Hey Kids! Let's Build "The Machine"!

(Updated October 4, 2014) If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I'm a rabid fan of CBS's "Person of Interest", a wonderfully-written drama about the dystopia of permanent, continuous surveillence disguised as a "crime of the week" thriller. It has several key human characters, but the character that drives the show isn't human at all--it's a computer, or more correctly, a whole bunch of computers, called "The Machine." The fundamental purpose of The Machine is to identify threats to U.S. national security wherever they may be, so that they can be "neutralized" (and we all know what that means.) Last season, The Machine was displaced, but not eliminated, by another system based on Artificial Intelligence software. This new system, called Samaritan, uses quantum processors that Samaritan's builders, Decima Technologies, stole from the NSA.

This season, POI is focusing on the impact and ethics of AI. Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plagerman see AI as potentially having the same magnitude of effect on the world as the atomic bomb, and call AI's development our era's Manhattan Project. I'm not sure that a system like The Machine needs Manhattan Project-scale development in the state-of-the-art of AI in order to fulfill its primary objective.

Here are the key functions that both The Machine and Samaritan perform:

• Signals Intelligence: Both systems are connected to all of the same sources and feeds as the NSA, CIA, FBI and presumably National Reconissance Office (NRO), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other U.S. and Five Eyes (U.S. plus Canada, U.K, Australia and New Zealand) country sources. That means that it can get virtually every phone call, email, text, tweet, webpage and app data transfer anywhere in the world. It can geolocate any mobile phone call, and turn the microphones of certain mobile phones on for surreptitious listening, even if the phone itself is turned off.
• Image Recognition: They can access the images from security cameras around the world, and use those images to recognize peoples' faces. It can also, presumably, categorize the actions in the images and analyze them to determine whether or not they represent threatening behavior.
• Database: They have massive databases of all the data they've collected, as well as a lot of historical data.
• Pattern Recognition and Classification: The systems have to be trained, or train themselves, on previous patterns of activity that indicate a threat. So, for example, they would be given every piece of information related to the 9/11 attack: Who the terrorists were, where they came from, where they traveled to, who they met, who they talked to, where they lived, how they trained, etc. Those data would then be analyzed to build a pattern that indicates a terrorist event being planned. That pattern would be modified with new information continuously. Other patterns, based on subsequent terrorist attacks and changes in terrorist behavior, would be identified. Then, as the systems see current activity, they'll try to match it with previous patterns and calculate the probability that what's going on is actually leading up to an attack. Both systems probably also have the ability to learn from previous attacks and make inferences about the activity even if no previous attack is well-matched. If a probable attack is identified, the systems alert human analysts and provide their analysis and underlying data. 
• Voice Response and Recognition: Both systems have voice response interfaces and accurate voice recognition.

In addition to these functions, both The Machine and Samaritan are what's called in the AI community "Hard AI." Hard AI has the ability to reason and independently solve problems without human intervention. Beyond that, Hard AI is self-aware--conscious, although its form of consciousness may not look or act like human consciousness.

That's a lot for any system to do, so where are we now (at least in developments that the public knows about?):

• Signals Intelligence: All the databases and sources that I listed above exist. The problem comes in access and coordination. The Five Eyes countries have extensive data sharing systems, but not all of their data are shared with all of the other partners, not all of the data are in online databases, and we can't assume that U.S. intelligence agencies have 100% of the functionality of other Five Eyes intelligence services available to them. For example, a Five Eyes member may have the ability to get geolocation information, caller identity and even the content of a phone call, but it may not have the legal authority to provide all of that information to the U.S. in real time. In addition, non-Five Eyes countries such as Russia and China may have the ability to limit, disrupt or completely block U.S. and Five Eyes access to their signals. That would keep a system like The Machine from getting every signal, everywhere, in real time.
• Image Recognition: This is the biggest problem for building a Machine-like system today, not because the quality of image (face) recognition is unacceptable (it's getting better every day) but because of the scarcity of networked security cameras. In New York, where POI is shot, you'd say that the last sentence is dead wrong, because there are security cameras everywhere. New York police had real-time access to 6,000 public and private security cameras and 220 license plate cameras last year, and the ACLU reports that Chicago police had access to 22,000 security cameras last year, but it's not clear how many of them offered real-time access.
  
  When you get beyond those two cities and a handful of others, including London, the number of cameras per 1,000 residents goes down significantly. However, even in the high-camera cities, there are many cameras on private property and in buildings that are not accessible from the Internet, either because they're on a private network or they're not networked at all. Getting images from these cameras requires physical access to the cameras or video recorders. Sometimes, the local police department or FBI has to take the entire video recorder to its facilities in order to copy the video. So, the real-time acquisition of video from every security camera everywhere simply isn't possible today.
• Database: The initial capacity of the NSA's Bluffdale, UT Data Center has been estimated to be between 3 and 12 exabytes (3 and 12 million terabytes,) and that's just one site. Storage developers are starting to think in terms of zettabytes (1000 exabytes) and even yottabytes (1 million exabytes.)
• Pattern Recognition and Classification: The world leader in this technology so far (at least the one that we know publicly) is Palantir, which was a spin-off from PayPal's fraud detection team. The company has two publicly-disclosed products: Gotham, which is a data management system for management and analysis of complex datasets containing both structured and unstructured data that can be both quantitative and qualitative. Metropolis is for model-based analysis of structured, quantitative data. Both systems require analyst and Palantir engineer inputs: Gotham requires Palantir engineers to build the model that maps all the data together, and analysts to query the data and develop their own hypotheses and conclusions, while Metropolis requires analysts to create and modify models.
  
  The functionality of both The Machine and Samaritan is a combination of both Gotham and Metropolis--they can build models that incorporate all types of data, not just quantitative. In addition, they have the ability to build and modify their own models. It's likely that The Machine's creator, Harold Finch (Michael Emerson,) initially trained it before it took over the task of model building and analysis.
• Voice Response and Recognition: Both voice response and voice recognition are mature but still improving technologies. As an example, the voice recognition in Apple's Siri hasn't been as good as that in Google Now, in large part because Siri does its recognition on the mobile device, while Google does it on its own computers with dramatically more horsepower. 

So, where does that leave us in building an all-knowing, all-seeing AI security system? We've still got a long way to go, but all the pieces are there. Voice and image recognition use both AI and non-AI technologies. There are some image processing systems that can analyze video to identify anomalies and threats. To my knowledge, there are no pattern recognition and classification systems that work on multiple types of data and that build and test models without human intervention, but research on neural network training and optimization methods (backpropgation, for example) is making big strides, fast enough that we may be five years away from a commercially-viable Machine. All of this is with processors using a conventional von Neumann architecture; it doesn't need quantum processors, although they could eventually dramatically speed up parts of the problem best suited to superposition and entanglement.

Also, let me be clear: The resulting system won't be conscious. We don't yet even have a consensus scientific definition of consciousness. This system would be what's called Soft AI: It can solve a specific problem that's it's been programmed to handle, but it's not self-aware. It may be able to analyze data and make decisions about a class of problems, and it may be able to hold a conversation, but beyond that, it will only do other things if it's programmed to do so by its developers. I'd hope that its developers will have seen "War Games" or "Colossus: The Forbin Project" and don't give it the ability to launch ICBMs all by itself.

It doesn't hearten me that the biggest obstacles to building The Machine or Samaritan are time, politics and bureaucracy, not fundamental science, but I can only hope that the benefits to medicine, science, education and engineering outweigh the risks to civil liberties.

The Justice Department: Your bank balance determines its prosecution strategy

Yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had settled a criminal case against Swiss bank Credit Suisse for helping U.S. taxpayers to evade taxes by transferring funds to overseas locations. Credit Suisse agreed to plead guilty to the charges and paid $2.6 billion, in the form of $1.8 billion to the U.S. government, $715 million to the New York Department of Financial Services and $100 million to the Federal Reserve. Only $670 million of the $2.6 billion went to the IRS for compensation of actual lost tax revenues. A few Credit Suisse employees will be dismissed or reassigned, but no one will spend a day in jail.

The settlement, as are most settlements of this type, was announced at a self-congratulatory press conference led by Attorney General Eric Holder. Attorney General Holder said “This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law.” He also said “a company’s profitability or market share can never and will never be used as a shield from prosecution or penalty. And this action should put that misguided notion definitively to rest.” Anyone who’s followed the Justice Department’s actions since the financial collapse of 2008 knows just how untrue--in fact, how hilarious--that statement is.

If the target of a Justice Department investigation has vast financial assets, the Justice Department offers or accepts a settlement that involves payment of money to the U.S. Government in return for dismissal of all outstanding charges. The vast majority of the time, the target doesn’t need to plead guilty or take responsibility for anything. Even if the Department does manage to get a guilty plea, as in yesterday’s deal with Credit Suisse, no one within the company will go to jail. (In the Credit Suisse case, the Government prosecuted not to recover any of the trillions of dollars lost by individuals due to financial manipulation and malfeasance leading up to the Great Recession. It prosecuted to recover a few hundred million dollars of lost Federal taxes.)

On the other hand, if the Justice Department decides to go after someone without vast financial resources, or if it has to defend its own actions, its tactics are dramatically more aggressive. In fact, after decades of fighting organized crime, the Justice Department seems to have adopted organized crime’s tactics. It’s gotten to the point where it’s almost impossible to determine who the “good guys” are, and a scorecard doesn’t help.

If the Justice Department’s target is an individual without large financial assets, it uses intimidation in the form of threats of prosecution with trumped-up charges and the potential of decades of prison to get the subject to plead guilty to a reduced set of charges. It does that even (or especially) if it knows that it’s unlikely to get a conviction if the case goes to trial. A good example is Aaron Swartz, who downloaded a huge cache of academic journal articles, most of which had been written with taxpayer dollars and should have already been in the public domain. However, the Justice Department charged Swartz with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges came with a maximum of a $1 million fine and 23 years in prison, which the U.S. Attorney told Swartz’s attorney that she intended to ask for in court. After two years of government harassment and two days after a plea bargain offered by his lawyer was rejected by the U.S. Attorney, Aaron Swartz committed suicide. Rather than discipline or dismiss the U.S. Attorney who refused the plea bargain, Attorney General Holder commended her.

If the target might be helpful in testifying against a bigger target, the Justice Department uses the same tactics, often stretching out the case for years in order to destroy the reputation of the target, eventually dropping the case before going to trial. The reputation and business of the target cannot be reestablished with an innocent verdict, so the individual or business is destroyed. Last week, Bloomberg reported on three previously unknown philanthropists who have created a $9.7 billion trust that’s bigger than the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations combined and is bigger than all of them except the Gates, Ford and Getty foundations. The three philanthropists were once part of a company called Princeton-Newport Partners, the world’s first quantitative hedge fund. Four Princeton-Newport managers were charged with racketeering and tax fraud (the three philanthropists were never charged with anything.) The Justice Department’s goal was to get the Princeton-Newport managers to testify against Michael Milkin. There’s no evidence that the Justice Department could have won a conviction against the Princeton-Newport employees if the case had gone to trial. The Justice Department eventually dropped all charges, but the reputation of Princeton-Newport was destroyed and the company collapsed.

If the Justice Department itself or the U.S. Government is the target of a civil or criminal case, it actively withholds evidence and lies to the court. A good example is the ACLU’s case last year in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to have the FISA Amendments Act ruled unconstitutional. The Supreme Court never ruled on the constitutional issues, instead ruling that the ACLU and its plaintiffs didn’t have standing to pursue the case—they weren’t affected by the Government’s actions because the Government wasn’t surveilling them. The Guardian reports that the Supreme Court came to that conclusion because the Justice Department told it “1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the FISA Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.” Both of these statements were outright lies.

In the case of #1 above, one of Edward Snowden’s revelations was that the NSA engages in what the agency calls “about” surveillance, in which it captures an enormous number (trillions) of emails and text messages between anyone in the U.S. and anyone outside the country, whether or not either party is in any way under investigation. Thus, the NSA got the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant AND without a targeted foreign party. In the second case, last July, the Justice Department admitted “that the government hadn't been notifying any defendants they were being charged based on NSA surveillance, making it actually impossible for anyone to prove they had standing to challenge the FISA Amendments Act as unconstitutional.” In most cases, the Justice Department acknowledges and alerts the court in question when it has given false statements or presented false evidence, but in this case, the Justice Department has refused to do so.

The Guardian explains what Attorney General Holder’s Justice Department has instead done, which is to deny its behavior and confuse the issue:

” The government's response, instead, has been to explain why it doesn't think these statements are lies. In a letter to Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall that only surfaced this week, the government made the incredible argument that the "about" surveillance was classified at the time of the case, so it was under no obligation to tell the Supreme Court about it. And the Justice Department completely sidestepped the question of whether it lied about notifying defendants, basically by saying that it started to do so after the case, and so this was somehow no longer an issue.”

In the FISA Amendments case, by any measure, the Justice Department should have at least been disciplined by the Court for deliberately lying, but nothing is going to happen. If the Justice Department can lie to the Supreme Court with impunity, it can lie to Congress, targets of prosecution and the American people with equal impunity. In fact, after looking at these cases and many others, it’s difficult to distinguish between the Justice Department’s actions and what it accuses its targets of.

The Justice Department has played a critical role for decades in civil rights, prosecution of organized crime and political corruption. It’s an essential part of our legal system, and I’m the last person who would argue that we don’t need it. However, we need a Justice Department that’s worthy of the people of the United States, and today, we don’t have that.

NSA: The world's biggest hoarder?

It dawned on me this weekend that the NSA is exhibiting classic hoarder behavior. TV shows such as "Hoarders" and "Hoarding: Buried Alive" visit the homes and apartments of compulsive hoarders, which are inevitably stacked to the ceiling with everything you can imagine--magazines, books, cats and dogs, fingernail clippings, used pizza boxes, etc. The rationalization often given by compulsive hoarders is that they're keeping these things in case they need them someday.

That's exactly the same rationalization that the NSA has used for many of its data collection programs. The agency is running hundreds of programs under nondescript codenames, vacuuming up telephone call metadata, emails, texts, tweets, browser histories, etc., in the hope that they may be useful for stopping a terrorist plot. There are so many programs, operating under so many different sets of rules, that analysts at the NSA can't keep track of them all. Having run out of space to keep all the data in its existing data centers, the NSA is spending billions of dollars to build new data centers in Utah and Maryland. That's like a hoarder renting storage units when they have no more room in their house.

Last week, Judge Richard Leon ruled that the NSA's program of storing all the phone call metadata for every person in the country for five years is likely to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. In his ruling, Judge Leon wrote that neither the NSA nor the Justice Department had presented any evidence that the NSA's massive, multi-year phone metadata collection program had contributed to thwarting or solving a single case of terrorism.

The NSA has explicitly argued that it needs to keep billions of phone records (and, by extension, everything else) for years because it wants to be able to go back through them if necessary. Judge Leon wrote that, to date, the NSA hasn't found anything useful in the phone records, and there's no justification for the agency's massive violations of the Fourth Amendment. That sounds an awful lot like compulsive hoarding behavior.

Would the NSA have been a lot more selective in its data collection if General Alexander wasn't running it? I suspect so...and given what he's done at the NSA, I wouldn't want to visit the General's house.