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Federal Software Running on AWS Can Trigger Revocation of Citizenship

8 points by ilamont 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This headline is really stretching to tap into both anti-Amazon and anti-government sentiment. No, Amazon isn't running a server to automatically strip people of their citizenship. They just happen to be the cloud server contractor for the department running this system. It looks like the government system in question, ATLAS, is crunching some unknown datasets to look for potential patterns of fraud, which are then tagged for further human review. > When ATLAS finds something derogatory according to its secret list of rules, the software sends out a “System Generated Notification,” which is then “triaged” and forwarded directly to FDNS-DS if potentially “actionable.” From there, FDNS determines whether the notification constitutes a “possible criminal denaturalization referral,” and, if so, will “refer to ICE for criminal denaturalization action.” All told, going from an ATLAS notification to criminal denaturalization proceedings takes only four steps on the flowchart. This is really disappointing writing from The Intercept. Trying to quantify the risk of a system as high because it only takes four steps on a single flowchart released through the FOIA is vacuous.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >Trying to quantify the risk of a system as high because it only takes four steps on a single flowchart released through the FOIA is vacuous. Did we read the same article?! I suppose you're right, though; despite the headline, they barely touched on the fact that it was an enormous megacorp running the black-box probable-cause generator. Your sneering dismissal of the rest of it is, I think, misplaced. I found the article to be more about quotes like this: >"The Department of Homeland Security refuses to disclose to the public how exactly ATLAS works or what rules it uses to determine when an immigrant should be flagged to potentially have their citizenship revoked. This secrecy makes it nearly impossible to tell whether ATLAS is targeting immigrants baselessly or not. The Open Society Justice Initiative this week filed a new FOIA request with DHS and its United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, division seeking details on how the algorithm functions." or this: >"Denaturalization experts say that putting an immigrant’s paper trail through the algorithmic wringer can lead to automated punitive measures based not on that immigrant’s past conduct but the government’s own incompetence. Experts have long pointed out that using matches against shoddily maintained fingerprints, many collected on notecards decades ago, as evidence of deliberate “fraud” or malfeasance is likely to ensnare and punish innocent people." I think the risk they're trying to emphasize is that of automation of probable-cause generation. Old or inaccurate records or fingerprints, combined with a closed-source algorithm, seems like a neat way to create firing solutions for ICE, and should the perp be an unsuitable target, ATLAS provides a neat way to obscure the kind of legal blame that might result in a lawsuit.

8 points by ilamont 5y ago

This headline is really stretching to tap into both anti-Amazon and anti-government sentiment. No, Amazon isn't running a server to automatically strip people of their citizenship. They just happen to be the cloud server contractor for the department running this system. It looks like the government system in question, ATLAS, is crunching some unknown datasets to look for potential patterns of fraud, which are then tagged for further human review. > When ATLAS finds something derogatory according to its secret list of rules, the software sends out a “System Generated Notification,” which is then “triaged” and forwarded directly to FDNS-DS if potentially “actionable.” From there, FDNS determines whether the notification constitutes a “possible criminal denaturalization referral,” and, if so, will “refer to ICE for criminal denaturalization action.” All told, going from an ATLAS notification to criminal denaturalization proceedings takes only four steps on the flowchart. This is really disappointing writing from The Intercept. Trying to quantify the risk of a system as high because it only takes four steps on a single flowchart released through the FOIA is vacuous.

revolvingocelot 5y ago
>Trying to quantify the risk of a system as high because it only takes four steps on a single flowchart released through the FOIA is vacuous. Did we read the same article?! I suppose you're right, though; despite the headline, they barely touched on the fact that it was an enormous megacorp running the black-box probable-cause generator. Your sneering dismissal of the rest of it is, I think, misplaced. I found the article to be more about quotes like this: >"The Department of Homeland Security refuses to disclose to the public how exactly ATLAS works or what rules it uses to determine when an immigrant should be flagged to potentially have their citizenship revoked. This secrecy makes it nearly impossible to tell whether ATLAS is targeting immigrants baselessly or not. The Open Society Justice Initiative this week filed a new FOIA request with DHS and its United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, division seeking details on how the algorithm functions." or this: >"Denaturalization experts say that putting an immigrant’s paper trail through the algorithmic wringer can lead to automated punitive measures based not on that immigrant’s past conduct but the government’s own incompetence. Experts have long pointed out that using matches against shoddily maintained fingerprints, many collected on notecards decades ago, as evidence of deliberate “fraud” or malfeasance is likely to ensnare and punish innocent people." I think the risk they're trying to emphasize is that of automation of probable-cause generation. Old or inaccurate records or fingerprints, combined with a closed-source algorithm, seems like a neat way to create firing solutions for ICE, and should the perp be an unsuitable target, ATLAS provides a neat way to obscure the kind of legal blame that might result in a lawsuit.