CIA-funded tools have the ability to predict crime before it happens

Something that seems to appear only in movies has now appeared in real life.

According to Thenextweb, in 2002, a film was adapted from a novel written by Philip K. Dick in 1956 that warned us of the dangers of maintaining security by predicting. In "Minority Report" - the name of the movie - actor Tom Cruise plays a cop in the "pre-crime" unit of the Los Angeles Police Department. His task is to find criminals before they commit a crime, then he asks the moral question when imprisoning someone when they haven't even committed a criminal act.

While Tom Cruise's movie character has become the past, real-world law enforcement is moving forward with the same technology.Palantir - a CIA-funded startup founded by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel in 2004 - is a tool that is changing the world right before our eyes without us knowing.

Having been used to predict the bombing in Iraq based on the signs of previous explosions, Palantir is currently being developed to be able to do everything from law enforcement to finance.

Palantir is currently being developed to be able to do everything from law enforcement to finance.

This tool is currently placed in a building that does not draw attention in a narrow street in Palo Alto, California. From the outside, you may not mind it. Inside, the technology is protected by walls that cannot be penetrated by radio, phone or internet; The only access method is through a series of biometric security systems, and the code is held by dozens of independent organizations whose identities are hidden by blockchain technology.

According to Palantir, the building "must be built to counter the internal access efforts. This network will have to be" airgap "- completely isolated from the public internet to prevent leakage. believe".

"The eye in the sky" - Palantir's term - will consider a huge amount of data, trying to find useful information from them. For the data that we have collected in the US, we do not know what to do with them other than storing and hoping future generations will be able to find a solution.

Palantir's list of customers includes the CIA, FBI, NSA, Centers for Disease Control, Marines, Air Force, Special Command, West Point and the US Internal Revenue Service. If using AI to predict your future actions based on past data makes you shudder, it's worth noting that half of Palantir's customers are state-owned companies of America.

But on the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles, what Dick predicted about an Orwellian future [an adjective describing the situation, idea, or social condition that George Orwell identified as undermining the welfare of a open and free society]. There, Palantir's algorithms will monitor criminal data, create "hot spots" and determine where more police are needed.

Theoretically, dividing the patrol teams based on the neighborhoods with the largest crime rates seems like a bad idea. You should also know that, in some areas of the United States, just being black and male is enough for the police to come, and sometimes even deadly consequences.

What data is collected also causes concern. Areas with a large number of police forces will always be held accountable for more organized criminals, thereby creating biases in the data set that may hinder the community in the coming years. Use predictive algorithms to bring officers to an area before the crime happens just to complete the "prophecy" of artificial intelligence.

The two men wearing hoodie walking on the street, normally wouldn't be worth our attention, now matched the description of an earlier incident that happened many hours ago.

Is it right to find criminals before they commit crimes?

This militarization level will cause law enforcement to be opposed by the communities they have sworn to protect, and Palantir will do only to make the situation worse. Ana Muniz, a social activist and researcher of Youth Justice Coalition, shared with LA Weekly:

"Whenever the army and the police become more alike, the boundary will be obscured. The military is supposed to defend the territory before the invaders, it is not a police duty - they are not considered the people to be invaders ".

We cannot consider Palantir as just an artificial intelligence tool for crime and terrorism. Its algorithms have the potential to be deployed on a series of intangible data sets that, when combined, will create a picture of our daily life. Worse, even if we disconnect from the internet and not transmit any information, the data needed to draw, this picture already exists, and just wait to be used. never mind.

This is no longer a science fiction movie. Advanced tools like Palantir create meaningful content from cluttered data. This also means that everyone, from government organizations, hackers to corporations like Facebook and Amazon, will want to " get involved " .

About Palantir, this software itself is not cruel. It is a powerful tool for organizing data and making predictions based on their content. Palantir is only part of a large system, where the main data is power and the apparatus is simply a means to extract them.

As the National Rifle Association once said: "Guns do not kill people. People kill people". Like guns, Palantir seems to have problems with humans.