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地域におけるデジタル技術の利活用を支えるデジタル基盤の利用環境の在り方ワーキンググループ（第3回）

第307回官民競争入札等監理委員会　書面審議（会議資料）

第36回国民経済計算体系的整備部会

消費者保護ルールの在り方に関する検討会（第55回）

　世田谷区史の刊行をめぐり区と対立する執筆予定だった青山学院大学文学部史学科準教授・谷口雄太氏の支援などを目的とした「世田谷区史のあり方ついて考える区民の会」は、区に２月２７日に提出した著作権譲渡契約書の見直しを求める要望書に対する区の５日の回答書に「失望した」として３月２２日に再び要望書を保坂展人区長に提出した。回答書の「経緯」説明の部分には、執筆者が「委員会」と３カ月にわたってやりとりしたなど看過しえない事実誤認があると指摘している。対話の場を設けてほしいと２９日までに回..

　2020年に廃業した出版ニュース社で五十数年仕事をした。出版界の業界誌で『出版年鑑』哉雑誌『出版ニュース』を刊行してきた。読者対象は学校や図書館も含まれる。わたしが編集しているあいだの方針は「出版の自由は出版流通の自由なくしてありえない」という理念であった。出版・表現をもとにした表現物（著作物）は、読者に届いてはじめて存在理由・価値があると考えるからだ。　こうした視座で業界ウオッチングをつづけた。出版をめぐる問題は山積していてそれをどう解決するかが日々の仕事であった。近年、..

　学校教育の現場で「汚染水」の用語を使うな−−いわゆる「ALPS処理水」なるものは「安全」だとして福島第1原発から出るALPS汚染水の海洋投棄を進める国・東京電力。その方針に学校教育現場の教職員を従わせようとする「トンデモ意見書」が2月28日、福島県議会に提出された。福島県民有志はこの間、意見書の採択をしないよう、この問題を担当する県議会商労文教委員会所属県議に対する要請行動や署名提出などあらゆる行動を続けてきた。だが、こうした努力にもかかわらず、意見書は3月18日に委員会で、また県議会最終日となる19日には本会議で、自民などの賛成多数で採択された。事の発端は1月下旬、日教組（日本教職員組合）が札幌市で開催した教研集会にさかのぼる。教研集会はコロナ禍のため過去3年、オンライン開催が続いてきたが、今年、4年ぶりの集合形式での開催に戻った。その集会で、神奈川県内の中学校教員が汚染水の用語を使った教育実践例を報告。地元との同意がない限り、汚染水を放出しないとの約束を反故にして、国・東京電力が放出を強行したという正しい内容を教えるものだった。（黒鉄好）

This post was written by Rachel Hochhauser, an EFF legal intern

We’ve written multiple times about the inaccurate and dangerous “gunshot detection” tool, Shotspotter. A recent near-tragedy in Chicago adds to the growing pile of evidence that cities should drop the product.

On January 25, while responding to a ShotSpotter alert, a Chicago police officer opened fire on an unarmed “maybe 14 or 15” year old child in his backyard. Three officers approached the boy’s house, with one asking “What you doing bro, you good?” They heard a loud bang, later determined to be fireworks, and shot at the child. Fortunately, no physical injuries were recorded. In initial reports, police falsely claimed that they fired at a “man” who had fired on officers.

In a subsequent assessment of the event, the Chicago Civilian Office of Police Accountability (“COPA”) concluded that “a firearm was not used against the officers.” Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling placed all attending officers on administrative duty for 30 days and is investigating whether the officers violated department policies.

ShotSpotter is the largest company which produces and distributes audio gunshot detection for U.S. cities and police departments. Currently, it is used by 100 law enforcement agencies. The system relies on sensors positioned on buildings and lamp posts, which purportedly detect the acoustic signature of a gunshot. The information is then forwarded to humans who purportedly have the expertise to verify whether the sound was gunfire (and not, for example, a car backfiring), and whether to deploy officers to the scene.

ShotSpotter claims that its technology is “97% accurate,” a figure produced by the marketing department and not engineers. The recent Chicago shooting shows this is not accurate. Indeed, a 2021 study in Chicago found that, in a period of 21 months, ShotSpotter resulted in police acting on dead-end reports over 40,000 times. Likewise, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office concluded that ShotSpotter had “minimal return on investment” and only resulted in arrest for 1% of proven shootings, according to a recent CBS report. The technology is predominantly used in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, contributing to the over-policing of these areas. Police responding to ShotSpotter arrive at the scenes expecting gunfire and are on edge and therefore more likely to draw their firearms.

Finally, these sensors invade the right to privacy. Even in public places, people often have a reasonable expectation of privacy and therefore a legal right not to have their voices recorded. But these sound sensors risk the capture and leaking of private conversation. In People v. Johnson in California, a court held such recordings from ShotSpotter to be admissible evidence.

In February, Chicago’s Mayor announced that the city would not be renewing its contract with Shotspotter. Many other cities have cancelled or are considering cancelling use of the tool.

This technology endangers lives, disparately impacts communities of color, and encroaches on the privacy rights of individuals. It has a history of false positives and poses clear dangers to pedestrians and residents. It is urgent that these inaccurate and harmful systems be removed from our streets.

　米国と中国は自陣営に引っ張りこうと各国に接近を図っている。ただし覇権をめざす米中のやり方は同じではない。3月２日のJCJと日本AALA（アジア・アフリカ・ラテンアメリカ）連帯委員会が共催したオンライン講演で慶応大・京都大学名誉教授の大西広氏は、両国の外交の違いを解説した。　「米国にはグローバルサウス（インド、ブラジル、タイ、南アフリカのような南半球に位置するアジア、アフリカ、中南米地域の新興国・途上国の総称）に手を突っ込みコントロールする力はもはやありません」と前置きしうえ..

In keeping with law enforcement’s grand tradition of taking antiquated, invasive, and oppressive technologies, making them digital, and then calling it innovation, police in the U.S. recently combined two existing dystopian technologies in a brand new way to violate civil liberties. A police force in California recently employed the new practice of taking a DNA sample from a crime scene, running this through a service provided by US company Parabon NanoLabs that guesses what the perpetrators face looked like, and plugging this rendered image into face recognition software to build a suspect list.

Parts of this process aren't entirely new. On more than one occasion, police forces have been found to have fed images of celebrities into face recognition software to generate suspect lists. In one case from 2017, the New York Police Department decided its suspect looked like Woody Harrelson and ran the actor’s image through the software to generate hits. Further, software provided by US company Vigilant Solutions enables law enforcement to create “a proxy image from a sketch artist or artist rendering” to enhance images of potential suspects so that face recognition software can match these more accurately.

Since 2014, law enforcement have also sought the assistance of Parabon NanoLabs—a company that alleges it can create an image of the suspect’s face from their DNA. Parabon NanoLabs claim to have built this system by training machine learning models on the DNA data of thousands of volunteers with 3D scans of their faces. It is currently the only company offering phenotyping and only in concert with a forensic genetic genealogy investigation. The process is yet to be independently audited, and scientists have affirmed that predicting face shapes—particularly from DNA samples—is not possible. But this has not stopped law enforcement officers from seeking to use it, or from running these fabricated images through face recognition software.

Simply put: police are using DNA to create a hypothetical and not at all accurate face, then using that face as a clue on which to base investigations into crimes. Not only is this full dice-roll policing, it also threatens the rights, freedom, or even the life of whoever is unlucky enough to look a little bit like that artificial face.

But it gets worse.

In 2020, a detective from the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department in California asked to have a rendered image from Parabon NanoLabs run through face recognition software. This 3D rendering, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, predicted that—among other attributes—the suspect was male, had brown eyes, and fair skin. Found in police records published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, this appears to be the first reporting of a detective running an algorithmically-generated rendering based on crime-scene DNA through face recognition software. This puts a second layer of speculation between the actual face of the suspect and the product the police are using to guide investigations and make arrests. Not only is the artificial face a guess, now face recognition (a technology known to misidentify people)  will create a “most likely match” for that face.

These technologies, and their reckless use by police forces, are an inherent threat to our individual privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice. Face recognition tech alone has an egregious history of misidentifying people of color, especially Black women, as well as failing to correctly identify trans and nonbinary people. The algorithms are not always reliable, and even if the technology somehow had 100% accuracy, it would still be an unacceptable tool of invasive surveillance capable of identifying and tracking people on a massive scale. Combining this with fabricated 3D renderings from crime-scene DNA exponentially increases the likelihood of false arrests, and exacerbates existing harms on communities that are already disproportionately over-surveilled by face recognition technology and discriminatory policing. 

There are no federal rules that prohibit police forces from undertaking these actions. And despite the detective’s request violating Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service, there is seemingly no way to ensure compliance. Pulling together criteria like skin tone, hair color, and gender does not give an accurate face of a suspect, and deploying these untested algorithms without any oversight places people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit. In one case from Canada, Edmonton Police Service issued an apology over its failure to balance the harms to the Black community with the potential investigative value after using Parabon’s DNA phenotyping services to identify a suspect.

EFF continues to call for a complete ban on government use of face recognition—because otherwise these are the results. How much more evidence do law markers need that police cannot be trusted with this dangerous technology? How many more people need to be falsely arrested and how many more reckless schemes like this one need to be perpetrated before legislators realize this is not a sustainable method of law enforcement? Cities across the United States have already taken the step to ban government use of this technology, and Montana has specifically recognized a privacy interest in phenotype data. Other cities and states need to catch up or Congress needs to act before more people are hurt and our rights are trampled. 

米NBC・TVのセス・マイヤーズ・トーク番組に出演した81才のバイデン米大統領は、77才の大統領選対抗馬トランプに向けて、「彼はだいたい私と同じくらいの年齢だが、自分の妻の名前も覚えていない」と、馬鹿にしました。　トランプは2月23日の「保守政治活動会議（CPAC）」での演説で妻のメラニアを「メルセデス」と呼んでいたそうです。　トランプは以前、バイデンを「無能」で「認知障害」のある人物と言ってましたが、バイデンのそうした要素は単に年齢から来るものだけではないそうです。　そんな選挙戦に、アメリカの庶民もウンザリしてきたようです。