Today The Identity Project joined 55 other civil rights, civil liberties, government accountability, human rights, immigrant rights, and privacy organizations in calling on the US Department of Homeland Security to abandon its Extreme Vetting Initiative.
The essential goal of the DHS Extreme Vetting Initiative is to extend the bogus ‘pre-crime’ prediction algorithms and methodsbased on ‘big data’ from suspicionless mass surveillance, already being used by the DHS and its partner agencies in the US and abroad to decide who is allowed to board airplanes, to a broader range of decisions about who is allowed to travel to, or reside or remain in, the US.
But the DHS doesn’t have any ‘pre-cogs’, human or robotic, to make these predictions. And prior restraint of our movements or other activities based on predictions of future criminality is not only impossible (and inherently subject to abuse by those who create the predictive and decision-making algorithms) but an affront to fundamental notions of justice, due process, and human rights.
According to a joint letter we sent today to the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Elaine Duke:
This post was published at Papers Please on November 16th, 2017.
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