Daily Archives: November 21, 2016

Literary precursors

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When it dawned on me in August that Trump could conceivably pull it off, a book came to mind — Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which is an imaginative speculation on what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, aviator hero and Nazi sympathiser, had beaten FDR to the Presidency in 1940. So I downloaded and read it. The novel chronicles the fortunes of the (Jewish) Roth family as anti-semitism becomes more mainstream during Lindbergh’s tenure of office. It’s imaginative and clever and persuasive. But then I forgot about it as the election campaign proceeded.

A few days before the election, I noticed a colleague smugly brandishing another book — this time Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here — a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy which describes how easily fascism could take hold in America. When I checked on Amazon I discovered that my colleague was clearly not the only person with a premonition — Amazon had run out of stocks of the volume.

And now I find that another book — this time by a famous philosopher — seems eerily prescient. It’s Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America, excerpts from which have been going viral across the Net. For example:

The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucratics, the tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

Or this:

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “n—-r” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Rorty wrote that in 1999.

Making algorithms accountable

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pasquale-book

As the world becomes increasingly driven by algorithms that are, effectively, ‘black boxes’, issues of responsibility, liability and accountability are becoming acute. Two researchers — Nicholas Diakopoulos of the University of Maryland, College Park and Sorelle Friedler from Data & Society are proposing five principles that might be helpful. They are:

Responsibility. “For any algorithmic system, there needs to be a person with the authority to deal with its adverse individual or societal effects in a timely fashion. This is not a statement about legal responsibility but, rather, a focus on avenues for redress, public dialogue, and internal authority for change”.

Explainability. “Any decisions produced by an algorithmic system should be explainable to the people affected by those decisions. These explanations must be accessible and understandable to the target audience; purely technical descriptions are not appropriate for the general public.”

Accuracy “The principle of accuracy suggests that sources of error and uncertainty throughout an algorithm and its data sources need to be identified, logged, and benchmarked.”

Auditability “The principle of auditability states that algorithms should be developed to enable third parties to probe and review the behavior of an algorithm… While there may be technical challenges in allowing public auditing while protecting proprietary information, private auditing (as in accounting) could provide some public assurance.”

Fairness “All algorithms making decisions about individuals should be evaluated for discriminatory effects. The results of the evaluation and the criteria used should be publicly released and explained.”

Not rocket science, but useful. What I like about this work is that it adds value. We all know by now that algorithmic decision-making is problematic. The next step is to figure out what to do about it, given that algorithms are here to stay.

Stuff happens, alas

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The Investigatory Powers Act has passed through Parliament and will soon be law. It provides the UK intelligence agencies and police with what the Guardian‘s Ewen MacAskill described as “the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world” and it passed into law with “barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside”. The Bill’s relatively serene passage through the legislature surprised many in government, and was probably partly due to the fact that the Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, seems largely uninterested in its responsibilities as the official opposition.

It’s not all bad news: the Act brings under explicit oversight a whole range of activities that were hitherto carried out under obscure, possibly dodgy, legal provisions and with totally inadequate oversight. So at least you could say that, at last, the activities of the secret state are all in a single piece of legislation.

On the other hand, the powers granted by the Act in relation to data retention are indeed sweeping, and include some new powers to conduct what is euphemistically termed ‘Equipment Interference’ — which is essentially legalised hacking; their inclusion in the Act is in effect an implicit admission that GCHQ and the security services have been doing this stuff anyway for some time.

The Act confirms that the British state’s appetite for fine-grained communications data seems insatiable and is destined to grow. Confronted with this new reality, one celebrated ex-spook once remarked that we are “a keystroke away from totalitarianism”. What he meant is that the information resources now available to states would be a godsend to an authoritarian regime that wasn’t restrained by constitutional niceties, civil liberties or human rights.

When one puts this point to spooks and government officials, however, their instinctive response is to pooh-pooh the idea. It may be technically true, they say, but — come on! — we live in a democracy and the chances of an authoritarian bully gaining power in such a polity are, well, infinitesimal.

Well, that was then and this is now. An authoritarian bully with no apparent respect for the rule of law will become president of the United States on January 20. Given that the British state has a long history of close co-operation with the US national security state, it’s possible that the new powers conferred on British agencies by the Investigatory Powers Act might mean that personal data on British subjects will be slipping noiselessly into the computerised maw of President Trump’s newly-energised security services. If this country had a functioning parliamentary opposition maybe Mrs May’s Bill would have had a rougher passage, and the Act would have been less sweeping. But the opportunity to rein in the surveillance state has been missed for a generation.