Are You a “Pre-Criminal”?

by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext

Background journalism instead of court reporting.
Independent. Uncomfortable. Incorruptible.

An American IT company has developed software that is supposed to track down criminals before they become one. To do this, she analyzes what people are doing on the Internet – a perfect control tool for the approaching “New World Order.” The police, secret services, and the military are already testing.

Tech startup Voyager Labs helps law enforcement agencies use our posts, interactions, and social media affiliations to determine whether we are guilty of a pre-crime – by “planning” or at least prone to doing something criminal. The software company is one of a growing number of companies that claim to be able to predict and solve criminal offenses by analyzing user behavior on the Internet.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a not-for-profit organization in New York, obtained sensitive documents about Voyager’s clientele. According to these, the US police have been using the software for years to identify and monitor people whose activities on social media suggest possible criminal offenses. All you have to do is use an Instagram name that shows Arab pride or tweets about Islam; Voyager sees it as a sign of a “possible tendency towards extremism.” It can also target any group that is considered suspicious, violent, and dangerous to the state. It even enables law enforcement agencies to infiltrate groups and private accounts using fake identities.

Voyager allows “profiles” to be reconstructed using publicly available information. It includes “uncovering” the frequency, nature, and strength of people’s connections on social media. The tool aims to identify people who are “most heavily invested in a certain attitude: emotionally, ideologically and personally.”

The spying does not leave any traces, the manufacturer assures.

Founded nine years ago, Voyager Labs is based in New York, just a few steps from Central Park. The company now has offices worldwide, including Washington, Singapore, the UK, and Israel. It is among a growing number of technology firms engaged in social media analysis for law enforcement.

The Voyager Labs are a small fish in a large pond. Their active competitors include Babel Street, Digital Stakeout, Cobwebs, Palantir, Media Sonar, Dataminr, Palantir, PredPol, Snaptrends, and Geofeedia. Her customer lists include the US Department of Homeland Security and Justice, the US military, intelligence agencies, the FBI, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and several other cities’ police forces. No social medium is safe from them: From Facebook to Twitter and Instagram to YouTube, Google+, Flickr, Snap, TikTok, VK, Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan they screen everything, as well as “niche blogs and forums.”

The technology these firms offer is tempting to law enforcement because it can automate and expedite the fight against crime. It is not a dystopian dream for the future – it is already happening. Records obtained by the Brennan Center indicate that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) conducted a four-month test of Voyager tools between July and November 2019. It then negotiated a permanent contract with the labs. Voyager then offered her a three-year software license at a special price of 453,560 US dollars, including a 50% discount, which allows 25 users, among other things, up to 31,500 personal assignments per year.

The LAPD has already worked with other companies of this type or at least considered cooperation.

Muslim Brother as a model case

Its developers are happy to demonstrate what Voyager can do using the example (1) of a New York Muslim Brotherhood activist. In March 2020, he posted a video asking followers to infect members of the Egyptian government with the Covid-19 pathogen.

Voyager then targeted all of his friends. It sensed its closest connections – accounts that interacted extensively with its profile – as well as mediators, closely related people who were also in close contact with its other friends. In addition, Voyager identified all friends of friends looking for indirect connections to people who could pose an “extremist threat.” Within this network, Voyager actually found people who worked in the government apparatus, which made it easier for them to access officials.

The principle: “guilty-by-connection.”

According to documents released from the Brennan material by The Guardian, Voyager uses a “guilty-by-association” model. “The software gathers all public information about a person or topic – including posts, contacts and even emojis -, analyzes and indexes it and then in some cases compares it with non-public information.” From this, she creates “a topography of the entire social media existence of a person.”

“The software shows how someone is connected to others, how strong these relationships are, and what ‘indirect connections’ exist, for example, in the case of people with at least four mutual friends.” The system catalogs not only a person’s contacts but also all content or media posted by those contacts, including status updates, images, and geotagging, as well as second-and third-degree friendships to “uncover previously unknown middlemen or improper connections” – even if someone is being tracked through Voyager software, deletes a friend or a post from their own account, it remains archived in their Voyager profile.

“Ideological solidarity” becomes suspect.

The company claims it can perform “real-time sentiment analysis,” determine someone’s social whereabouts, “and provide new clues in investigating” ideological solidarity. “

“We’re not just connecting existing dots,” says a Voyager promotional document. “We create new points. What seems like random and irrelevant interactions, behaviors or interests suddenly becomes clear and understandable.”

A service the company calls VoyagerDiscover presents social profiles of people who “identify most strongly in their hearts with an attitude or a particular topic.” According to the company, the system considers personal engagement, emotional involvement, knowledge, and calls to action, the records state.

Meredith Broussard, professor of data journalism at New York University and author of the bestselling Artificial Intelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, compared Voyager to systems used for online ad targeting. They assign us to certain “affinity groups” based on common interests: “Instead of dividing people into groups like ‘pet owners,’ Voyager puts them into ‘groups’ of likely criminals,” Broussard explained. “It’s an ‘association guilt’ system.”

Cooperation with the police

Voyager software complements publicly available data with information obtained by law enforcement agencies through search warrants, arrest warrants, and subpoenas. In addition, there are analyzes of private text messages and data about the geolocated whereabouts of a person.

According to the manufacturer, the software can also access encrypted information at Telegram.

A so-called “premium service” called Active Persona offers customers the option of using “avatars” to “collect and analyze information that is otherwise inaccessible.”

According to the Guardian, “police services are often unwilling to abandon the use of these tools, even in the face of public outcry and despite little evidence that they help reduce crime.”

Voyager’s claims that it uses “cutting-edge AI-based technologies” like “machine learning,” “cognitive computing,” and “combinatorial and statistical algorithms” are basically a “mess of words,” said Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and CEO from Orcaa, a company that tests algorithms. “They say, ‘We use great math.’ That doesn’t say anything about what they’re doing.” In fact, according to O’Neil, companies like Voyager generally provide little evidence that their algorithms have the capabilities they claim.

The problem with this type of marketing, O’Neil said, is that it can serve as a cover for biased police practices: “If they can get people to trust their algorithm without there being any evidence, that it works, then it can be used as a weapon. “

Data protection was yesterday,

lawful behavior is criminalized

This type of software violates privacy and criminalizes otherwise lawful behavior such as dealing with certain people. For criminal defense attorney John Hamasaki, a San Francisco Police Commission member, “the extent to which Voyager obtains private information is just way too broad.” Companies can now analyze personal data using Voyager’s AI technology and raise massive civil liberties and data protection concerns.

“I worry about how low the threshold is for tech companies that explicitly allow police surveillance,” said Chris Gilliard, professor at Macomb Community College and research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. “There is a long history of law enforcement agencies spying on activists – who engage in completely legal activities – to intimidate people or disrupt movements. Therefore, the bar should be set very high for companies that support police surveillance.”

Perfect control tool

Software like “Voyager” offers technocratic truth keepers of the “New World Order” a perfect control instrument. It could develop its potential no later than the following real or alleged emergency – for example, in the case of p(l)andemia. It takes little imagination to imagine how such a tool can “optimize” police surveillance during pandemic times. Do you believe the same as someone who shares your convictions with someone who has been noticed as a mask refuser, as a participant in a banned anti-corpona demo, as a user of a forged vaccination card? Are you a member of an online group in which someone has called for resistance against state power? Your posts “liked” every now and then someone who sympathizes with “lateral thinkers” who are known to be observed by the protection of the constitution? All of this makes you suspicious – especially if you can be charged with all three “pre-crimes.”

Exaggerated? The corona crisis teaches: Anyone who supports and represents dissenting opinions, criticizes government measures such as curfews, travel bans, and lockdowns, refuses to obey rulers, doubts the meaningfulness of tests and the effectiveness of masks, or even declares vaccinations unnecessary, ineffective, and unsafe, sees himself not only ostracized and censored to an ever greater extent – it is downright criminalized.

“They kill people,” US President Joe Biden recently railed against people who spread “lies” about the pandemic on the Internet; thus, he puts “disinformants” on the same level as murderers.

Parents who demonstrate against Covid restrictions in schools have to be stamped as “domestic terrorists.”

A medical professor advocates pursuing criticism of the controversial government advisor Anthony Fauci and other experts as “hate crime” and “antiscience aggression.” (2) WHO declares anti-vaccination to be one of the “ten greatest global health threats.” (3)

In the early phase of the pandemic, in mid-March 2020, Lower Saxony’s SPD Interior Minister Boris Pistorius called for “false news” to be criminalized. It must be forbidden to publicly spread “untrue” claims about the supply situation of the population, medical care or cause, infection routes, diagnosis, and therapy of the disease Covid-19. (4)

And this is where Freedom of expression must end, believes Bill Gates too. He calls on all governments of the world to punish anyone who speaks out against masks and vaccines online. It is important to consistently suppress “false information” about the novel coronavirus and the state-approved “vaccines.” State organs should finally take control of the Internet discussions. (5)

Gates is happy to help with this. To combat “disinformation” even more effectively around the world, he recently forged a new alliance of large media and tech companies. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is supposed to create the technical prerequisites for clearing the Internet of “fake news” and “conspiracy theories” – comprehensively and once and for all: “This stuff has to go.”

Gates forgot to mention that the required inspection has long since taken place.

From censorship to persecution

Experience has shown that it is a small step from public pillory to censorship to law-approved criminal prosecution. On May 20, 2021, Joe Biden signed a Covid-19 Hate Crime Act, which can expand into legal manslaughter for all critics of the hygiene regime.

In Australia, the Senate passed a far-reaching law on internet surveillance in late August 2021. The Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identity and Disrupt) Bill 2020 gives the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) new, controversial powers. Both law enforcement agencies are now allowed to “interrupt data” to “prevent the continuation of criminal activities by participants,” especially those who are “in unknown locations or under anonymous or false identities.” A “Network Activity Warrant” allows investigators to Monitor a suspect’s internet activity to gather information.

Allegedly, the new law only serves to combat serious, organized cybercrime. But from September onwards, appalling reports and film recordings of citizens who received house calls from the police because of unpopular posts on social media increased on social media. Australian law enforcement officers seem to systematically search social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, looking for users who could support protests critical of the coronavirus. “We’d like to talk to you because we have evidence that you’ve posted some things on social media,” said the plainclothes policeman in a TikTok video that went viral. “I’m here to remind you that regarding COVID and the stay-at-home order, you must stay home.” In another popular video, an officer asks a man on his doorstep, “Are you yourself aware that certain notices of impending protests are circulating among the people? (…) Do you use any platform for communication” (with protesters)?

In Greece, denying the pandemic, spreading conspiracy theories, and calling for pandemic rules to be broken have been criminal offenses since August 2020. (6) On the orders of Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis, the public prosecutor’s office is relentlessly pursuing such thought-breaking. A cybercrime unit of the Greek police monitors blogs, internet magazines, and social networks. “We will take all legal measures to ensure that public health is not threatened by misinformation or conspiracy theories circulated on the Internet,” said the minister. “The coronavirus is not suitable for calls to disobedience or conspiracy scenarios. In every act, in every one of our actions, the responsibility and awareness of the consequences for our fellow citizens must prevail. The state will not allow the creation of breeding grounds for public health through socially irresponsible behavior. “

Amnesty International laments a “climate of fear.”

“Anti-state movements” is the name of a guideline from Lower Austria’s state health agency that came into force on November 1, 2020. “Supporters of anti-state movements,” as the enemy is defined in the introduction, “do not recognize – to put it simply – the state and its institutions, reject official measures (notices, judgments, etc.)” – such as the mask and test obligation, curfews, Access bans for unvaccinated people – “and/or try to prevent the implementation of measures. (…) The enemies of the state approach the state organs utilizing (…) non-recognition of procedural measures (—).” How to deal with such a rabble? Your approach “must not be ignored. It is important to ensure that the necessary actions are carried out consistently and that the official activities are carried out purposefully. Basically: Discussions about untenable legal views, missing “legitimations” etc., are not to be conducted, and every correspondence must be limited to the bare essentials. “

In Germany, there is now a “National Cyber Security Council,” which outlines its tasks as follows: “Research needs to be carried out into how disinformation, Deepfakes, malicious social bots, and their distribution channels can be recognized, marked, blocked, and deleted. The characteristics of disinformation and their effects on individuals and society as well as political and legal countermeasures that bring about an effective fight without hindering Freedom of expression are to be examined.” So at least it is about an Internet that has been cleaned of “harmful information.”

More and more often, more and more rigorous state media authorities ensure this. They send out dunning letters to operators of corona-critical internet platforms in a row, in which they request deletions or corrections of specific posts. They impose heavy fines and threaten to withdraw their “broadcasting license.” (7)

The EU created the legal basis for using spyware such as Voyager across Europe on July 6, 2021: The European Parliament approved a regulation that allows chat and messenger providers to block private chats, messages, and e-mails en masse, as and when required. And search for suspicious content indiscriminately—the official justification: criminal prosecution of child pornography. The consequence is mass surveillance through fully automated real-time chat control, artificial intelligence, and thus the abolition of digital secrecy. Shortly afterward, the European Commission announced a follow-up regulation that should make such chat controls mandatory.

Scouting software can automatically collect indications that we are becoming “criminal” social pests, into thought terrorists in the sense of truth watchers. What kind of posts do we post, like, share? How intensely do we do this? What do we comment approvingly, what rather negatively? What emojis do we use? Who do we follow, what groups do we belong to? Which newsletters do we subscribe to? For which events do we register online? Do we go to infamous fake news sites like KLARTEXT? How often do we do this? What kind of texts do we read there for how long? With every click, we become a virtual part of a group: We do the same thing as someone who may have already been noticed by violating the law – or who tends to do so, as his surfing behavior suggests. The pure association makes us suspicious. We charge contact debt on us.

In most western countries, sanctions for this are initially limited to social ostracism and public denunciation. The Red Chinese social point system shows how they can be “further developed.” The scale of punishment ranges from fines and restrictions on Freedom of movement to imprisonment.

Amnesty International laments censorship, harassment, and criminalization of Corona measures critics. “A climate of fear is emerging,” warns the human rights organization in its latest report. (8) “Large parts of the world’s population suffer from restrictions on Freedom of expression. (…) “The term” fake news “has also been used by a number of officials and politicians to denote factual information and legitimate comments and opinions, to undermine and discredit stories, opinions, and reports that are critical or independent of them (…) Freedom of expression is the key to holding governments accountable for their political responses to the health crisis. “

“Dramatic decline” of Freedom of expression

The corona pandemic has led to a “dramatic decline” in Freedom on the Internet: This is the result of the US non-governmental organization Freedom House in its annual “Freedom on the Net Report,” which examines the international issue of digital Freedom of speech and the right to your own data is available. Since the beginning of the corona crisis, a “particularly gloomy” picture has emerged. In numerous countries, state and private actors have used the crisis to control information published online, suppress critical reports, and install new technologies for social control. In at least 28 of 65 countries examined, websites are blocked, or individual users, platforms, or online publications are forced to delete information about the spread of the pandemic. New laws to contain supposedly false news about the infection process, or to maintain public order are often misused. According to the report, surveillance activities occur in at least 30 countries in direct partnership with telecommunications providers and other companies.

According to the report, it will be “difficult if not impossible” to decommission such surveillance tools after the virus is defeated. History shows “that new state powers usually outlive the original threat.”

How do we escape the mania for control, if not by completely abandoning social media? Either we post and click from now on in a system-compliant manner to not arouse suspicion. Or we limit our potential “pre-crimes” to those niches of cyberspace in which we can still act anonymously. Your own IP address can be disguised using Tor, a network for anonymizing connection data.

Tor is available free of charge on the Internet. The fact that only 2.4 million users use it every day shows how underdeveloped the general awareness of technocratic threats still is.

(Harald Wiesendanger)

Editors note:

Remarks

(1) https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/lapd-documents-show-what-one-social-media-surveillance-firm-promises; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/17/police-surveillance-technology-voyager

(2) https://www.infowars.com/posts/baylor-prof-says-it-should-be-a-hate-crime-to-criticize-fauci-other-scientists/; https://reclaimthenet.org/hate-crime-protections-extend-to-criticism-of-dr-fauci/

(3) https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/ten-threats-to-global-health-in-2019; https://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/impfen-who-erklaert-impfgegner-zur-globalen-bedrohung-fuer-die-gesundheit-a-1248913.html

(4) https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/coronavirus-boris-pistorius-fordert-strafen-gegen-fake-news-a-ed5050b5-c194-4890-a4c3-c713290134f3; https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/coronavirus-kritik-an-forderung-nach-strafen-fuer-100.html; https://www.haz.de/Nachrichten/Der-Norden/Pistorius-fordert-Strafen-fuer-Verbreitung-von-Corona-Fake-News

(5) https://youtu.be/CZplF4qdwII ; https://telegra.ph/Bill-Gates-fordert-die-Regierungen-der-Welt-auf-jeden-zu-bestrafen-der-sich-online-gegen-Masken-und-Impfstoffe-ausspricht-11-12

(6) https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Corona-Leugnung-in-Griechenland-strafbar-4881977.html, http://www.topontiki.gr/article/401402/i-dioxi-ilektronikoy-egklimatos-esteile-ston-eisaggelea-21-periptoseis-gia-theories

(7) http://blauerbote.com/2021/02/19/zensur-durch-landesmedienanstalten-schon-lange-angekuendigt/; http://blauerbote.com/2018/08/23/bloggen-nur-noch-mit-staatlicher-rundfunklizenz/

(8) https://www.amnesty.de/allgemein/pressemitteilung/covid-19-angriffe-meinungsfreiheit; https://www.amnesty.de/sites/default/files/2021-10/Amnesty-Bericht-Global-Covid19-Meinungsfreiheit-Silenced-and-misinformed-Oktober-2021.pdf