Jose Martinez vs. Jose S. Martinez). Linking on individuals without error strikes me as a hard problem. In other words, if the linking is error-prone, individuals would suffer repercussions they don’t deserve, with little recourse (“computer says no”).
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January 2018
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