Dozens Of Tech Experts Tell DHS & ICE That Its Social Media Surveillance And Extreme Vetting Should Be Stopped

Last week dozens of well known technologists sent a letter to Homeland Security arguing that Immigration & Customs Enforcement's (ICE) plans to use technology for "extreme vetting" is a really, really dumb idea.

According to its Statement of Objectives, the Extreme Vetting Initiative seeks tomake "determinations via automation" about whether an individual will become a"positively contributing member of society" and will "contribute to the national interests."As far as we are aware, neither the federal government nor anyone else has defined,much less attempted to quantify, these characteristics. Algorithms designed to predictthese undefined qualities could be used to arbitrarily flag groups of immigrants under aveneer of objectivity.

Inevitably, because these characteristics are difficult (if not impossible) to defineand measure, any algorithm will depend on "proxies" that are more easily observed andmay bear little or no relationship to the characteristics of interest. For example,developers could stipulate that a Facebook post criticizing U.S. foreign policy wouldidentify a visa applicant as a threat to national interests. They could also treat incomeas a proxy for a person's contributions to society, despite the fact that financialcompensation fails to adequately capture people's roles in their communities or theeconomy.

The Extreme Vetting Initiative also aims to make automated determinationsabout whether an immigrant "intends to commit" terrorism or other crime. However,there is a wealth of literature demonstrating that even the "best" automated decisionmakingmodels generate an unacceptable number of errors when predicting rareevents. On the scale of the American population and immigration rates, criminal actsare relatively rare, and terrorist acts are extremely rare. The frequency of individuals'"contribut[ing] to national interests" is unknown. As a result, even the most accuratepossible model would generate a very large number of false positives - innocentindividuals falsely identified as presenting a risk of crime or terr

In short, this is the tech world telling DHS and ICE that its belief that there's a "nerd harder" solution to using computers and algorithms to sniff out terrorists is a load of pure hooey. It may be true, as Arthur C. Clarke once stated, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," but the corollary does not apply: not all magical solutions can be implemented in technology. It's kind of ridiculous that actual technologists were needed to explain this to DHS, but that's where things are these days.