Author: Tom Sullivan

Tom Cruise in a jetpackby Tom SullivanIMDB describes Minority Report thusly:

In the year 2054 A.D. crime is virtually eliminated from Washington D.C. thanks to an elite law enforcing squad “Precrime”. They use three gifted humans (called “Pre-Cogs”) with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand.

Meanwhile, here in the past an elite research team at N.C. State University is at work on a top secret project, Future States Processing (announced a year ago yesterday):

RALEIGH — As the field of “big data” continues to grow in importance, N.C. State University has landed a big coup – a major lab for the study of data analysis, funded by the National Security Agency.

This is from the project’s Executive Summary [emphasis mine]:

Broadly, Future States Processing (FSP) is “a mechanism that conceives of the state of an entity (e.g., person, place, or thing) at some point in the future based on a current collection of information.” One challenge is to decompose the broad aim of FSP into a set of key research areas. The group has identified five areas: narrative processing (addressed in another research theme), which allows the identification of emerging topics and narratives from structured and unstructured data; state description, which includes entity, feature, and attribute identification; state modeling, which identifies relationships and dependencies and creates a formal representation; process and prediction models, which infers subsequent states given the current description and a context; and uncertainty quantification, which addresses the precision with which the predictions can be made. Predictions must be made within a context, and an unaddressed issue is context generation. As the group identifies example problems, the preference is to focus on people as entities and to predict behavior or motivation.

Some people are paid to lose sleep over those unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. For that, there’s “big data.” And now that No Such Agency has a place to store it (Bluffdale, UT), N.C. State just needs to develop the right set of algorithms to predict people’s future behaviors.But there’s still the unaddressed problem of “context generation.”Describe your most paranoid fantasy and — with the right data “corpus” — No Such Agency will tell you who’s most likely working on turning that threat into a reality.So you can arrest or kill them.What could go worng?What could go worng?

Using up all kinds of cop equipment

by Tom Sullivan

For a good bit of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I commuted home on Fridays on I-26 in South Carolina and North Carolina. I could kind of gauge the wars’ progress by how many low-boys carrying Humvees, up-armored Humvees, and MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored troop carriers) passed me on my commute as they headed from their Midwest factories to Joint Base Charleston to be airlifted to the war zones.

Plenty never made it home, I’m sure. But after this week’s events in Ferguson MO, I have to wonder where the rest wound up. Chase Madar explains how one MRAP ended up at Ohio State University in case a frat party got out of hand.

That MRAP came, like so much other equipment police departments are stocking up on — from tactical military vests, assault rifles, and grenade launchers to actual tanks and helicopters — as a freebie via a Pentagon-organized surplus military equipment program.  As it happens, police departments across the country are getting MRAPs like OSU’s, including the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota.  It’s received one of 18 such decommissioned military vehicles already being distributed around that state.  So has Warren County which, like a number of counties in New York state, some quite rural, is now deploying Afghan War-grade vehicles.  (Nationwide, rural counties have received a disproportionate percentage of the billions of dollars worth of surplus military equipment that has gone to the police in these years.)

So lots of that deficit-funded hardware deployed to fight ’em over there so we wouldn’t have to fight ’em over here has come home to fight — for lack of terrorists in places like Ferguson, MO — whatever “threats” are lying around. Congressman Hank Johnson, D-Ga has proposed legislation to restrict the militarization of neighborhood policing.

It was just typical “cop equipment hanging around the police officer station” that rural Massachusetts police couldn’t wait to use up against the notorious litterer, Arlo Guthrie. Now it’s state-of-the-art war-fighting machinery. If that’s meant to make Americans feel safer, it ain’t working.

Drones Over Your Homes



by Tom Sullivan

So in North Carolina’s capitol, one of Charlie Pierce’s Laboratories Of Democracy, Gov. Pat McCrory is rushing to fix items in the budget he signed just days ago. Like a “provision that would stop automatically paying for enrollment growth at public schools.” 

It’s just another of those items slipped anonymously into a must-pass budget bill. Among the hidden pearls is this ALEC-inspired gem found by Asheville-based activist Barry Summers. He wrote about it this week in the Asheville Citizen-Times:

H1099 was never heard by any Senate committee, but it has become State law nonetheless. It allows warrantless drone surveillance at all public events (including those on private property) or any place which is in “plain view” of a law enforcement officer. It has other loopholes and deficiencies which taken altogether, make a mockery of the “right-to-privacy” anywhere but inside your home with the shades drawn tight.
Not surprisingly, the ACLU-NC, which had partnered with conservatives to draft the earlier, tougher H312 (Protecting Privacy Act), has come out solidly against H1099.
It was conceived in the NC House Committee on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, chaired by an executive of a company that develops drone technology for the military (no conflict of interest there, right?). They solicited no testimony from anyone whose focus is the preservation of civil liberties. Instead, they invited drone manufacturers, law enforcement and others who clearly wanted the NCGA to open up the skies to drones with the fewest possible restrictions. Concerns about privacy were given little consideration.

These drones might be GoPro-equipped flyers like the one that just found its way to the bottom of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. Or they might be the type that until recently the San Jose Police Department denied purchasing with a Homeland Security grant. Or they might be, as Summers discovered in a presentation to a state committee, whatever specially equipped drones are being flown out of the eastern North Carolina airstrip owned by the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

I wonder, Wayne LaPierre, can they see into your gun safe and count your AR-15s?
It’s a rare instance where the ACLU and the tea party are on the same page. The local tea party group represented by state Rep. Tim Moffitt, R-Buncombe, one of ALEC’s point men on drone legislation in NC, seems to have caught Moffitt claiming that the drone bill “is more than likely not going anywhere.” This, after the language he sponsored got slipped into the budget bill he voted for and Pat McCrory signed. People who might have been staunch supporters have discovered that Moffitt thinks they’re stupid or else he’s incompetent.
Moffitt is up for reelection in November. Good luck with that.