AI-Run ‘Early Intervention’: Real-Life Minority Report?

Via Mediaite (emphasis added):

Israeli special operations veteran Aaron Cohen used Fox News to pitch President Donald Trump on his “AI-powered threat detection system” for law enforcement on Monday, claiming the technology could be used to scan the internet for “radicalization.”…

Cohen has previously boasted on social media that his system “scans the open web and social media for pre-attack signals,” including “radicalization, target casing, manifesto writing, tactical planning, and group coordination,” and then “pushes real-time alerts to law enforcement or school threat units so they can act before an attack happens.”

The Israeli special operations veteran has also boasted that his “elite engineering team” includes former engineers from billionaire Peter Thiel’s company Palantir, which has been accused of building “an unprecedented spy machine that could track Americans.”

• What will the threshold for “radicalization” as defined by whatever algorithm be? At what point does one cease to be the expresser of a legitimate point of view and become a thought criminal? “Radicalization” is an entirely subjective term in the same way that “hate speech” is.

Related: AG Pam Bondi Vows Federal Crackdown on ‘Hate Speech’

• Once the AI pre-crime regime is unleashed, programmed by whatever shady bureaucrat or third-party contractor gets the contract, what human is going to monitor its use to ensure it doesn’t violate Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure — or, for that matter, First Amendment speech protections?
• Even if we accept that these tools will be used only for the noblest of purposes by the current administration, what about the next one? And the one after that? There is no way a future Democrat administration won’t sic its AI surveillance apparatus on “domestic terrorists.”
• Is there a sunset on this program? The government never relinquishes these powers, even after the threat that initially justified them is ostensibly neutralized; they only repurpose them for whatever agenda du jour.

Have we learned nothing from the Orwellian PATRIOT Act — which birthed, among other monstrosities, the oversight-free FISA courts that were used to launder the corrupt FBI’s Russiagate hoax?

Related: 'ChaosGPT' AI Bot Strategizes to Destroy Humanity

Peter Thiel, of all people — not exactly the archetypal civil liberties champion — apparently has some reservations, as evidenced by a post appearing on his website on Aug. 30.

Via Peterthiel.com (emphasis added):

The launch of GIDEON, an AI-driven threat detection platform designed for U.S. law enforcement, signals the entry into an era of algorithmic pre-crime policing. Developed by former Israeli Defense Forces operator Aaron Cohen, GIDEON leverages continuous internet scraping, behavioral profiling, and advanced ontologies modeled on Israeli counterterrorism frameworks.

Its debut (framed in the aftermath of a tragic school shooting) suggests the weaponization of fear and trauma to normalize surveillance practices that resemble a fusion of Palantir-style data analytics with the fictional dystopia of Minority Report…

The deployment of GIDEON illustrates a profound shift in governance paradigms: from reactive justice to predictive control, from evidence of crime to evidence of thought. Framed as protection, it risks establishing a permanent architecture of suspicion.

The last paragraph is perhaps the most salient. Contemplating criminal acts is not a crime. Everyone, if they’re being honest, is bombarded daily with criminal impulses by the id. Most don’t act on them, being emotionally well-regulated adults. Nonetheless, those unregulated impulses, often predicated on righteous indignation at the injustice in the world, could very easily qualify as “pre-attack signals” in the language of GIDEON. 

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
 -H.L. Mencken