Automating Crime Prevention, Surveillance, and Military Operations

This interdisciplinary volume critically explores how the ever-increasing use of automated systems is changing policing, criminal justice systems, and military operations at the national and international level. The book examines the ways in which automated systems are beneficial to society, while addressing the risks they represent for human rights.This book starts with a historical overview of how different types of knowledge have transformed crime control and the security domain, comparing those epistemological shifts with the current shift caused by knowledge produced with high-tech information technology tools such as big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The first part explores the use of automated systems, such as predictive policing and platform policing, in law enforcement. The second part analyzes the use of automated systems, such as algorithms used in sentencing and parole decisions, in courts of law. The third part examines the use and misuse of automated systems for surveillance and social control. The fourth part discusses the use of lethal (semi)autonomous weapons systems in armed conflicts. An essential read for researchers, politicians, and advocates interested in the use and potential misuse of automated systems in crime control, this diverse volume draws expertise from such fields as criminology, law, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology.

Auteur

Ale Zavrnik is a Senior Researcher Associate at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He was an EURIAS Fellow 2017/18 at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH, in Zurich. In the past, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Norwegian Research Council at the University of Oslo (2012), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute für ausländisches und internationals Strafrecht *in Freiburg i. Br. (2009). He co-managed several international scientific networks of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) programme that were dedicated to technology, law, surveillance and delinquency on the Internet (e.g. currently Action CA16121 *From Sharing to Caring: Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy and Action IS0807 Living in Surveillance Societies or the Action IS0801 *Cyberbullying *in the past).

His research interest lay in the intersection of law, crime, technology, and fundamental rights. He led a research project funded by the Slovenian National Research Agency Law in the age of big data: Regulating privacy, transparency, secrecy and other competing values in the 21st century (2014 - 2017). His most recent scientific achievements include an edited book Big Data, Crime and Social Control (Routledge, 2018); and Drones and Unmanned Aerial Systems: Legal and Social Implications for Security and Surveillance (Springer, 2015). He organized several conferences in these research areas, for example Big data: Challenges for Law and Ethics (Ljubljana, 2017) and Spy in Sky: Regulatory issues of drones and unmanned aerial systems (Ljubljana, 2013). He was an independent Ethics Expert with the European Research Council (ERC) and for the REA, the research arm of the European Commission, for Horizon 2020 projects.

Vasja Badali is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His primary fields of research are contemporary imperialism and migration. He combines theory with extensive field-work, frequently visiting the Middle East and Central Asian countries, in particular Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the author of four single-authored monographs, including The War Against Civilians: Victims of the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)*.*

Before joining the Institute of Criminology, Vasja Badali worked as a freelance journalist, reporting for Slovenian news media from the Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria), Central Asia (Afghanistan), South Asia (India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), and Latin America (Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, and Mexico). His work frequently appeared in Slovenian newspapers and magazines such as Delo, Dnevnik, Veer, and Mladina. He has appeared many times on Slovenian radio and television as an expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Contenu

1. Contextualizing automation in crime and security domains.- Part I. Automating Policing.- 2. Predictive policing as "social sorting on steroids?" Data (in)justice in practices of forecasting crime.- 3. Platform policing.- 4. Information in formation: algorithmic law enforcement and the life of data.- 5. Information systems in the area of freedom, security and justice: is EU movig toward indiscriminate mass surveillance of foreign nationals?- Part II. Automating Criminal Courts.- 6. Presumption of guilt and responsibility for the acts of others: postulates of criminal law in the age of automated justice?.- 7. Deciding on detention by using a computer program: Prior v1.0 as a tool for more fair judicial decisions?.- Part III. Automating Surveillance.- 8. Diffuse-disciplining: the pervasive nature of autonomous policing systems and their consequences.- 9. Automating spatial injustice: the case of Iran's surveillance of physical and virtual spaces.- Part IV. Automating Intelligence and military Operations.- 10. Project Maven, big data analytics and ubiquitous knowledge: the impossible promises and hidden politics of algorithmic vision.- 11. Humans, (semi)autonomous weapons systems and the assault on key principles of international humanitarian law.