The Naked Future (28 page)

I asked Jones about the prospect for more subtle forms of misuse. What's to stop someone from publicly tagging his neighbor as
a domestic abuser or a terrorist? He answered that I have the power to post any number of unflattering things about my neighbors to any number of social networks and officially accuse anyone of domestic abuse with a five-minute phone call. But there's something of a social cost to posting that sort of content on Facebook. No similar social cost exists for posting the same material on Guardian Watch. It's the very purpose of the site.

The hope is that the citizen-policing system will self-police according to the same rules it uses to police others. Just as there exists a log of every Facebook tag and every domestic-disturbance call to the police, so every post on Guardian Watch creates data not just about the subject but also about the poster. Members who abuse the system lose influence.

At least that's the hope.

Naturally, anyone with a smartphone can already stream videos of people in her neighborhood to a Google+ circle or publicly through the Google+ Hangouts service, or to a specified group on Facebook. Guardian Watch has just taken the extra step of “friending” law enforcement and like-minded people on the user's behalf. Whether you see Jones's little start-up as a great way to improve public safety without increasing police budgets or as a lot of white people taking pictures of nonwhite people to make them nervous, Guardian Watch would exist without Gordon Jones.

Here's one of the more interesting examples: a Russian online newspaper called the
Village,
created an app provocatively named Parking Douche. It allows anyone with a smartphone to publicly shame a bad parker to that parker's neighbors, coworkers, and anyone in the neighborhood. To use it, you just take a picture of a car that's parked in a way that annoys you. The app then creates a banner ad with a picture of the car, license plate, and the name of the street. When people nearby (as determined by IP address) attempt to access online news though the
Village
's Web site, they see the ad. It gets in their way. “Thanks to the IP address, only douches in your area will be highlighted, so all the offenders will be
exposed to their colleagues' friends and neighbors,” says the narrator in the demo video.
¹⁹

What can we do to protect our privacy in a world where its value is falling faster than that of last year's cell phone? One creative if tongue-in-cheek proposal comes from British artist Mark Shepard whose Sentient City Survival Kit includes such items as a CCD-Me-Not umbrella studded with 256 infrared light-emitting diods (LEDs) to scramble the night vision of closed-circuit camera systems. My favorite item in the kit is the Under(a)ware, a set of undergarments that can detect RFID tags and vibrate to alert the wearer. “In the near future sentient shopping center, item level tagging and discrete data sniffing will become both pervasive corporate culture and a common criminal pastime,” states a computerized voice on the demo video.

Unless our legal system becomes more transparent, accountable, and accessible we'll never feel certain that the people looking out for us won't abuse their power to persecute people who may technically be criminals but pose no real threat, such as pot smokers, prostitutes, and those who commit an act of trespass as part of a protest. How will we respond to this? Yes, we could put RFID tag readers in our underpants.
Alternatively
, we could decide to use surveillance and data to actually make the world safer and not abuse it. When you adopt the assumption that that's possible, opportunities open up.

If the bad news is the cops are going to have a better window into your career as a lawbreaker, the good news is that in the naked future you're more than just a suspect on her way to her next crime; you're a set of probabilities, potential costs, and potential benefits. The challenge for all of us now is to make the price of overzealous or discriminatory policing both high and conspicuous. The benefits of good policing must be more readily obvious as well. The social and public costs of pestering and prosecuting people for petty crimes should be visible to citizens, lawmakers, and police all at once. Before that happens we may have to settle for those costs becoming
more transparent to law enforcement, where at least some departments or agencies will use them as part of their decision making. The same sort of technology that took away your privacy is beginning to provide just that opportunity.

The year is 2002. The Palo Alto–based online payment outfit PayPal has a big problem; Russian mobsters are defrauding the company to the tune of $3 to $4 million a month. PayPal's founder, Peter Thiel, and his coworker Joe Lonsdale realize they have to develop a system to better track the money moving through PayPal. Simply flagging individual transactions and users isn't enough. The infiltrators adapt far too quickly, setting up new locations and user identities before the old fake profiles grow cold. Thiel and Lonsdale know that if they can better chart how the money gets into the system and how it leaves, where it's spent and what it buys, then they can see whom it touches along the way.

They develop a new program to solve the problem. The Russian operation is broken. The fraud stops. It's at this point that they realize they've invented something they can spin out. They secure funding from the Central Intelligence Agency's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, and create Palantir Technologies, named for the seeing stones in
The Lord of the Rings
.

When I arrive at Palantir headquarters on a bright August day in 2012, I find halls filled with young programmers and graffiti-style murals. The only feature that distinguishes Palantir as a military and police service provider is the big-shouldered law enforcement types in the front lobby. I meet Courtney Bowman, a company spokesman and privacy expert. Bowman's got deep statistical-modeling experience as well as a background in philosophy. In his work at Palantir the second credential is just as useful as the first.

Palantir today is a platform to coordinate and organize files for different law enforcement purposes and agencies. It's like an operating system for classified or important information. The company
itself doesn't do any evidence collection, snooping, or investigating. It simply offers software solutions to connect, centralize, and especially visualize information that may be distributed across a wide number of databases and players.

If you're a local law enforcement professional and you have a query about a suspect in a shooting, you can go to the Palantir interface on your desktop and find relevant records including arrests as well as suspect affiliations and even recent purchases. But the system doesn't give everyone the same access, as different clearance levels can exist across departments and agencies. If, however, you want to know where a particular record came from and who last updated it, the system can tell you that. If you want to see how two individuals may be connected to a single incident, crime, or transaction, the system can draw a map between the points of evidence.

“What Palantir can do,” says Bowman, “is take those model outcomes or those hot-spot views, and, also, known information from criminal history records, from records management systems, from arrest records, and a multitude of other data sources that police legitimately have access to, and tie those all together into a picture of how the crimes, involving specific suspects or specific behavioral patterns, might play out.”

For instance, say you're watching two suspects in a network. Person A is connected to person B through several affiliations. Person A makes a particular type of purchase, say, buying twelve rolls of toilet paper, before robbing a bank. The next day person B goes to a convenience store and buys twelve rolls of toilet paper. It's reasonable to infer he might be preparing to rob a bank. It's not enough to make an arrest but it does suggest an emerging pattern.

The practice of connection tracking, even when all that's being observed is correlation, is extremely fruitful in intelligence. In 2003, after months of trying to get information on Saddam Hussein's whereabouts from Hussein's senior officers and inner circle, the U.S. military used a social network mapping tool called i2 to chart the connections between his chauffeurs. This led them eventually to the farmhouse in Tikrit where Hussein was captured.
²⁰

Tracing the social network of a dictator during war is rather less controversial than analyzing the connections of millions of Americans. Yet this is what the U.S. government under the Obama administration has begun to do. The obscure National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) routinely keeps personal transaction information, flight information, and other types of data on Americans who have neither been convicted nor are under suspicion of a crime. It does so for as long as five years under the vague auspice that it may be useful in some sort of investigation one day, even if that information isn't relevant to any operation at the time of collection.

The subjects of this transaction surveillance are people who have found their way into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), an enormous database of known terrorists, suspected terrorists, people who are loosely associated with suspected terrorists in some way (beekeepers, elementary school teachers, et cetera)—more than five hundred thousand links in all. The government has also given itself license to share the data across departments and even with other governments, despite the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits this sort of sharing.
²¹

If legal, technical, and public relations costs of expanding surveillance remain as low as they are now, it's easy to imagine law enforcement considering a much broader array of connections and transactions worthy of monitoring.

But not all connection tracking in law enforcement is this creepy or controversial. For instance, say you're an investigator, and a roughneck from a particular gang, let's call him John Jet, is murdered. You know that the hit happened on a Friday night on disputed turf. Because this is gang related you're not just looking to solve the crime, you need to make an inference about the members of the rival gang (the Sharks) who have the highest probability of becoming victims of a retaliatory strike. Figuring this out may require sharing information across departments and even making inferences on the basis of correlations. But in this situation, you can deploy an antigang unit to a particular location at a particular time and do so without worrying about trampling on anyone's civil liberties.

While the NCTC may not need to consider itself accountable to the public, Palantir does. It's sort of like a beta tester. It plays a feedback role that is helping Palantir improve its system and make the system more valuable. As Bowman explains, “The government will make claims about collection of suspicious activity reports as being critical because you never know when that information is going to be useful. The privacy advocate will come back and say, ‘Well, show me when this [piece of personal information on a subject] is actually useful. Give me hard metrics of why it's justifiable to hold on to this information.' If we can use the platform to demonstrate cases where this is useful, we can start to bridge the gap between these two communities and explain why this is valuable information.”

The next step for Palantir, the product it wants to offer in the years ahead, is a model to allow law enforcement in the field to determine if the information it's got is good enough to bring a case. If you could structure data on court cases, as some folks at the Santa Fe Institute are currently trying to do, you could come up with a probability distribution for the likelihood of a court case's succeeding or failing. We are, in other words, fast approaching a future when it will be possible not only to see crimes in advance
but also see how the court case plays out.

Today, we've convinced ourselves that we can't have improved public safety without giving up liberty. But perhaps in the future, children will see this trade-off as unnecessary, a failure of imagination. We've discounted the possibility that we can use public data and personal data in ways that empower individuals without making them feel uncomfortably exposed or more dangerous to one another. Get involved in how your local department uses or plans to use advanced analytics. Start a Facebook page that discusses how more involvement in how local police treat data is the trade-off we have to make for greater safety. You may get the brush-off, or you may be surprised to discover a bunch of smart public servants who are eager for more citizen participation. When police chiefs confront the reality of how income, employment, housing density, schooling, taxation,
and even urban planning affect robbery, assault, and murder, they often start sounding less like cops and a lot more like sociologists.

The predictive policing program in Memphis, which has been in place longer than any other program of its type in the nation except New York's, has touched the lives of virtually everyone in the city. But it's attracted no complaints, no legal challenges, none of the controversy that has attached itself to other programs. Janikowski credits legwork for this. He and the deputy chiefs went to more than two hundred community meetings over the course of two years; they went through neighborhoods block by block to knock on doors, tell people what they were doing, and listen to concerns. Of these meetings, he says, “Whether there were five people there or five hundred, we did the same thing. We explained what we were doing, why we were doing it, what results we were hoping for. By going out there and telling folks, ‘This is what's going on and why,' we never got the kinds of push back that I've heard from other cities.”

A cynic would suggest that Janikowski surrendered a strategic advantage in doing so. He gave up too much information to the would-be perpetrators. Janikowski says being more generous with information and proactively reaching out to the public about the program, rather than just announcing its existence in a press release, is the reason the program continues to operate with the public's blessing. Public support is necessary if these programs are ever to reach their fullest potential.