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Safe Crime Prediction: Encrypted Deep Learning for Less Intrusive Surveillance
- jsonderulio 9y agoI think you mean "Pre-crime"
- williamtrask 9y agoi think you're right
- jsonderulio 9y agoThe dog argument was cute. But the dog also doesn't make a searchable, indexable list of all your personal information. Someone will inevitably make this though, and it will inevitably be abused. Plus what if I start switching search parameters from say, 'planning a terrorist attack' to, likely to to vote one way, believe on thing, or be of a certain religion. We will trade all our privacy and the nefarious people will switch to a new method of comms...like they always do.
- williamtrask 9y agoSo part of what makes this work is that it's not an index. As opposed to doing general storage of people's data, this restricts a surveillance operation to only be able to identify specific concepts.
- jsonderulio 9y agoThe software itself would have access to the index. So it would still exist. Keep in mind the extents governments and other private enterprise would go to get their hands on this. You will have created a clean super-weapon. Or 'the dark mark' for those biblical folk out there. Can you imagine what that would do to your life as well? Even if you couldn't access the information. Half the governments of the world would torture you just to double-check.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pc2g4d 9y ago"the dark mark" I think that's from Harry Potter, not the bible. Maybe you meant the mark of the beast?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- williamtrask 9y agothat's strange, i would have assumed that they would be averse to a tool that doesn't give them un-restricted access to the data. right now, the dialogue is "privacy vs security... take your pick" but this breaks that rhetoric... showing that it's a false choice.
- jsonderulio 9y agoThis tool assumes we've already gave up our privacy. Its just a smart way to comb through all the data you've extracted.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- williamtrask 9y agoFar from it, this tool prevents the need for us to give up our privacy. (not sure why HN isn't giving me a "reply" button to your posts)
- sambull 9y ago"A positive prediction should launch an investigation, not put someone behind bars directly." That is the scariest thing I've read. All we need is a black box to investigate people at anytime.
- williamtrask 9y agoThere are already thousands of black boxes. Consider satellite photography, malware detectors, fire alarms, sniffing dogs, credit fraud detectors. All of these are tools ("black boxes") used to launch investigations. The future of crime fighting is impossible without tools like these as criminals become more sophisticated. The real question is who owns them and are they audit-able? This blogpost is about making neural networks used for these purposes auditable by a third party without making them vulnerable to evasion by criminals.
- rrggrr 9y agoAgreed. Stop, assess and arrest is now audit-able thanks to body cameras and we're already seeing the results in greater accountability. However, with greater visual accountability has come de-policing, a serious problem in some cities.
- petre 9y agoYup, this sounds like software driven Minority Report.
- liamcardenas 9y agoI like this, but I would argue that predicting crime isn't the core problem that law enforcement has today. The real issue is the incentive structure that disincentivizes crime prevention. That sad truth is that police bear no cost when they fail to prevent crime and, in fact, get more funding and power if crime goes up.
- zappo2938 9y ago>> The sad truth is that teachers bear no cost when they fail to teach a student.
- liamcardenas 9y agoIn public schools, this is often the case. In private schools, bad education will lead to a loss of profit. If you think this doesn't apply to teachers, you must've never been in a bad public school
- ouid 9y agoThe machine should be able to make economic policy decisions as well.
- TTPrograms 9y agoThe number of people killed by terrorism in developed countries per year is, what, a hundredth of those killed in car accidents? A tenth of those shot in Chicago alone? http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrorism-disease-accidents-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrori... Terrorists have to kill literally hundreds of times more people per year for it to justify even the meagerest response. And one may argue about the economic impacts, but that's just a reflection of this underlying irrationality. If we had media focusing on "Keep Calm and Carry On" like Israel does now or Britain did in WWII it would have a much smaller economic impact - and terrorists would stop doing it, since it would be less effective at achieving the subgoal of "terror". So this post is really begging the question IMO.
- petre 9y agoIf the media wouldn't cover terrorism it would probably go away by itself. Israel is probably the only country dealing with it effectively.
- ams6110 9y agoSo if the media weren't flagrant whores for eyeballs things might be better. I'm not holding my breath. The fable of the farmer and the snake comes to mind.
- ams6110 9y agoSo if the media weren't flagrant whores for eyeballs things might be better. I'm not holding my breath. The fable of the farmer and the snake comes to mind.
- williamtrask 9y agoAuthor here. These are great points and I tend to agree. While the tech is interesting to me as a way to reconcile privacy and security, changing the incentive structure is a more straightforward initial response. Perhaps this post is most useful as a counter-argument to any "privacy vs safety" arguments that might be used to justify unrestricted access to consumer data.
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- Asdfbla 9y agoInteresting, I didn't know that homomorphic encryption was already advanced enough to be feasible for actual computation. Years ago I just read about the proof-of-concept systems that worked but were too slow. I'm still doubtful if the specificity of such pre-crime systems will be high enough that only a negligible number people will be wrongfully investigated. After all, the prevalence of terrorism is extremely low in any population. I guess if you trust law enforcement enough to escalate the investigation slowly and carefully (instead of putting a suspect on a no-fly list immediately) it can work. Also, with regard to the audits by NGOs or government watchdogs: I suppose you would also need the auditors to cryptographically sign the version of the software they audited so that users can check that a trusted surveillance system was deployed.
- williamtrask 9y agoRe: cryptographically signing the software version. I think that's a brilliant idea. I'll look into it.
- dbranes 9y agoFor those unfamiliar with homomorphic encryption, I found this to be a good algebraic treatment. https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-042612-132350/unrestricted/Meissen_MQP2.pdf https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-04261...
- aomix 9y agoI have nothing useful to add to this discussion. I just like that this idea is a core part of the TV show Person of Interest.
- grandalf 9y agoDoes anyone know what minimum level of "homomorphism" is necessary to insulate the entity doing surveillance or analytics from legal action? I ask this about the following contexts: - government surveillance: does using a homomorphism remove the need for a search warrant? - in-app analytics: does using homomorphisms allow a firm to consider data not disclaimed by the firm's privacy policy? - research: when does a homomorphism eliminate the need for IRB approval?
- williamtrask 9y agoGreat question. I sincerely doubt there is legal precedent in this area though. I'd love to be wrong here though :)
- AceOfSpace 9y agoI'm concerned with a tool such as this that can be directed to target anything of interest to those administering the system. We've already seen mass surveillance shift from being used "exclusively" for terrorism to also assisting in the war on drugs. Where else would the lens be trained? As the author suggests, murder. What about organized crime? Gangs? Illegal downloads ... the sharing of Netflix passwords?
- CiPHPerCoder 9y agoThere are multiple elements to unpack here. The obvious pre-crime problem other commenters raise. The fact that terrorism is such a rare risk it isn't worthy of our attention. But I'd like to raise another objection: Homomorphic encryption does not provide integrity over the ciphertext, which could open the door to active attacks against the systems that undermine its privacy goals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14443191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14443191 https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/crypto-misnomers-zero-knowledge-considered-self-descriptive https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/crypto-misnomers-zero-kno... If you really need to build such a dangerous and needless system, would you want it to be built with such an error-prone cryptographic design? I'd say "No".
- rocqua 9y agoOk, I'm probably missing something. How is public-key homomorphic encryption possible? Suppose I know the pub-key, and have some cipher text X. Can't I simply encrypt 0 and try, for all plausible values V, whether encrypt(V) - X = encrypt(0). Or is the encryption function not reversible, i.e. there are multiple 0s? If not, it seems like you'd need quite a bit of true entropy in the plausible values. I don't see how you add something like a Nonce to artificially add entropy. Heck, if you have nice integer under/over flow on division, that would give a crude implementation of comparison, bringing the search down by a logarithm. It seems like the only reasonable situation is one where indeed multiple different values decrypt to 0.
- murbard2 9y ago> Or is the encryption function not reversible, i.e. there are multiple 0s? Yep, there's padding.
- aub3bhat 9y agoThere was a great talk at USENIX on how Whatsapp reduced spam while maintaining end to end encryption https://youtu.be/LBTOKlrhKXk https://youtu.be/LBTOKlrhKXk
- bilotrace 9y agoSeveral problems with your points - Data For the SPAM example you provided, you used a Data Set available publicly with no consequences. But where will the training data for prediction of homicides will come from? Will it be accurate? Will it unfairly target minorities? The predictor uses features in the data to predict the future. What features will the machine learning algorithm learn to predict homicide? location? age? gender? ethnicity? mannerism? income? I could see big problems with any features used to detect and potentially send law enforcement for "Investigations" - Detectors Capturing and sending users data to a warehouse is a privacy/security risk. But what is worse is installing a detector in their house, or in their computer. What happens when a citizen removes the SPAM detector from their computer? Well, the next logical step is to pass a law requiring all citizens to run a specific process on their computer and are not allowed to reverse engineer it or else... For me, this is even worse than having my privacy violated. It would mean users would not have root access to their own computer. It would mean, many applications will be illegal and developers cannot write certain applications that enable people to send emails. If this is not impossible, it would be the worst outcome for everyone. - Globalization The SPAM detector, the fire detector and the sniffer dog are great localized examples. But todays problems are globalized. Attacks might be planned and coordinated from different country with different set of rules. And not all countries are considerate when it comes to privacy. How will global security surveillance deployment work when we can't even agree on matters of climate change?